D.W Griffiths - What contribution did the following have on film editing? (script)

 David Llewelyn Wark "D. W." Griffith (January 22, 1875 – July 23, 1948) was a premier pioneering American film director. He is best known as the director of the epic 1915 film The Birth of a Nation and the subsequent film Intolerance(1916).

Griffith's film The Birth of a Nation made pioneering use of advanced camera and narrative techniques, and its immense popularity set the stage for the dominance of the feature-length film in the United States.

Griffith began his career, first as a failed actor, and then as a writer. It is here as a playwright that he found his first influences. His love for the works of Dickens and Tennyson gave him the idea of parallel stories within a single film as he began his career in directing. Multiple scenes of action "crosscutting" from one scene to another, first introduced in Griffith's ninth film The Fatal Hour (1908) and expanded later in After Many Years (1908), had never previously been attempted in film. He enhanced this crosscutting approach in The Lonely Villa (1909) by the use of intercutting between three separate groups of characters: a man, his wife and children, and burglers. Griffith followed the stories of each of the groups allowing the audience to witness the events unfolding from each of their perspectives until all three collide into the film's single narrative.

Griffith employed the crosscutting technique and combined it with shorter and more rapid shots, thus setting a rhythmic tempo and allowing him to sustain suspense within his movies. Griffith structured these films using parallel editing to enhance, and prolong the suspense of the sequence by continuously interrupting the progress of each line of action. This approach to editing influenced Russian filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the development of montage editing, as well as the techniques used by future Hollywood directors in all genres

Motion picture legend Charles Chaplin called Griffith "The Teacher of us All". This sentiment was widely shared. Filmmakers as diverse as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock^[22] Orson Welles, Lev Kuleshov^[23] Jean Renoir^[24] Cecil B. DeMille^[25] King Vidor^[26] Carl Theodor Dreyer^[27] and Sergei Eisenstein^[28] have spoken of their respect for the director of Intolerance. Orson Welles said "I have never really hated Hollywood except for its treatment of D. W. Griffith. No town, no industry, no profession, no art form owes so much to a single man."^[29]