The 1908-12 period saw the rise of the film star. Even in Europe and the UK, audiences knew the American stars: Mary Pickford, John Bunny, Lillian Gish. Chaplin made his first film in 1914. From the start of this period documentary subjects were beginning to wane. Narrative films grew to feature-length, of around 90 minutes, although twenty-minute comedies were still popular. Studios were equipped with electric lighting. European and British film production was still important, but by 1914 Hollywood feature production had started.

Feature films
The multiple-reel film--which came to be called a "feature," in the vaudevillian sense of a headline attraction--achieved general acceptance in the USA with the smashing success of Louis Mercanton's three-and-one-half-reel Les Amours de la Reine Elizabeth (Queen Elizabeth, 1912), which starred Sarah Bernhardt and was imported by Adolph Zukor (who founded the independent Famous Players production company with its profits). In 1912 Enrico Guazzoni's nine-reel Italian super-spectacle Quo Vadis? was road-shown in legitimate theatres across America at a top admission price of one dollar, and the feature craze was on.

The Patent Wars
At first, there were difficulties in distributing features in the USA, because the exchanges associated with both the Patents Company and the independents were geared toward cheaply made one-reel shorts. Owing to their more elaborate production values, features had relatively higher negative costs. This was a disadvantage to distributors, who charged a uniform price per foot.

 
Epic features
No country was more responsible for the popularity of the feature than Italy. The Italian cinema's lavishly produced costume spectacles brought it international prominence in the years before the war. The prototypes of the genre, by virtue of their epic material and lengths, were films by the Cines company. It was Cines' nine-reel Quo Vadis? (1912), with its huge three-dimensional sets of ancient Rome and 5,000 extras, that established the standard for the super-spectacle and briefly conquered the world market for Italian motion pictures. Its successor, the Italia company's 12-reel Cabiria (1914), was even more extravagant in its historical reconstructions, from the burning of the Roman fleet at Syracuse to Hannibal crossing the Alps and the sack of Carthage. The Italian superspectacle stimulated public demand for features and influenced such important directors as Cecil B. deMille, Ernst Lubitsch, and especially D.W. Griffith.

Griffith's one-reelers grew increasingly complex between 1911 and 1912, and he began to realize that only a longer and more expansive format could contain his vision. At first he made several two-reel films and finally determined to make an epic, the four-reel Judith of Bethulia (1913), filmed secretly on a 12-square-mile set in Chatsworth Park, California. In addition to its structurally complicated narrative, Judith contained massive sets and battle scenes unlike anything yet attempted in American film. Biograph officials, stunned at Griffith's audacity and extravagance as expenditure doubled the budget, tried to relieve the director of his creative responsibilities by promoting him to studio production chief. Griffith quit instead. He then accepted an offer from Harry E. Aitken, the president of the recently formed Mutual Film Corporation, to head the feature production company Reliance-Majestic; he took camerman Bitzer and most of his Biograph actors company with him.

For his first project he chose to adapt The Clansman, a novel about the Civil War and Reconstruction by the Southern clergyman Thomas Dixon, Jr. (As a Kentuckian whose father had served as a Confederate officer, Griffith was deeply sympathetic to the material, which was highly sensational in its depiction of Reconstruction as a period in which mulatto carpetbaggers and their black henchmen had destroyed the social fabric of the South and given birth to a heroic Ku Klux Klan.) Shooting on the film began in secrecy in late 1914. Although a script existed, Griffith kept most of the continuity in his head--a remarkable feat; the completed film contained 1,544 separate shots. 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. The complexity of its narrative and the epic sweep of its subject were unprecedented, but so too were its controversial manipulations of audience response, especially its blatant appeals to racism. Despite its brilliantly conceived battle sequences, its tender domestic scenes and dignified historical reconstructions, the film also contained shocking racist images. As the film's popularity swept the nation, denunciations followed. Ultimately, after screenings of The Birth of a Nation had caused riots in several cities, it was banned in eight states. Despite this it was seen by nearly 3,000,000 people.

 
Although it is difficult to believe that the film's racism was unconscious, it is easy to imagine that Griffith had not anticipated the power of his own images. He seems to have been genuinely stunned by the hostile public reaction to his masterpiece. At the height of his notoriety and fame, Griffith decided to produce a spectacular cinematic polemic. The result was the massive epic Intolerance(1916), which interweaves stories of martyrdom from four separate historical periods. The film was conceived on a scale so monumental as to dwarf all predecessors. Crosscutting freely between a contemporary tale of courtroom injustice, the fall of ancient Babylon to Cyrus the Great in 539 BC, the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 16th-century France, and the Crucifixion of Christ, Griffith created an editing structure so abstract that contemporary audiences could not understand it. (Left: Margery Wilson and Eugene Pallette in the French Story strand of Intolerance). Even the extravagant sets and exciting battle sequences could not save Intolerance at the box-office. It would be fair to say that Griffith's career as an innovator of film form ended with Intolerance, but his career as a film artist certainly did not.

Exhibition
By 1914 several national feature-distribution alliances in the USA that correlated pricing with a film's production cost, and box-office receipts, were organized. These new exchanges demonstrated the economic advantage of multiple-reel films over shorts. Exhibitors quickly learned that features could command higher admission prices and longer runs; single title packages were also cheaper and easier to advertise than programs of multiple titles. As for manufacturing, producers found that the higher expenditure for features was recouped by high volume sales to distributors, who in turn were eager to share in the higher admission returns from the theatres. The whole industry soon reorganized itself around the economics of the multiple-reel film, and the effects of this restructuring did much to give motion pictures their characteristic modern form.