Rethinking Authorship: Jack London and the Motion Picture Industry

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In the middle of June 1913, a person in New York City who wanted to see a moving picture "installation" or "exhibit," as they were often called, would have had several choices: the eight-reel Italian spectacle Quo Vadis at the Astor Theatre, Thomas Ince's five-reel The Battle of Gettysburg at the Grand Opera House, Captain Scott's South Pole pictures at the Lyric, or Jack London's Adventures in the South Sea Islands at the Criterion, a Broadway playhouse. ¹ A person who chose the Criterion for one of its twice daily screenings of the London film would have seen, as the title promises, exotic views of the South Sea Islands while listening to Martin Johnson, who accompanied London on his journey and was credited with making the film, provide a lecture describing the images. Press accounts of the day indicate that seeing the film would have been an exciting, worthwhile experience, despite the fact that London, whose name was a valuable commodity by 1913, appears to have played no significant part in the final product. One advertisement's detailed synopsis of the film, for example, implies London's on-screen presence only once; moreover, Johnson appears to have taken most of his footage after London and his wife, Charmian London, had returned home. ² Although the public's desire to see London at work, both as author and American adventurer, had intensified over the course of the early 1900s, his absence from the film was surprisingly not an issue in the press coverage, which failed to mention it at all.

In fact, reporters seemed most impressed by the film's realism and its uncanny verification of the unfamiliar rituals of the "noncivilized" world. On 16 June 1913, the Morning Telegraph reported that viewers would see "scenes from Polynesia, Melanesia, the Solomon Islands, New Guinea, New Zealand, Borneo, Sulu, Sumatra and Java," many of them "handsomely colored." Readers were also promised that they would be entertained by Mr. Johnson's "highly amusing" and "instructive" lecture. ³ Although London was not a central figure in the film, he was an essential, though invisible, attraction nonetheless. ⁴ As Johnson writes in the preface to his Through the South Seas with Jack London (yet another instance of the famous author's name recycled as a commodity), "The Snark alone was enough to compel attention, but the Snark sailed by Jack London, a writer of world-wide celebrity, was irresistible." ⁵ London is cast here into multiple roles, including, however erroneously, movie star and filmmaker.

Despite Johnson's prominent role at the screenings and London's apparent absence—or at least his inconspicuous presence—the Evening World's coverage on 16 June 1913 credits London entirely for the production: "Jack London did the verifying last night when his wonderful moving pictures of life in the South Sea Islands . . . were shown at the Criterion Theatre and explained by Martin Johnson." ⁶ Although London appears to have had nothing to do with making the film beyond the important fact that he was responsible for the existence of the Snark and its highly publicized voyage, his name was both easily identifiable and highly marketable. He is granted authorship by association here, a connection made because the London name and image possessed a cultural value that successfully (or so it seemed at the time) translated into the cinematic arena. Jack London had become a one-man cultural industry.

London's first important film venture, in which he is neither star, director, nor author, provides a window onto the interrelated notions of authorship, stardom, commercial value, publicity, and representation that were being redefined during the early 1900s in response to the technology and industry of the moving image. ⁷ Jack London's transition from literary to cinematic production can be traced by examining his fascination with the cinema's potential to distribute images, including his own. ⁸ London was concerned with the value of his...