Showing an innate genius for telling a story through the rapidly developing medium of moving pictures, the one-time bit-part actor and aspiring writer, D W Griffith, stunned the world with this high quality big-screen production containing spectacular panoramic battle scenes. Following a period as production supervisor and director at Biograph Studios, he moved to Majestic-Reliance in 1913 where he began to devise the structure for his masterpiece. Based on a best-selling novel and negrophobic play called "The Clansman", he produced a three-hour epic that, in 1915, set a new standard for film production and absorbing melodrama. It follows the lives of two white families divided by, and enduring, the American Civil War, and includes elaborate cameos of historical events such as the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Costing the then unprecedented sum of $100,000 to make, it opened in Los Angeles on 8 February 1915 and quickly becamse the most successful silent film ever made. It grossed