Recognized as the greatest film director and most consistently innovative artist of the early U.S. film industry, D.W. Griffith influenced the development of cinema worldwide. Beginning as an actor and writer with the Biograph Film Company of New York in 1907, the following year he was offered a contract as director and producer. For the next five years he managed production of more than 400 films. He changed firms and in 1914 began his most famous film, The Birth of a Nation. The work became a landmark, for both its artistic merits and its innovative use of such techniques as close-ups, fade-outs, and flashbacks.