ABSTRACT
David Llewelyn Wark Griffith was incensed. The acclaimed director of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916) had heard one of his actresses refer to a film as a ‘flicker’. Lillian Gish, another of Griffith’s actresses, noted his angry reaction,
He told her never to use that word. She was working in the universal language that had been predicted in the Bible, which was to make all men brothers because they would understand each other. This could end wars and bring about the millennium. We were all to remember that the next time we faced a camera.
