Director D.W. Griffith's film Birth of a Nation premieres at Clune's Auditorium in Los Angeles. The Civil War epic, which cost $100,000 and ran nearly three hours, used revolutionary filmmaking techniques, including multiple camera angles. The film provoked an outcry from liberals and black leaders, who objected to the film's sympathetic portrayal of members of the Ku Klux Klan and demonization of Southern blacks. Despite attempts by several groups to ban the film, the picture became a financial success, drawing long lines to pay the unprecedented price of $2 a ticket. One of the songs in the movie's score, "The Perfect Song," became the first musical hit generated by a movie.

Griffith's pioneering techniques made him one of the most important figures in early film. The son of a Mexican War soldier, Griffith was born in Kentucky in 1875 and grew up in poverty. He became interested in theater, joining Louisville's Meffert Stock Company as a teen and later touring on his own, without much financial success.

Griffith turned to writing in the early 1900s, penning short stories, poems, and plays. After writing several stories for movie studio Biograph, Griffith became involved in different aspects of the studio, from production to directing. Realizing that film acting required a different set of skills than stage acting, Griffith assembled a company of young, talented actors and rigorously trained them in a new, subtler performing style that lured huge audiences to showings of his films. His players included future stars Mary Pickford and Lillian Gish. In 1910, he brought them to Los Angeles to take advantage of the sunny climate and varied scenery. In 1911, Griffith directed a two-reel film, Enoch Arden. Previously, directors had assumed a two-reel film would exhaust the attention span of the American audience. When he left Biograph after making more than 450 short films, he began working secretly on The Birth of a Nation, released in 1915.

His next picture, Intolerance (1916), took two years to make and featured a complex, interwoven plot portraying racism, prejudice, and injustice throughout history. He used much of his own money to finance the $2.5 million film, and its failure ruined him financially: his career foundered for several years after that.

In 1919, he co-founded United Artists with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Charles Chaplin. In 1935, Griffith won an honorary Oscar for his "lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts." Griffith died in 1948 at the Knickerbocker Hotel in Hollywood. Today, the highest honor bestowed by the Directors Guild of America is the D.W. Griffith Award.