SOURCE: "The Movies 100 Years from Now," in Film Makers on Film Making: Statements on Their Art by Thirty Directors, edited by Harry M. Geduld, Indiana University Press, 1967, pp. 49-55.

In the following essay, originally published in 1924, Griffith speculates on a number of innovations he believed will occur in filmmaking during the next one hundred years and predicts that movies will become an influential social force.

They say I am a realist—a man who functions best when reproducing in the films life as he sees it or knows it. Whereupon the editor promptly assumes that fantasy will be perfectly easy for me, and propounds a question that scarcely can be answered by anything other than a dream. Fortunately, I have my fancies.

"What," asks the editor in substance, "will be the status of the motion pictures one hundred years hence?"

I have wondered that very thing many times...