D. W. Griffith Trivia
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
6correct to beat the crowd
49 free D. W. Griffith trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This D. W. Griffith trivia quiz covers the silent-era director whom Chaplin called the teacher of us all and whose most famous film is still condemned as racist propaganda. The easy questions are ones any film-history student could answer: the 1915 epic, the studio he founded with Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks, his favourite leading lady, and the state where he was born. The harder end is for cinephiles: the 1908 short that was his directing debut, the Dickens novel that inspired his cross-cutting, the first film ever shot in Hollywood, the four-reel feature Biograph did not want, the novel and play behind The Birth of a Nation and its White House screening, the four stories and rocking cradle of Intolerance, the ice floes of Way Down East, the first film United Artists ever distributed, his two sound films, the honorary Oscar of 1936, the DGA award that dropped his name in 1999, and the hotel lobby where he collapsed in 1948. Billy Bitzer, Mack Sennett, Linda Arvidson, Thomas Dixon and the Gish sisters get questions too. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia entries for the director, his films and his collaborators before publishing, and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. If you enjoy this one, try our silent film, Charlie Chaplin and classic Hollywood quizzes next.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which state was D. W. Griffith born in 1875?
Kentucky
Kentucky. He was born on a farm near Louisville; when his father died the family sank into debt, and he left school early for jobs in a dry-goods store and a bookshop.
Q 02What do the initials in D. W. Griffith's name stand for?
David Wark
David Wark. He kept the name off playbills in his years as a touring actor, and was still billed as Lawrence Griffith when he first appeared in Edison and Biograph films.
Q 03Which war does The Birth of a Nation depict?
Civil War
The American Civil War. The Stonemans of the North and the Camerons of the South land on opposite sides, and the first half ends with a staged re-creation of Lincoln's assassination.
Q 04Which Great Train Robbery director gave Griffith an acting part when he came to Edison to sell a script?
Edwin Porter
Edwin Porter. He cast the would-be playwright as the hero of Rescued from an Eagle's Nest, and within months Griffith was directing films himself at the rival Biograph studio.
Q 05Roughly how many films did D. W. Griffith direct in his career?
About 500
About 500. Most were one-reel shorts of around twelve minutes: in five years at Biograph he turned them out at up to two a week, more than 400 in all.
Q 06What was Griffith's 1908 directorial debut?
The Adventures of Dollie
The Adventures of Dollie. Kidnappers seal a little girl inside a barrel, which tumbles off their wagon into a river and is swept towards a waterfall before she is fished out safe.
Q 07Which cameraman did Griffith meet at Biograph and work with for years?
Billy Bitzer
Billy Bitzer. He shot The Birth of a Nation and Intolerance, and his skill let the director try the fade-outs, iris shots and close-ups he wanted.
Q 08Which novelist's technique inspired Griffith's cross-cutting between parallel stories?
Dickens
Dickens. Told that jumping between two scenes would leave audiences lost, Griffith answered, by his wife's account, "Well, doesn't Dickens write that way?"
Q 09Which 1910 Griffith short was the first film shot in Hollywood?
In Old California
In Old California. Biograph had sent Griffith's company west for the winter, and he took his cameras out to Hollywood, which was then just a small rural village.
Q 10In which 1911 Griffith short does a telegraph girl hold off robbers until help arrives by train?
The Lonedale Operator
The Lonedale Operator. She wires for help, then keeps the robbers back with a "gun" that turns out to be a wrench, a trick Griffith reveals in a close-up.
Q 11Which 1912 Griffith short is regarded as an early gangster film?
The Musketeers of Pig Alley
The Musketeers of Pig Alley. Griffith took his camera into New York's tenement streets, reportedly using real gang members as extras, for a tale of two rival gangsters.
Q 12What was Griffith's first feature film, shot for Biograph in 1913?
Judith of Bethulia
Judith of Bethulia. Biograph's bosses had no faith in long films: they cut it down, held it back until 1914 and offered Griffith only more one-reelers, so he quit and took his actors with him.
Q 13Who played the lead in Griffith's first feature film, shot for Biograph in 1913?
Blanche Sweet
Q 21Which Wagner piece did Joseph Carl Breil use as the Klan's leitmotif in the score?
Ride of the Valkyries
Ride of the Valkyries. Wagner's music swells as the hooded riders gather and gallop to the rescue in the film's climax, part of a score played live by a full orchestra.
Q 22The Birth of a Nation's love theme became the signature tune of which radio sitcom?
Amos 'n' Andy
Amos 'n' Andy. Sold as sheet music under the title The Perfect Song, the tune outlived the film: it opened a radio comedy in which two white actors voiced Black characters.
Q 23Whose death is one of Intolerance's four stories?
Jesus
Blanche Sweet. Still in her teens, she was the toughest of Griffith's young heroines, an energetic contrast to the fragile type the director usually favoured.
Q 14Which Mexican revolutionary signed a 1914 film deal with Mutual, the company Griffith had just joined?
Pancho Villa
Pancho Villa. He gave Mutual's cameramen special access to his campaign against Huerta, restaged scenes for them, and appeared as himself in The Life of General Villa.
Q 15Triangle Film Corporation teamed Griffith with Keystone's comedy chief and which maker of William S. Hart westerns?
Thomas Ince
Thomas Ince. At his Inceville studio he split the staff into units, each filming from a detailed shooting script he had approved, the factory method the big studios went on to adopt.
Q 16Whose 1905 novel and play was the basis of The Birth of a Nation?
Thomas Dixon Jr.
Thomas Dixon Jr. Griffith knew the former Baptist minister already: as a jobbing actor he had toured as leading man in another Dixon play, years before he filmed this one.
Q 17Under what title did Griffith first produce his 1915 epic through Reliance-Majestic?
The Clansman
The Clansman. It first played under that name, the title of the novel and stage play it adapts, and was renamed The Birth of a Nation by the time it opened in New York.
Q 18Which president watched The Birth of a Nation at the White House?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson. Griffith had already borrowed the scholar-president's authority: the film's title cards quote from Wilson's own History of the American People.
Q 19In which city did The Birth of a Nation have its premiere in February 1915?
Los Angeles
Los Angeles. It opened downtown at Clune's Auditorium, and the protests that met it there followed the film to New York the next month and then on to Boston.
Q 20Which organisation campaigned to have The Birth of a Nation banned?
The NAACP
The NAACP. It organised boycotts, court challenges and appeals to mayors and censors; a few cities did ban the film, but it went on showing almost everywhere else and broke box-office records.
Jesus. The Crucifixion is one of four tales of persecution Griffith wove together, his answer to the campaigners who had tried to have The Birth of a Nation banned.
Q 24What recurring image links the stories of Intolerance?
A mother rocking a cradle
A mother rocking a cradle. She appears each time the film jumps between eras, under a line borrowed from Walt Whitman: "Out of the cradle endlessly rocking."
Q 25In Intolerance, Babylon falls to the army of which empire?
The Persians
The Persians. Cyrus the Great takes the city in 539 BC, and in Griffith's telling Babylon is undone from within, by a feud between the followers of two rival gods.
Q 26Who played the Mountain Girl in Intolerance's Babylonian story?
Constance Talmadge
Constance Talmadge. The tomboy charioteer was her first major role, and Griffith re-released the Babylon story as a film of its own in 1919.
Q 27Which government asked Griffith to make the 1918 propaganda film Hearts of the World?
British
British. The War Office's film section brought him to England in 1917 and let him film at the front in France, yet the battle scenes were restaged afterwards on a studio lot in California.
Q 28With which three stars did Griffith found United Artists in 1919?
Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks
Chaplin, Pickford and Fairbanks. Cowboy star William S. Hart sat in on the early talks but dropped out, leaving four founders set on releasing their own films free of the big studios.
Q 29Which 1919 film was Griffith's first release through United Artists?
Broken Blossoms
Broken Blossoms. A small, bleak tragedy about a gentle Chinese shopkeeper and a girl beaten by her boxer father, it was a hit with critics and audiences all the same.
Q 30Griffith's 1919 melodrama of London's docklands is based on a story from which Thomas Burke collection?
Limehouse Nights
Limehouse Nights. Limehouse was the dockside district that then held London's Chinatown, and Griffith recreated its foggy streets entirely on studio sets.