Dw Practice history

In June 1908 Biograph gave him an opportunity to replace its ailing director, George (“Old Man”) McCutcheon, on the chase film The Adventures of Dollie.

When Biograph started sending his production unit to southern California in 1910, Griffith began to practice panoramic panning shots not only to provide visual information but also to engage his audience in the total environment of his films.

Griffith quit instead, publishing a full-page advertisement in The New York Dramatic Mirror (December 3, 1913), in which he took credit for all the Biograph films he had made from The Adventures of Dollie through Judith, as well as for the narrative innovations they contained.

When the film opened in March 1915, retitled The Birth of a Nation, it was immediately pronounced “epoch-making” and recognized as a remarkable artistic achievement.

Transferred to private control, UFA became the single largest studio in Europe and produced most of the films associated with the “golden age” of German cinema during the Weimar Republic (1919–33). Therefore, on December 18, 1917, the German general Erich Ludendorff ordered the merger of the main German production, distribution, and exhibition companies into the government-subsidized conglomerate Universum Film Aktiengesellschaft (UFA). UFA’s mission was to upgrade the quality of German films.

The organization proved to be highly effective, and, when the war ended in Germany’s defeat in November 1918, the German film industry was prepared for the first time to compete in the international marketplace.

Representative works included F.W. Murnau’s Der Januskopf (Janus-Faced, 1920), adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr.

Erich Pommer, Caligari’s producer at Decla-Bioskop (an independent production company that was to merge with UFA in 1921), added a scene to the original scenario so that the story appears to be narrated by a madman confined to an asylum of which the mountebank is director and head psychiatrist.

By March 1927, UFA was once again facing financial collapse, and it turned this time to the Prussian financier Alfred Hugenberg, a director of the powerful Krupp industrial empire and a leader of the right-wing German National Party who was sympathetic to the Nazis.

Not one could be called a success, although his first sound film, Abraham Lincoln (1930), was recognized as an effective essay in the new medium.

He emigrated in 1933 to escape the Nazis and began a second career in the Hollywood studios the following year.

In 1972, at age 26, founder Don Lombardi opened a small teaching studio in Santa Monica, California where he offered monthly workshops and private drum lessons.

That was until 1977, when Camco Drum Co. (the main purchaser of the trap-seat) owner Tom Beckman made DW’s Don Lombardi an offer that would change the future for both himself and his company.

Throughout the 1980’s they created even more innovative hardware, such as the rotating two-leg 5500T and the remote (cable) 5502LB hi-hat stands.

In 1990 they produced their first official catalogue of products which they took to that year’s NAMM show.