Where to watch The Birth of a Nation (1915)

Trivia & production notes

• D.W. Griffith's father served as a colonel in the Confederate States Army, which shaped Griffith's negative view of Reconstruction alongside his shared Southern background with playwright Thomas Dixon.
• Thomas Dixon initially agreed to sell his play for $10,000, but Griffith ran out of money and could only pay $2,500, so he offered Dixon 25 percent of the film's profits instead.
• By 2007, Thomas Dixon's proceeds from the film had become the largest sum any author had ever received for a motion picture story, totaling several million dollars.
• Griffith shot approximately 36 hours of raw film and edited it down to just over 3 hours, with footage later removed in response to early screenings and censorship demands.
• West Point engineers provided technical advice on Civil War battle scenes and supplied the artillery used in filming.
• New York Mayor John Purroy Mitchel demanded the removal of several scenes before the film's release in New York City, including one depicting a female abolitionist recoiling from a black boy's body odor.
• The film's war scenes drew inspiration from Robert Underwood Johnson's book Battles and Leaders of the Civil War, Harper's Pictorial History of the Civil War, and Mathew Brady's Civil War photography.
• A 1911 film adaptation of The Clansman in Kinemacolor directed by William F. Haddock was abandoned, with its scriptwriter Frank E. Woods later showing his work to Griffith, who was inspired to create his own version.
• Griffith began filming on July 4, 1914 and completed principal photography by October 1914.
• The fictional character Silas Lynch was modeled after real historical figures Alonzo J. Ransier and Richard Howell Gleaves.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article The Birth of a Nation, available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Rewritten for StreamShack; errors are ours — tell us about them.