Adventures with D.W. Griffith

Dust jacket “Karl Brown, who became a famous cameraman (The Covered Wagon) and film director (Stark Love, the lyrical silent film about North Carolina mountaineers), was in his youth an eyewitness to and participant in the most momentous occasions in the history of films – the production of D. W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation and Intolerance. Having been employed as an assistant to the great cameraman, G. W. Bitzer, he was on the firing line of all the major Griffith films until Broken Blossoms. As the introduction says, ‘His extraordinary story represents the most exciting, and the most perceptive, volume of reminiscence ever published on the cinema.’ When he went to work in 1914, in the Griffith studio at the corner of Sunset and Hollywood Boulevards, Karl Brown was still a teenager, with a sharp and penetrating eye. Recently discovered in obscure retirement in Hollywood, he was persuaded by Kevin Brownlow to set down his story. His memory proved to be he has provided so much new and detailed information on this early period that the published sources have become outdated. Brownlow calls this narrative ‘a dramatic, and often hilarious, story of a boy trying to cope with a complex technical process, and helping to make history….Everyone who loves films should be grateful that, when D. W. Griffith was working on his greatest pictures, Karl Brown was there – on our behalf.’ Kevin Brownlow, film director and author of the widely praised film book, The Parade’s Gone By, has edited the text and written the introduction. There is a generous selection of photographs, many of them provided by Karl Brown, as well as a few diagrams and maps he has drawn.”