Little cinemas: Eugene O’Neill as screenwriter

In November of 1926, Eugene O’Neill (1888–1953) wrote photoplays of two of his most successful and ambitious dramas of the 1920s, The Hairy Ape (1922) and Desire under the Elms (1924). O’Neill was motivated in part by the journalist and screenwriter Ralph Block’s promotion of the ‘little cinema’ movement, the prestige model of authorship that accompanied it as well as the movement’s actual momentum in New York in the late 1920s. Thus, optimism about the growth of an increasingly sophisticated audience as well as accounts of the innovative possibilities for film form promoted by the likes of Block and Victor O. Freeburg seem to have encouraged O’Neill to imagine a potential cinema in harmony with his own commitments to experimentalism and aesthetic autonomy. Although neither photoplay was ever produced, both bear the traces of O’Neill’s attentiveness to contemporary, intermedial theories of film and drama as well as the playwright’s own history of film viewing.