SOURCE: "The Growth of a Film Director—D. W. Griffith," in Wonderful Inventions: Motion Pictures, Broadcasting, and Recorded Sound at the Library of Congress, Library of Congress, 1985, pp. 11-16.

In the following essay, Kuiper describes Griffith's early film career at Biograph Studios.

During the early part of 1908 an unusual man of thirty-three years began to work at the old Biograph Studios, 11 East 14th Street in New York City. Author, poet, and playwright by predisposition and a reasonably successful actor by practice and experience, David Wark Griffith began his work in the motion-picture medium first by acting in a short picture for the Edison Company and then by offering Biograph scenarios and plots as well as his other Thespian talents.

The activity he must have observed at the 14th Street studio could hardly have inspired serious meditation or even confidence in the expressive capabilities of his newly chosen field...