The Englishman's Boy Read Online Free Page A

him on hand to introduce to distinguished visitors as, ‘The world’s greatest writer. He works for me.’ ”
    Fitz abruptly says, “Who wants a drink?”
    “Denis recalls me to my duties as a host. I have been remiss. As you see, I can get carried away,” Chance apologizes, offering a smile. “We have some very good Scotch that some of Fitz’s friends got us from Canada. Or perhaps you would care for something else?”
    “Scotch and water is fine.”
    “Soda with mine. As usual, Denis.”
    He turns back to me as Fitzsimmons busies himself mixing drinks.
    “You see, Harry … do you mind if I call you Harry? You see, Harry, I want to make pictures rooted in American history and American experience. Just as Mr. Griffith showed us how to. I’m tired of all these people making movies about Marie Antoinette. Prisoner of Zenda stuff. Chocolate-coated kitsch. Costume dramas, knights and castles, Robin Hood. Why not a film biography of George Washington instead of Henry VIII? Do you see what I mean?”
    I nod. Fitz serves the drinks, then retreats to a chair in the corner. All but his shoes and pant legs vanish in shadow.
    “That is what I mean when I say I wish to continue Mr. Griffith’s work,” Chance explains with just a touch of smugness.
    It is hard to remember that Griffith only died in 1948, five years ago. I don’t suspect the name means much to anyone now, except the most avid film buffs. He died an alcoholic, guiltily ignored by the very business which he pioneered, a neglected, pathetically grandiloquent figure. But for about a decade he dominated movie-making in a way no one has since, or is ever likely to do again. He began to direct when movies were shot with a stationary camera as if they were stage plays, actors and actresses making exits and entrances. It was Griffith and his cameraman, Billy Bitzer, who take the lion’s share of credit for inventing the vocabulary of movies – close-ups (audiences wanted to know what had happened to the actors’ feet), rapid cuts from scene to scene and character to character, the “fade-out,” the “soft focus,” tracking cameras. He even used a variation of colour photography, printing night scenes on blue stock, day scenes on yellow. It was Griffith who first demanded that movies be regarded as art and Griffith who gave some credibility to the claim they could be. He produced some of the first Hollywood spectaculars with
The Birth of a Nation
and
Intolerance
, as well as small, intimate movies like
Broken Blossoms.
His pictures were a reflection of their maker, a mixture of bombast, hokum, sentiment, and high artistic purpose.
    Griffith was an obsessive eccentric and one of his obsessions was history. He employed a large staff to research his period dramas and dunned archaeologists and historians for blurbs to advertise the “accuracy” of his movies. But his obsession with history went further. He argued that the motion-picture camera would end conflicting interpretations of the past. Eventually all significant events would be recorded by movie cameras and film would offer irrefutable proof as to what had really happened. Vast public archives of documentary movies would make history democratic; by viewing the evidence, citizens could check the facts, know the truth for themselves.
    In the early years Griffith was always surrounded by admirers; people who never thought to laugh when the great man propounded his naive theories, or wore kooky straw hats with holes cut in them to prevent baldness, or declaimed ornately like a hillbilly Shakespeare. To them he was always Mr. Griffith, the Genius.
    This is the man Chance begins to lecture me on in a style sounding a bit like an address to Congress. He says that he has made an intense study of Griffith’s films, pondered them, and drawn conclusions. Griffith is the man who has given America to Americans. America had cried out for bread and received stones until Griffith came along. It was
he
who had