2013 Essays

Rose Smith

Hatch, Kristen

Rose Smith edited a number of D.W. Griffith’s films. According to the Los Angeles Times in 1925, Rose Smith had “been a cutter for D.W. Griffith since her little-girl days,” joining Griffith’s Biograph studio in New York and traveling with him to California (C2). Her husband, James Smith, became Griffith’s cutter at Biograph, and Rose appears to have joined him in the cutting room during the editing of Birth of a Nation (1915). Later sources often mention Jimmie Smith but not his wife Rose.