Adaptation, Ownership and the Emergence of Narrative Film

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.