Silent Wells

Sylvia Hardy argues that Wells is a kind of paradigm of literary involvement in cinema's first decades because he simultaneously reflected and contributed to how film made use of and saw itself as relating to fiction. Demographic, cultural and class parallels between the new mass audiences for both cinema and the kind of fiction that Wells practised are manifold. In his 1929 introduction to KWWAK, he noted with satisfaction the pressure that cinema put on the traditional bastions of art, both challenging their social exclusiveness and raising alternative aesthetic possibilities:

The early industry resorted to literature to stake its own claims for aesthetic respectability and prestige, mostly through adaptations rather than commissioning original scripts. However, according to Wells, the indiscriminate appetite for scenarios didn't necessarily either enhance the texts it devoured or progress its own technical evolution:

Although the screening of Wellsian themes and motifs (if not whole narratives as such) goes back as far as Méliès, and invisible men were rife in the late 1900s, it is unlikely that they were legally sourced, copyright law lagging behind the new medium. Sometimes Wellsian material was mixed in with others, as in Walter Booth's The Airship Destroyer (1909), publicised as ‘War In The Air! Possibilities Of The Future! An actual motion picture prediction of the ideas of Rudyard Kipling, H. G. Wells and Jules Verne.’