Numerous early jobs included being a salesman for the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a hop-picker, a newspaper reporter and drama critic in Louisville, and an actor under the stage name of Lawrence Griffith in stock and touring companies. He wrote a play, The Fool and the Girl, which was produced in Washington and Baltimore in 1907 without much success. Taken by a friend to see his first picture show, he found it 'silly, tiresome, inexcusable; any man who enjoys such a thing should be shot at sunrise'. But it led him to offer film stories to Edison and Biograph Studios in New York, and it was only a short step to finding employment as a bit-player for the cameras,along with his wife Linda Arvison.

intolerance
(1916)

Mrs Griffith has described in her autobiography (When the Movies Were Young, published in 1925) how the Biograph Company, originally created to make the peepshow devices called Mutoscopes to rival Edison's Kinetoscopes, were by 1908 desperateley searching for good material. At the suggestion of Billy Bitzer's camera assistant, Arthur Marvin (who happened to be the general manager's brother), the studio offered a story by staff-writer Stanner Taylor (later to write many of Griffith's one reelers) to the reluctant Lawrence Griffith - only when established did he become known as 'David' or 'D.W.', on the assurance that he could have his acting job back if the project did not work. Photographed by Marvin, The Adventures of Dollie (1908) starred Linda Arvidson and Arthur Johnson, a young stage actor with no film experience whom Griffith picked for his suitable appearance. It was shot in a week, premiered in New York on July 14, 1908 and judged successful enough for Griffith to be granted a one-year contract which, with royalties, raised his salary from practically nothing to $500 a month. Apart from brief appearances when, in a crisis, there was no-one else to fill the walk-on roles, he never did go back to acting.

The torrent of films that poured from Biograph for the next few years has survived remarkably intact and has been carefully charted by, among other film critics, Robert Henderson (in his book D.W Griffith: The Years at Biograph) and Edward Wagenknecht and Anthony Slide (In The Films of D.W Griffith), although not too may film critics have the stamina to voyage across the full flood of Griffith's early output. His one reelers ventured into almost every conceivable territories long before they were defined (and late confined) as separate genres - in fact, the argument could be made that Griffith was the inventor of everything but fantasy cinema, which was pioneered by George Melies and Thomas Edison, and the epic spectaculars which he left to the Italian film-makers until he could afford to outclass them.

His were among the first - if not the first - slapstick comedies (with The Curtain Pole in 1909 setting the scene for the Keystone antics of his Biograph colleague Mack Sennett), suspense thrillers, Westerns, gangster stories, social-realism dramas and romantic melodramas. He made costume films, adventure stories and war films, together with some adaptations, not always acknowledged, from such writers as Alfred Lord Tennyson. Leo Tolstoy, Guy de Maupassant, James Fenimore Cooper, and O. Henry. The variety of titles is astonishing in any month picked at random from the Biograph list: October 1908, for example, saw the release of The Devil, The Zulu's Heart. Father Gets in the Game, The Barbarian Ingomar. The Vaquero's Vow, The Planter's Wife, Romance of a Jewess, The Call of the Wild and Concealing a Burglar.

orphans of the storm
(1921)

Today, just a handful of the Biograph works have a lasting reputation, though many more deserve attention. Among those most frequently reconsidered are Pippa Passes, which achieved the distinction of being the first film to be reviewed by the New York Times (on October 10.1909); the Mary Pickford classic The Lonely Villa (1909), a suspense story of a family imprisoned in their own home by a marauder with a gun; The Lonedale Operator (1911), in which the camera was mounted on a locomotive to observe the struggle between the heroine (Blanche Sweet) and a railroad gang: and Man's Genesis (1912), a Stone Age parable in which an early screen dinosaur wobbled across the landscape.

If the one-reelers had anything in common (other than the 'AB' logo that featured in all the backgrounds to protect copyright), not surprisingly it was a sense of speed. They could be made on any inspiration, even the slender basis of a change in the weather; the unit would make up a story on the spot to unfold against the background of a recent snowfall, or to take advantage of a vista of autumn trees. And since there was not time to show insignificant detail, Griffith used titles more creatively than had previously been tried, in the place of cumbersome or irrelevant action, pushing his stories headlong from climax to climax. Marriages were made, broken and mended in ten minutes, wars fought and lost in the space of a single shot. His stories, springing from this frantic schedule, frequently based themselves on a race against time, and the need to show widely separate events interacting with each other led him to the