Jack London is a 1943 biographical feature film about Jack London!
It’s also available for download via Archive.org: |AVI|MP4|OGV|
This movie got me thinking. Is it the only biopic of an Science Fiction author?
So I looked around and found a list of biographical films on Wikipedia. And while I had remembered there had been movies featuring Mary Shelley, like Gothic – that isn’t a biopics per se.
Based on the Wikipedia list, it appears that Edgar Allan Poe has been a character in some quasi-biographical films, notably the recent John Cusak movie, The Raven (which has its roots in earlier dramatized biographical snippets like The Raven (1915)). The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) is a true biographical film, but it’d be hard to argue that twain wrote Science Fiction (though the case for Fantasy is pretty easy). Robert E. Howard got a biopic, in a solid little movie called The Whole Wide World (1996) but it’s just a snippet of Howard’s life.
I don’t think there have been any other Science Fiction writers who’ve had an actual biographical film made about him or her. Maybe writer’s lives are too sedentary for good drama?
Posted by Jesse Willis