Honorary Award, 1935

Awards presented March 5, 1936

To David Wark Griffith, for his distinguished creative achievements as director and producer and his invaluable initiative and lasting contributions to the progress of the motion picture arts. 

Frank Capra, D.W. Griffith, Jean Hersholt, Henry B. Walthall, Frank Lloyd, Cecil B. DeMille, and Donald Crisp at the Academy Award banquet at which Griffith received his honorary award

Griffith received his honorary award from the Academy twenty-one years after the release of his most notorious film, The Birth of a Nation. There was no particular scandal about the award: Griffith was greeted with a standing ovation. Today, nearly a century after the release of The Birth of a Nation, it's something of an embarrassment to realize that the feature film that did more to launch the Hollywood film industry is a work of deep-seated racism, based on a novel by Thomas Dixon Jr. that glorified the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, Griffith's film at first bore the same title as the novel: The Clansman. But it was such an enormous box office success that it emboldened others to try their hands at making and exhibiting films: Louis B. Mayer made so much money by securing the New England exhibition rights to the film that he decided to move to California and get into the movie-producing business. It was also the first movie to be shown at the White House, and President Woodrow Wilson remarked of it that it was "like writing history with lightning." Bad history, that is. 

Nevertheless, Griffith deserved to be honored by the Academy for his extraordinary pioneering work as a filmmaker. Starting in 1908, he produced hundreds of short films that explored the potential of the new medium. After the success of The Birth of a Nation, he also became a pioneering feature director, with the extravagant (if money-losing) Intolerance, Hearts of the World, Way Down East, Broken Blossoms, and Orphans of the Storm, among many others. He helped make Lillian Gish into one of the greatest screen actresses, and in 1919 joined with Charles Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks in founding United Artists as a releasing company for their films. But eventually he was unable to adapt to the changes in Hollywood and after making two talkies, Abraham Lincoln and The Struggle, both of which were flops, he stopped making movies.    

From time to time, those who were aware of Griffith's reputation would try to involve him in their work: W.S. Van Dyke asked for his help in shooting the earthquake sequence of San Francisco in 1936, and in 1939 Hal Roach asked him to produce Of Mice and Men and One Million B.C. But his actual involvement on those pictures seems to have been minimal and received no screen credit. After his death in 1948, the Directors Guild of America decided to name its highest award after him, but in 1999 the Guild, acknowledging the stain cast on Griffith's reputation by The Birth of a Nation, removed his name from the award.