LOS ANGELES -- The Directors Guild of America will change the name of the award it presents for career achievement in moviemaking because the film pioneer it was named for -- D.W. Griffith -- helped foster "intolerable racial stereotypes," the Guild announced Tuesday.
The DGA's national board voted unanimously Nov. 20 to retire Griffith as the award's namesake but kept the move quiet until notice could be given privately to past DGA presidents and former recipients, including Francis Ford Coppola, Woody Allen and Robert Altman, a guild spokesman said.The new name for the guild's career achievement award, which has been given out 28 times since it was first presented in 1953 to Cecil B. De Mille, will be announced at a later date.
Griffith, who died in 1948, is widely regarded as the first major American movie director and is credited with introducing such basic filmmaking conventions as the fade-in, fade-out, close-up, moving-camera shot and flashback, as well as rehearsals before shooting.
But his 1915 landmark epic "Birth of a Nation" is controversial because of its racial stereotypes and heroic depiction of the Ku Klux Klan.
"It's one of the most horrifying movies ever made," said DGA third vice president Paris Barclay, the acclaimed director of the hit police series "NYPD Blue" and the first African-American elected as a Guild officer.
"As we approach a new millennium, the time is right to create a new ultimate honor for film directors that better reflect the sensibilities of our society at this time in our national history," Guild President Jack Shea said in a statement.
"There is no question that D.W. Griffith was a brilliant pioneer filmmaker whose innovations as a visionary film artist led the way for generations of directors," Shea said. "However, it is also true that he helped foster intolerable racial stereotypes."
The idea of changing the award's name had been gaining momentum for the past couple of years, Barclay said. "This isn't an overnight thing."
Griffith, the son of a Confederate army colonel, was "an extraordinarily talented filmmaker," but his best-known movie, "Birth of a Nation," was instrumental in perpetuating racial stereotypes seen in film for the next 60 years, Barclay said.
"If there was a single movie that could be pointed to for its negative impact on African-Americans, it would be 'Birth of a Nation.' So to name the top award for the Directors Guild of America after D.W. Griffith was always troubling for me."
Past recipients of the D.W. Griffith Award include such famed directors as Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, Ingmar Bergman, Robert Wise, Elia Kazan, Billy Wilder, Orson Welles, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock, Frank Capra and John Ford.