The years of the First World War were a complex transitional period for the film industry. It was the period when the exhibition of films changed from short programmes of one-reel films to longer shows consisting of a feature film of four reels or longer, though still supported by short films. The exhibition venues also changed from small nickelodeon cinemas to larger cinemas charging higher prices. These higher prices were partly justified by the new film stars who were now being created. In the United States, nearly all the original film companies which formed the Motion Picture Patents Company went out of business in this period because of their resistance to the changeover to long feature films. The one exception to this was the Vitagraph company, which was already moving over to long films by 1914. The move towards shooting more films on the West coast around Los Angeles continued during World War I, until the bulk of American production was carried out there.
The Universal Film Manufacturing Company had been formed in 1912 as an umbrella company for many of the independent producing companies, and continued to grow during the war. Other independent companies were grouped under the Mutual banner in 1912, and there were also important new entrants, particularly the Jesse LaskyFeature Play Company, and Famous Players, which were both formed in 1913 to take advantage of the fact that films could reproduce the real substance of a stage play (plus embellishments), and so the best plays and actors from the legitimate stage could be enticed into films. In fact, the film industry adopted the term “photoplay” for motion pictures at this time. In 1914 the Lasky company and Famous Players were amalgamated into Famous Players-Lasky, with distribution of their films handled by the new Paramount Pictures Corporation.
Another new major producing company formed during the war years was Triangle, with Mack Sennett, D.W. Griffith and Thomas Ince heading its production units. Despite the talents involved, it only lasted from 1915 to 1917, after which its separate producers took their films to Paramount for distribution. Equally short-lived, but still very important, was the World Film Company, which recruited most of the French directors, cameramen, and designers who had previously been working at the Fort Lee, New Jersey studios for Pathé and Éclair.
The biggest success of these years was D.W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), made for Triangle. Griffith applied all the ideas for film staging that he had worked out in his Biograph films to a bigoted white southerner's epic view of the Civil War and its aftermath. Despite protests in the northern cities of the United States organized by theNational Association for the Advancement of Colored People and others, it took many millions at the box office. Stung by the criticism of his film, Griffith made a new film he had just finished, The Mother and the Law, into one of the strands of an even bigger film with an even bigger theme, Intolerance (1916).
