D. W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith was born January 22, 1875, and became the director who pioneered film editing and expanded the narrative possibilities of the medium. In 1915 he released The Birth of a Nation, a staggering financial success that film historians consider a landmark for its technique and that the NAACP tried to ban for its degrading portrayals of African Americans and its celebration of the Ku Klux Klan and the Confederacy. The backlash drove him to make Intolerance the following year, which he positioned as an answer to critics he believed had unfairly attacked him. In 1919 he co-founded United Artists with Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks to free artists from studio control. He directed successful films like Broken Blossoms, Way Down East, and Orphans of the Storm, but high production costs often sank them commercially. By the time he made The Struggle in 1931, his last feature, he had directed nearly 520 films - all but three of them silent. He died July 23, 1948.