After a short time at the Mutual studio, Mr. Griffith and his company went to California. At the old Kinemacolor lot they encamped, the Mutual having taken over that studio. The carpenters got busy right away, and soon little one-story wooden buildings crowded to the sidewalk’s edge, and the place began to look like a factory. The sprinkling can that had given sustenance to red geraniums and calla lilies was needed no more. * * * * * Now before the Kinemacolor Company had started work at Whitestone they had held a contract with George H. Brennan and Tom Dixon for the production in color of Tom Dixon’s “The Clansman.” The idea was that the dramatic company touring through the Southern States in “The Clansman” would play their same parts before the camera. In these Southern towns all the Southern atmosphere would be free for the asking. Houses, streets, even cotton plantations would not be too remote to use in the picture. And there was a marvelous scheme for interiors. That was to drag the “drops” and “props” and the pretty parlor furniture out into the open, where with the assistance of some sort of floor and God’s sunshine, there would be nothing to hinder work on the picture version of the play. But the marvelous scheme didn’t work as well as was expected; and eventually the managers decided that trying to take a movie on a fly-by-night tour of a theatrical company was not possible, so the company laid off to take it properly. They halted for six weeks and notwithstanding the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars was spent, it was a poor picture and was never even put together. Although Tom Dixon’s sensational story of the South turned out such a botch, it was to lead to a very big thing in the near future. Frank Woods, after several others had tried, had written the continuity of this version of “The Clansman,” and had received all of two hundred dollars for the job. That the picturizing of his scenario had proved such a flivver did not lessen his faith in “The Clansman’s” possibilities. Mr. Griffith was doing some tall thinking. His day of one- and two-reelers having passed, and the multiple-reel Mutual features having met with such success, he felt it was about time he started something new. So, one day, he said to Frank Woods: “I want to make a big picture. What’ll I make?” With his Kinemacolor experience still fresh in mind Mr. Woods suggested “The Clansman.” With the Dixon story and the play Mr. Griffith was quite familiar as he had heard from his friend Austin Webb, who had played the part of the mulatto _Silas Lynch_, about all the exciting times attending the performance of the play--the riots and all--and more he had heard from Claire MacDowell, who was also in the show, and more still from Mr. Dixon himself.