Literary Writers and Early Sound Film: Experimental Writing

This chapter studies the film industry’s re-evaluations of literary writers with the introduction of synchronised sound, together with the effect of sound on writing for film and adaptation during the late 1920s and 1930s. These simultaneously opened new possibilities for film writing and created new tensions between writers and the industry, with wider impact on filmmaking practices and theoretical discourses of media relations. As prior theories of film medium specificity were no longer valid or valued, film was temporarily freed from the aesthetic limitations that had been placed upon it by silent film practitioners and theorists. These changes produced attempts at cross-media fertilisation, as literary authors experimented with writing across media boundaries, with variable results. Writers who had previously shown little to no interest in writing for film now immersed themselves in film writing. Case studies centre on the experimental hybrid-novel film writing by H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw’s play-to-screenplay adaptation of Pygmalion (1912/1938). The chapter argues that writing for film had a progressive influence on literary writers, shaping and evolving them and their writing.