Russell Merritt co-wrote and was senior historical advisor for the Emmy-nominated series D.W. Griffith: Father of Film (directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill). During cinema's formative years, censorship of the medium was haphazard, provoked as much by the seamy atmosphere of the nickelodeon parlor as it was by the indiscreet image. By 1915 all this changed: D.W. Griffith gave us not only his landmark The Birth of a Nation, but a film substantial enough to inspire a protest movement. Out of Birth were born censor boards and ordinances across the country. Not one to turn and run, Griffith quickly turned the censor wars into the linchpin of the film's marketing campaign-making brilliant publicity out of personal encounters with protest groups and state legislators. What he learned with The Birth of a Nation, he applied to his wartime epics, Intolerance (1916) and Hearts of the World (1918), baiting his adversaries and demanding the same rights for movies that had been granted earlier art forms. Tonight, Russell Merritt will look at the legal controversies Griffith created with his notorious film-and how he maintained them in his twenties revivals of The Birth of a Nation amidst the resurrection of the Ku Klux Klan.