Word: griffith
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...First in War, First in Peace, and Last in the American League," was last in attendance as well, and has been without its original team for 20 years as a result, ever since, management decided to reincarnate and seek larger profits as The Minnesota Twins Fittingly. Twins owner Calvin Griffith is now eager to move to Tamps. Yachtsman entrepreneur Ted Turner has turned the Atlanta Braves into a controversial, competitive, and dearly-loved local institution. But it was not so long ago that the Braves worked out of Milwaukee. And before that, they were the Boston Braves. And before that...
Schickel, a TIME cinema critic, views his subject as father to all the auteurs to follow, and with good reason. Griffith had both a view and a vision. In Birth of a Nation (1915) he restaged his father's Civil War, complete with dramatic scenes of the Ku Klux Klan that brought charges of racism along with blockbuster success. In Intolerance (1916) he took on, among other things, Belshazzar's feast, with elephants, dancing girls and collapsing Babylonian towers...
...justice to these epics, Griffith, as much as any one man, devised the primary techniques of film. The closeup, the fadeout, cross-cutting-all developed on his set. But Schickel provides a lively argument for Griffith as poet as well as technician. Through the famous storms and battle scenes, the director seemed to be trying to find his own way back to a lost innocence...
...move to Los Angeles, in 1910. Now he bought a 28-acre estate outside Mamaroneck, N.Y., to convert to his private studio. It was a tactical mistake. He got bogged down in logistics and financing-the producer's world in which he had no role. In 1927 Griffith returned to a changed Hollywood; Ernst Lubitsch had made The Marriage Circle, an ironic sex comedy, and the old sentimental, moralizing sagas about child-women suddenly seemed embarrassing antiques...
...Griffith's early years had the elements of spectacle, his decline seems to have been made for cinema noir. Ignored, unrecognized, the old director hung around in bars, moving in a limbo of almost-deals and the very young women he could never stay away from. Only when he died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1948 at the age of 73, did recognition arrive. Obituaries were laudatory; Samuel Goldwyn and Louis B. Mayer served as honor ary pallbearers to the man they had ignored in his final years...