| Dramatis
Personae |
Frank
Capra
Howard Strickling
D.W. Griffith
Angelo Holo
Lillian Gish
Louis B. Mayer
Dudley Nichols
Evelyn Griffith
 David
Wark Griffith (1875-1948) was the first great titan of
the motion picture industry and was its major creative force
both before and after the debut of his masterpiece The
Birth of a Nation in 1915. Griffith was born in Kentucky
and spent his early years as an itinerant actor, primarily
performing in melodrama in Southern states, when he entered
the motion picture business in 1908 as a means to make some
fast cash. He was the first to recognize the medium’s
artistic potential and invented or advanced the techniques
of parallel editing, crosscutting, and close-ups. The making
of The Birth of a Nation was an enormous uphill battle,
as nothing of its magnitude had been attempted before and
most pundits predicted that it would be a financial disaster.
The opposite turned out to be the case, as it became one of
the two greatest financial blockbusters of the silent era
(along with MGM’s The Big Parade in 1925) and
the first film to be screened at the White House (where Woodrow
Wilson made his famous quote “It’s like reading
history by flashes of lightning”), although the appalling
racism of the film has greatly diminished its current reputation.
Griffith continued making great films after Birth,
including Intolerance (1916), Broken Blossoms
(1919), and Way Down East (1920), but bad money management
forced him to lose his independence and ultimately his artistic
vision failed to evolve with his audience. The quality of
his work degraded badly through the 1920s, and his final film
The Struggle (1931) was considered such a disaster
that many newspapers refused to review it out of respect for
his former accomplishments. Griffith went into a decline during
the 1930s and 40s, becoming increasingly dependent on alcohol,
although he continued to be a revered figure within the motion
picture industry.
 Frank
Capra (1897-1991) was the most popular filmmaker of the
1930s, with his movies single-handedly taking B-List Columbia
Studios to front-rank status. Capra admitted to being obsessed
with the Academy Awards early in his career, and received
his first nomination for Lady for a Day in 1933 and
won it for It Happened One Night the following year.
Capra became president of the Academy in 1935 and remained
in the post through 1939, winning two more Oscars during his
tenure for Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) and You
Can’t Take It With You (1938). He privately cared
little about the Academy’s union activities but took
a hard public line, criticizing the Writers Guild in print
and challenging the boycott of the awards. Ironically though,
after he stepped down from his position at the Academy he
became president of the Directors Guild of America in 1940.
 Lillian
Gish (1893-1993) made her debut with Griffith in the one-reeler
An Unseen Enemy in 1912, and would go on to become
arguably the greatest actress of the silent era with her performances
in the classics The Birth of a Nation (1915), Broken
Blossoms (1919), and Way Down East (1920). She
wrote that her favorite project for Griffith was Intolerance (1916) despite playing only a cameo part in the film because
she had such a large role in its preparation, and she would
become one of the very few women to direct a film in the 1920s
when she made Remodeling Her Husband for Griffith’s
company in 1920. She signed a lucrative contract with MGM
in 1926, although her box office appeal was not as great as
the company hoped for and she was released after making her
final silent masterpiece The Wind in 1928. She continued
her acting career on stage (notably as Ophelia to John Gielgud’s
Broadway performance of Hamlet in 1936) and later television
and starred in her last film, The Whales of August,
at the age of 94. She was nominated for only one Academy Award,
for Duel in the Sun in 1946, but received an honorary
Oscar for lifetime achievement in 1971. The degree of intimacy
that she shared with Griffith can only be speculated, as they
were discreet people living in a discreet age, but she remained
devoted to him throughout his lifetime and titled her autobiography
The Movies, Mr. Griffith, and Me. Griffith is quoted
as saying “Everything went downhill after Lillian left
me.”
 Evelyn
Baldwin Griffith (1910-2004) met Griffith in 1927 when
she accompanied her mother to a charity event at the Astor
Hotel in New York where Griffith was living, and he told her
that he wanted to cast her as Little Nell in a film he was
planning of The Old Curiosity Shop (she would go on
to act in only one film, a small role in Griffith’s last
feature, The Struggle). It would take another two years
for their relationship to develop into romance, but Griffith
was unable to dissolve his early first marriage, which had
become a drain on his finances because of the constant money
demands of his wife. He was finally able to obtain a divorce
and marry Evelyn in April of 1936, one week before he received
his honorary Oscar. But the thirty-plus year difference in
their ages and Griffith’s increasing dependency on alcohol
put an enormous strain on their relationship, and they were
divorced in 1947, one year before his death. She later remarried.
 Louis
B. Mayer (1882-1957) was the head of MGM Studios from
1924 to 1951 and, in his time, the most powerful man in Hollywood.
The Motion Picture Academy was his brainchild and he had such
influence over the early voting for the awards that he was
able to block the Best Director Oscar going to King Vidor
for The Crowd (a film Mayer detested). Mayer began
as an independent producer and first made his fortune when
he acquired the New England distribution rights for The
Birth of a Nation. The windfall allowed him to form Louis
B. Mayer Pictures in 1918, which merged with the Metro Pictures
Corporation (which Mayer had co-founded in 1915) and the Samuel
Goldwyn Company to form MGM in 1924. Mayer was an intense,
volatile individual who was locked in a power struggle with
MGM production head Irving Thalberg until Thalberg’s
death in 1937, when Mayer consolidated his influence in an
incredibly successful fifteen-year reign that saw Mayer become
the highest paid American during the 1940s. He was ultimately
forced out of MGM in another power struggle, this time with
production chief Dore Schary, a move that proved so disastrous
for the studio that Mayer was asked to return to the job shortly
before his death, a proposition that he declined.
 Dudley
Nichols (1895-1960) was one of the preeminent screenwriters
of the 1930s and 1940s, responsible for the scripts of such
classics as Bringing Up Baby (1938), Gunga Din
(1939), Stagecoach (1939) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943).
He was nominated for four Oscars, winning his only statuette
for The Informer. Since Nichols was a dedicated
member of the Writers Guild of America, he recognized the
Guild’s boycott of the Academy and bravely turned down
the honor (although he would play a game of Hot Potato with
the award for weeks after the ceremony, with the Academy continually
delivering the Oscar to him and Nichols repeatedly sending
it back). When the Academy finally got out of the union organization
racket in 1938, Nichols consented to accept his Oscar.
 Howard
Strickling (1896-1982) was the head of the MGM publicity
department from the silent era into the mid-1960s. A gentleman
who was respected throughout the industry for his classy and
genuine personality, one of Strickling’s primary duties
was concealing scandals that involved MGM stars. This resulted
in some fanciful urban legends (such as the myth that Clark
Gable killed a pedestrian while driving drunk, and MGM paid
an employee to go to prison in his place) as well as some
genuinely chilling cover-ups (like the strong possibility
that Three Stooges creator Ted Healy was beaten to death by
MGM star Wallace Beery in 1937, and the studio managed to
bury the evidence).
Angelo Holo is the one completely fictional character in the play; a publicist of Italian descent working at MGM.
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