Word: griffith
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...flickering beginnings, movies have been fair game for the scissors and splicer. In 1903 the distributors of The Great Train Robbery advised nickelodeons that a startling shot of a gunman firing directly at the audience could be inserted at either the beginning or the end of the film. D.W. Griffith's epic Intolerance (1916), which blended parables from four epochs into a "film fugue," bombed at the box office; so Griffith extracted and recut two of the stories and released them as separate films. Too soon, producers were applying the cleaver of their judgment to good films...
...silent era, accompanied by some 300 stills, many of them previously unpublished, from the collection of Archivist John Kobal. The photographs, carefully selected and strikingly reproduced, add more than decoration to the text. Stills of Theda Bara as a Madonna in The Forbidden Path (1918) and Corinne Griffith surrounded by a field of flowers in Outcast (1928) prove that the silents offered impressionistic masterpieces that have remained unequaled. A candid shot of Jackie Coogan, Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks clowning on the set of The Kid helps flesh out Coogan's joyous memories of his child-star days...
There is also new information about the era's most famous flameouts (D.W. Griffith, Buster Keaton, Erich von Stroheim) and the best-documented veterans (Gloria Swanson, King Vidor, Lillian Gish). Even the trivia somehow does not seem trivial. It is touching to hear Frank Capra recall Mack Sennett's sad mansion full of unread books and overdressed servants. Director Henry Hathaway, who remained active past True Grit (1969), wittily brings back the days when his job was to follow DeMille around with a chair on location. A writer remembers the shock of seeing her credits on a silent...
...however, the convertible is making a comeback. In Florida several enterprising entrepreneurs are beheading standard model Toyotas, Datsuns, Cadillacs, Pontiacs and Ford Mustangs to recreate the mystery of a car without a roof. The Florida firms, such as American Clout Inc. and the Griffith Co., work only with new cars. In a 25-hour operation, the standard top is chopped off with a diamond-toothed saw and a polyvinyl one is installed. Unlike the convenient convertibles that Detroit once offered, Florida's new tops do not pop up at the first drop of rain. They must be mounted into...
...glamour of a convertible is both eternal and profitable. Griffith originally expected to turn out about 300 ragtops annually but is now producing 150 a month, and has established conversion plants in Jacksonville, Detroit and Los Angeles. The typical buyer is a James Dean in pinstripe. He is a single, 25-year-old junior executive male, making $25,000 a year. He is also someone willing to pay a lot to vroom into the sunset with his blown-dry hair tossed gently in the soft wind...