Literary Writers and Filmmaking Practices in Silent Cinema

This chapter investigates literary writers’ relationships with film in the 1920s prior to the arrival of synchronised sound and it investigates how the film industry displayed an ambivalent attitude towards popular writers, first courting, and then discarding them. Highlighting the expectations versus the realities that literary authors faced writing for film and the antagonism towards them from the industry, it discusses American and British film industries’ advertisements to promote their writers’ programmes, along with the variable experiences of writers’ engagements, including discourses on writing for film by authors such as Elinor Glyn and Somerset Maugham. The complex relationship between authors and film in this period is further examined via the case study of J.M. Barrie and his proposed screenplay for the 1924 film adaptation of Peter Pan, which challenges the prevalent notion that literary writers were clinging to words without regard for film conventions and technologies. This chapter also traces how the rise of medium specificity in film theory resulted in a devaluation of the written word within film, limiting the contribution that literary writers wanted to make to film as an art form, thereby creating a more favourable position for the conventional industry film writer.