STAGESTRUCK FILMMAKER: D.W. GRIFFITH AND THE AMERICAN THEATRE by David Mayer Selected as Finalist for the 2010 Richard Wall Memorial Award

The University of Iowa Press is proud to announce that Stagestruck Filmmaker: D.W. Griffith and the American Theatre by David Mayer has been chosen as a finalist for the 2010 Richard Wall Memorial Award. Formerly known as the Theatre Library Association Award, the prize was renamed in 2010 to honor the memory of the late Richard Wall, longtime TLA member and Book Awards Chair.

An actor, a vaudevillian, and a dramatist before he became a filmmaker, D. W. Griffith used the resources of theatre to great purpose and to great ends. In pioneering the quintessentially modern medium of film from the 1890s to the 1930s, he drew from older, more broadly appealing stage forms of melodrama, comedy, vaudeville, and variety. In Stagestruck Filmmaker, David Mayer brings Griffith’s process vividly to life, offering detailed and valuable insights into the racial, ethnic, class, and gender issues of these transitional decades.

Combining the raw materials of theatre, circus, minstrelsy, and dance with the newer visual codes of motion pictures, Griffith became the first acknowledged artist of American film. Birth of a Nation in particular demonstrates the degree to which he was influenced by the racist justifications and distorting interpretations of the Civil War and the Reconstruction era. Moving through the major phases of Griffith’s career in chapters organized around key films or groups of films, Mayer provides a mesmerizing account of the American stage and cinema in the final years of the nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century.

Griffith’s relationship to the theatre was intricate, complex, and enduring. Long recognized as the dominant creative figure of American motion pictures, throughout twenty-six years of making more than five hundred films he pillaged, adapted, reshaped, revitalized, preserved, and extolled. By historicizing his representations of race, ethnicity, and otherness, Mayer places Griffith within an overall template of American life in the years when film rivaled and then surpassed the theatre in popularity.

David Mayer is emeritus professor in the Department of Drama, University of Manchester. He is the author and editor or coeditor of numerous publications in nineteenth- and twentieth-century British and American popular entertainment. His books include Harlequin in His Element: English Pantomime, 1806–1836 and Playing Out the Empire: “Ben-Hur” and Other Toga-plays and Films.