David W. Griffith

David Wark Griffith (1875 Crestwood – 1948 Hollywood), better known as D. W. Griffith, was an American film director. A prolific director, he made about four hundred short films in five years, from 1908 to 1913, and had made the first American blockbusters from 1914.
He developed scriptwriting to allow for increasingly longer films. In 1914, he joined forces with two other executive producers, Thomas Harper Ince and Mack Sennett, to create the Triangle Film Corporation and partly escape the financiers who, from that time onwards, ran American cinema and forced it to prefer tried and tested recipes to innovative films. In 1919, after the failure of his last blockbuster, Intolerance, he founded United Artists with actors Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks and Charlie Chaplin.