Film was not invented to make movies possible. The Lumière brothers' first public screening in 1895 was the culmination of innumerable technical developments that finally allowed films to be made and projected, but the invention of film did not immediately give rise to movies as we know them. Within ten years, film had become a sizable industry and medium of popular entertainment, but news films, travelogues, films of vaudeville acts, trick films, and gag films were the dominant forms. Even as late as 1907, dramatic narratives constituted only one-sixth of the “product.”

The turning point came in 1908. With the sudden growth of nickelodeons, respectable theaters intended primarily for the screening of films, producers turned to such “legitimate” fare as adaptations of novels and stage plays, and the dramatic narrative became the dominant form of film, as it has remained to this day. It was at this critical – and rather mysterious – juncture that the technology of film decisively linked up with the incipient idea of movies. Not entirely coincidentally, it was in 1908 that David Wark Griffith directed his first film.

Griffith was a struggling actor from Kentucky, no longer young, with fading dreams of attaining immortality as a playwright. In desperation, he accepted work with the American Biograph Company as a movie actor. When Biograph needed a new director, he stepped in.