A Summary of Chapter 1 “Mean Streets” in Bullets Over Hollywood the American Gangster Picture by author John McCarty. Bullets over Hollywood is an introduction into the cinema that set the standard for films of that genre for years to come. Pioneer filmmaker David Wark Griffith states “As a child he was influenced with stories of his father’s experience in the civil war”. These experiences later made their way into Griffiths classic novels The Birth of a Nation (1915). Griffith created a style of cinema called cross cuttings in which he carried over characters and locations from film to film. Cross cutting would later be used by Francis Ford Coppola sixty years later at the conclusion of one of the most influential of all modern gangster