Abstract
This chapter considers how literary writers responded to the arrival of film and its development as a mass narrative form in the late 1910s. It finds that many legal, social, and cultural issues that had informed nineteenth-century relations between drama and prose were newly directed towards film’s relationship to both drama and prose, as film sought to establish itself as an art. Concerns and uncertainties regarding adaptation practices also continued nineteenth-century dynamics, with one major contrast: literary writers were intrigued by the potential that the new medium of film (by contrast to the ancient medium of the stage) held for developing their writing. Authors addressed in previous chapters such as Frances Hodgson Burnett and Marie Corelli are joined by other popular writers, including H.G. Wells, Arthur Conan Doyle, Thomas Hardy, P.G. Wodehouse, and George Bernard Shaw, to consider their experiences of early film adaptation. This chapter furthermore investigates the role of ‘picture-playwrights’ in the film industry, particularly with regard to medium-specific advice given by newly created screenwriting manuals. It treats film and writing more generally, locating intriguing trajectories between the profession of the dramatist in the nineteenth century and the role of the emerging film writer in the twentieth.
[O]ur rights are an asset which is rising in value, no one knows quite how much. English cinema films are in their infancy, but promise well, and it is there that our hopes lie.
—A. C. Doyle in September 1913 (qtd. in Lycett 2008, 341)
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Notes
- 1.
Despite the British film industry correctly predicting a growth of film audiences during the war years, it failed to realise the impact that the war would have and the monopoly that the America industry would create, a failure that was evident through Britain’s increased blind and block bookings of American films. Bill Baillieu and John Goodchild chart the economic and commercial history of the British film industry in the context of American involvement and competition, considering production and regulation and exhibition practices. Their first two chapters focus on 1895-“Talkies” (2002, 1–26). Jon Burrows (2017) focuses specifically on the commercial cinema boom in the period of 1909–1914. Ernest Betts points out that the American industry actively pursued a conquest of the British industry and considers that American films were “in every way superior” to British ones, partly due to Britain’s comparative lack of industry organisation (1973, 81–2). Robert Murphy documents that in 1926, 37 British films were competing with over 500 American imports as well as the widespread opinion that America had “exploited wartime disruptions to establish an unfair advantage” (1986, 47). Tom Ryall argues that British cinema also influenced the American industry, for example through adaptations of British literature (2001, 107–24).
- 2.
His novels The Time Machine (1895), The War of the Worlds (1898), and The First Men in the Moon (1901) are regarded as pioneering works of science fiction.
- 3.
Hermann Hecht (1993) charts technological developments from the sixteenth-century to 1896, including those feeding into early film. Stephen Herbert’s collection of nineteenth-century articles (2000) illustrates the popularity and variety of “‘time-based’ visual media” in the period’s entertainment industry, advocating for these to be viewed as “self-contained media,” rather than merely as “a step toward cinema.” Simon Popple and Vanessa Toulmin’s edited essay collection (2001) provides a historical and theoretical framework for the intermedial culture of visual imagery from the nineteenth century to the turn of the twentieth.
- 4.
Further critics treating the early years of film are, for example: A. Nicholas Vardac (1968) traces the theatrical origins of early film; Thomas Elsaesser and Adam Barker (1990) provide a historical and theoretical trajectory in their edited collection; Rachael Low (1948a/b, 1950) focuses on British film history from 1896–1918 (Volume 1–3); Charles Musser (1994) treats the early origin of film in America to 1907, which Eileen Bowser (1994) continues until 1915.
- 5.
Méliès, a former magician and caricaturist, is often credited with bringing aesthetics to film by exploiting the “magical” properties of the camera through his “pictorial fantasy” (Vardac 1968, 174–9).
- 6.
Shown in London on 20 February 1896, which Baillieu and Goodchild date as the “birth of the commercial cinema in Britain” (2002, 1).
- 7.
The film was not made. Laura Marcus discusses this and the connection between Paul and Wells further (2007, 48–52).
- 8.
In his study on Shaw, Fintan O’Toole discusses Shaw’s evolved understanding of mass media and its uses for global reach further, whilst also arguing for Shaw’s restoration to contemporary discourses ‘as a figure who has something of great importance to give to the twenty-first century’ (2017, 4–5).
- 9.
Low charts the rise of the industry around 1910, attempting to verify the numbers of film theatres, production companies, film releases, financial costs, and audience numbers (1948b, 13–57).
- 10.
Burnett wrote: “We have seen battles with thousands of soldiers in them & precessions & functions of great cities with apparently hundreds of thousands of people—we have seen heroines of lays galloping over miles & miles of veldt in South Africa, & lions prowling about in jungles—and the arena filled with thousands & thousands of maddened leaping struggling Pompeiians on the day of the eruption which destroyed them” (qtd. in Gerzina 2004, 173; punctuation in original).
- 11.
Many of these specialised film magazines can be read in the Media History Project’s digital library.
- 12.
European theorists began to hail film as an art in the early 1910s: see, for example, Ricciotto Canudo (1911). Yet even so, they initially saw film as an extension of theatre. As film developed, it was increasingly recognised as a separate form, championed further by European theorists and filmmakers (see Chap. 5). Ian Aitken (2001) discusses early European film theories and movements from 1900.
- 13.
The assembly also included Squire Bancroft, George Alexander, John Hare, Johnston Forbes-Robertson, and C.M. Lowne, the latter two also starring in the adaptation. The only woman present, remaining silent throughout, is stage actress Irene Vanbrugh, who portrayed Peg Woffington in the film, but also instigated the idea of the prologue (Brown 1986, 143). The film in its entirety can be viewed for free via the BFI Player.
- 14.
His attitude here is surprising, considering the rejection of large financial offers for the silent film rights, and the aesthetic interest he had in latter adaptations of his own work (see Chap. 6). In 1925, Shaw remarked: “you cannot combine the pursuit of money with the pursuit of art” (1925, 56); in 1915, he commented that the theatre was a far more “exacting art than that of the picture palace,” suggesting that the enlistment of established dramatic talent would help the cinema (Metropolitan Magazine 42: 23).
- 15.
Although the surface message of the prologue highlights intermedial collaboration and exchange, Geoff Brown (1986) discusses how the production became “marked and marred by sibling rivalry,” before examining wider associations between theatre and early film.
- 16.
This is also the dynamic in Chap. 2’s discussion of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
- 17.
By October 1913, Burnett had already made several deals for her work to be filmed and was negotiating others (Thwaite 1974, 232).
- 18.
Shaw further suggested to Pinero that the Society of Authors should be involved in arrangements between authors and film companies, setting a model contract in terms of pecuniary terms and conditions. A Cinema Section and a Cinematograph Sub-Committee were established by the Society in 1914, under the presidency of Thomas Hardy (Low 3: 115–6). Chap. 6 discusses Shaw’s engagement with sound film adaptations of his work.
- 19.
Robert Lee Wolff finds that Braddon’s diaries over 35 years make no direct reference to public events or to social change, arguing that she put those into her novels (1979, 379). Considering the success of her novels in the nineteenth century, as well as the demand for their dramatisations, the lack of interest in filmic adaptations after her death in 1915 is notable. According to the Internet Movie Database, Lady Audley’s Secret was adapted only four times (in 1915, 1920, 1949, and 2000) and her own stage dramatisation of Ellen Wood’s 1861 novel East Lynne was adapted once in 1916.
- 20.
The film was made by Famous Players Lasky, directed by J. Searle Dawley, adapting the American stage play written by Lorimer Stoddard and starring Mrs. Fiske.
- 21.
Commenting on the process of adapting his work, Hardy had likened the act itself to “a piece of carpentry” (1987, 312), thus reinforcing the view of adaptation as a technical craft rather than a work of art. Keith Wilson (1995) and Rosalyn Gregory (2011) discuss Hardy’s experiences with theatre and British stage adaptations of his work. Joan Grundy (1979) explores the influence that theatre and other arts had on Hardy and his writing.
- 22.
In her 1938 autobiography, Elizabeth Jordan briefly recounts her experiences with the film business and writing. Her experience as a journalist, fiction writer, and editor was sought after by the newly established Goldwyn Company in 1917, who felt the need for a “recruit from the literary world.” Despite Jordan assuring co-founder and playwright Mary Selwyn of her lack of film experience, she was persuaded that her knowledge of writing in other media would be sufficient and that everything else would be taught. As she had heard “too many sad stories of the brisk entrances and exits of authors in the moving-picture world,” she boldly asked for $25,000 annually on a part-time basis, which was granted. She was soon installed with the “very impressive” sounding title of the “Editorial Director of the Goldwyn Company,” until the business moved from New York to California a year later. She expressed her relief at this end to her film venture, but nonetheless remained grateful for her “experiment.” Her account records her recommendations for adapting classic and modern books to film, titles which “had never been heard of by most of my new associates,” making her feel “depressed.” Even though some of these were later produced by other companies to great success, “at that time they were as alien to the picture world as I was myself” (358–67). Her account predates the widespread employment of literary authors in Hollywood, discussed in Chaps. 5 and 6.
- 23.
Madame Albanesi, also known as Effie Adelaide Rowlands, was a popular writer of novels as well as short stories for newspapers and magazine, with a writing career spanned from the 1880s until her death in the 1930s. Despite this, her work has largely been forgotten and she has not received wider critical attention.
- 24.
Other authors were similarly used within advertisements to promote films they had seen. For example, the film Smilin’ Through (1922) was marketed as having been seen by “the famous author” Arthur Conan Doyle with his comment that “We greatly enjoyed the very beautiful film. It is true to life—and to death.” (Exhibitors Trade Review May 1922).
- 25.
Béla Balázs, in 1945, was one of the first film theorists to propose an “organic connection between form and content in any art form,” (although Lessing 2005 and others had done so nearly two centuries prior), arguing that a bad film could produce a good book, but a good book could not be turned into a good film, as it had already found “the most adequate expression” for its content (1945, 259).
- 26.
Paul Goldstein and Bernt Hugenholtz (2013) provide a comparative survey of international copyright law for literary and cinematographic works in a section treating “Authorship and Ownership” (245–82), also detailing the terms of protection for literary and cinematographic works up to the present day (283–90).
- 27.
The US attended the International Copyright Union meetings as non-Union observers and Thorvalg Solberg, the first Registrar of Copyrights at the Library of Congress, provided a succinct overview of the changes and additions since the first treaty in his 1908 delegate report. Solberg, an advocate for America to join the Union, wrote subsequent articles on the matter for the Yale Law Journal, including a 1930 article addressing developments to date and the need for America to amend existing laws (Vol. 40, Art. 2: 184–214).
- 28.
Kamina does not evidence this claim. Alexander suggests that the drive for inclusion came from France (2009, 274). Reconciling the two positions, considering France’s leading position in setting out authorial rights and movements, as well as the high number of original French dramas produced for the stage, it is possible that French dramatists drove the classification.
- 29.
Alexander discusses the stages of development leading up to the Act (2009, 234–90). Similar to the formation of the 1832 Select Committee, the Government tasked a Departmental Committee (the Gorell Committee) to examine the necessary revisions to the current law and report to Winston Churchill, the President of the Board of Trade. The members within the group reflected the variety of representations with interest in the reform, including practitioners in music, art, literature, drama, and publishing (266–7).
- 30.
Her experience with stage adaptations in the twentieth century continued to be fraught. In 1908, a play based on Corelli’s Barabbas (1893) was produced in America. Corelli refused to sign the contract giving the rights or to allow alterations unless she made the changes herself, “which will greatly strengthen it.” She insisted that false rumours of her seeing the play in America, spread, “just to ‘boom’ the play,”’ be “very emphatically” contradicted. While legal details regarding the production were being checked by her agent and solicitor, pecuniary matters were paramount in a letter to her agent: “I want (of course) a lot of money.” Despite her attempts to control the dramatisation, a press cutting indicated that the theatre company had already begun rehearsing without her input; because of this “dishonesty”, she withdrew the agreement, and the play was cancelled. Corelli also denounced other unauthorised dramatic versions of her works as “robbery” and, whenever possible, took legal action, insisting that “Fraud can be exposed and should be—and will be—as long as I wield a pen” (qtd. in Ransom 1999, 152–3; emphasis in original).
- 31.
Some films were indirectly influenced by Corelli’s books, including Santana/Satan or the Drama of Humanity (1912/3), an Italian production re-released in America, and Leaves from Satan’s Book (1921), a Danish production, listed by John T. Soister et al. (2012, 537).
- 32.
Henry Dacre’s stage adaptation had premiered in London in July 1897. According to the records of the Lord Chamberlain’s office, a licence was not applied for until September 1897 (Bolton 2000, 117–8).
- 33.
A prominent British screenwriter during the silent era, Engholm had adapted, among other notable works, East Lynne to film in 1913 (based on Mrs. Henry Wood’s novel, rather than Braddon’s stage adaptation) and Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet in 1914.
- 34.
Her early approval of film can be further seen in her own attempt at an original screenplay, sent to her friend Hubert von Herkomer around 1913, though nothing became of it (Scott 1955, 160–1).
- 35.
According to the records, this play had premiered in London in October 1898 and toured for 12 years. Co-written by Brian Daly, it combined Corelli’s novel with George Augustus Sala’s novel, Margaret Foster (Bolton 2000, 118). T.F. Coates and Warren Bell report that Somerset had informed Corelli of his adaptation, telling her, somewhat patronisingly, that he had combined the two works “to strengthen both” (1903, 191).
- 36.
The Grosvenor Theatre Syndicate had been dissolved in 1902 and Russell claimed to have bought all the shares, although Corelli’s solicitor saw no official evidence to support this, according to Ransom.
- 37.
Doyle persisted with dramatic endeavours and boasted of dramatising “The Speckled Band” (1910) within a week and staging it shortly thereafter (2012, 101). He involved himself as stage manager in productions of his own adapted plays and wrote of the advantage afforded by this position to break with “dramatic conventionalities” in a particular staging of a scene in his 1909 play Fires of Fate, based on his novel The Tragedy of the Korosko (1898), asserting: “such moments to a dramatist give a thrill of personal satisfaction such as the most successful novelist never can feel” (2012, 234).
- 38.
Entitled “An Intimate Study of Sherlock Holmes” it can be found in Collected Sherlock Holmes Story Editions.
- 39.
Although barely considered a film at 35 seconds, Haydock argues that the idea most likely stemmed from the proximity of the play’s staging and success, noting that the wardrobe of the film matched that of the play (1978, 2).
- 40.
Haydock writes that the film was reportedly “a too-literal adaptation from stage to screen” (1978, 45). The fact that the film is advertised as a “play” and “in 7 acts” would support this view (Fig. 4.4). Although the film had been considered lost, it was rediscovered at the Cinémathèque Française in 2014 (see Sherlock Holmes: 100-Year-Lost-Film). Chap. 6 discusses film adaptations that remained too constricted by prior stage adaptations.
- 41.
On its revival in Chicago in 1913, the play was retitled A Thief for a Night, starring John Barrymore (McCrum 2004, 97).
- 42.
Showing a strong negotiating position for the work, the contract had a rather unusual provision that the adaptation had to be released by 1 July 1915 or $500 in penalties and another $500 would have to be paid to the authors every six months until the film was released. Despite this contract, legal confusion and contests continued: for a new film adaptation in 1923, Stapleton received $5000 for the rights to the play and its source novel from Famous Players Lasky, with the rights remaining with the buyer, even when the copyright was renewed. Yet in 1925, Wodehouse and Stapleton jointly sold the rights to the play, excepting the film rights, for $750 to the Kane and Thatcher Holding Corporation (Taves 2006, 9–12).
- 43.
Kristen Thompson (2006) suggests that, rather than looking at previous dramatic versions, Griffith worked directly with the novel. However, Griffith was not credited with writing the adaptation, only with directing and producing it. The film was not well received critically or commercially, with Leanne Waters (2021) suggesting that this was possibly due to aspects of comedy and Christianity being limited in contrast to earlier stage adaptations.
- 44.
Doyle, after struggles to find a publisher, originally received £25 when his first Sherlock novel sold to Ward, Lock & Co. (Lycett 2008, 341). The Franco-British film company, a subsidiary to the Éclair Company who had already produced a Holmes film in 1911 prior to the deal, subsequently produced eight films in 1912.
- 45.
These films were significant in being the first to stay faithful to the original stories. In England, little “screen-originality” for Sherlock could be found afterward, as the Doyle Estate exercised tight control over adaptations, by contrast to those made in other countries: for example, the American Universal film adaptations of the 1940s (Haydock 1978, 28).
- 46.
The Stoll Sherlock Series ran from 1921–3, producing a total of 47 films. The only criticism that Doyle made within his autobiography regarding those adaptations was a historical and cultural one: that they introduced “telephones, motor cars and other luxuries of which the Victorian Holmes never dreamed” (Doyle 2012, 106). Nathalie Morris (2007) discusses the Sherlock Series in view of Stoll’s wider ambitions to establish themselves internationally.
- 47.
Doyle furthermore sold film rights for non-Sherlock related works, starting with a 1913 adaptation of Rodney Stone (1896), entitled The House of Temperley, and followed by others. Haydock (1978) surveys all screen appearances by Holmes and Watson until the late 1970s, in addition to other Doyle works filmed; Alan Barnes (2011) continually updates an extensive filmography of Holmes; Scott Nollen (1996) provides a comparative study of all works by Doyle adapted to film.
- 48.
In a later letter to his publisher, Hardy confesses that his “chief thought was whether it would affect the book-sales” (1980, 142–3).
- 49.
In this letter, Hardy leaves the financial remuneration to his publisher, but suggests that it would be “desirable” that the license should not run longer than five years. Other correspondence indicates that he received “ten per cent on the gross turnover” (1980, 142–3).
- 50.
- 51.
To fuse matters between stage and film even more, the American stage actress Minnie Maddern Fiske made her first screen appearance in the part of Tess, who she had previously portrayed on stage. The American stage rights were sold to representatives of the actress, with Hardy also giving them his own prior adaptation; yet it was considered that “it crowded too many incidents on the stage,” so Fiske hired Stoddard to write another adaptation, which he reportedly completed in five days (Kozloff 1985, 37). Fiske portrayed another one of her famous stage parts, Becky Sharp, in the 1915 adaptation of Vanity Fair, her next and last film role.
- 52.
Steven Maras traces the screenplay from an “image-orientated entity” to a “word-based one” and highlights the importance of changes in the terminology for critical discourse (2009, 80–6).
- 53.
Thomas Harper Ince (1880–1924), an American director, producer, and ultimately, screenwriter, is often credited for the innovation of the screenplay as a literary form guiding a film’s production, for example: by Boon (2008, 3–4).
- 54.
These were precursors to the original and still existing Screen Writers Guild, established in 1920. Miranda Banks (2015) provides a history of the Guild.
- 55.
Screenwriting manuals continue to be popular to the present day, seen for example, in the enduring popularity of screenwriting manuals by Syd Field (2005) (first published in 1979) and Robert McKee (first published in 1997), continuing through many subsequent editions, and in books about experiences in screenwriting, such as those by William Goldman in 1983 and 2000.
- 56.
Adaptations of verses and songs have not received much critical attention, but would offer further insights, especially into the screenplay as intertext.
- 57.
In America, the case of Ben-Hur’s unlawful adaptation lasted from 1907–11, and was instrumental in deterring unsolicited adaptation and establishing tightened legal regulations when the silent film was seen to infringe on the copyright of the published novel. Price further credits the ruling of the Supreme Court on the case with the categorisation of the “adapted screenplay” (2013, 52–4).
- 58.
The “scenario fever” period is variably placed by critics both before and after the American copyright ruling of 1912 (Maras 2009, 137–41).
- 59.
He finishes his manual with these words: “It is the mission of the picture-play to teach by showing the light and not the darkness, the beautiful and not the repulsive, the sublime and not the abyss. Let this be your motto from a high moral principle and sense of responsibility to the millions of men, women and children throughout the world who will profit from your art” (1912, 92). The film industry worked hard to protect itself against allegations of immorality and vice by attempting to regulate itself through self-censorship, rather than state led legal censorship: see Low (1948a, 84–90; 1950, 126–42), Jeffrey Richards (1984, 89–154) and Annette Kuhn (1988) for early British film censorship and Eileen Bowser (1994, 37–52) for American film censorship.
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Nissen, A. (2024). Adaptation, Ownership and the Emergence of Narrative Film. In: Authors and Adaptation. Palgrave Studies in Adaptation and Visual Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-46822-3_4
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