Literary adaptation
Works of literature have been adapted for film from the dawn of the industry. Some of the earliest examples come from the work of Georges Méliès, who pioneered many film techniques. In 1899, he released two adaptations — "Cinderella" based on the Brothers Grimm story of the same name and "King John", the first known film to be based on the works of Shakespeare. The 1900 film "Sherlock Holmes Baffled", directed by Arthur Marvin featured Arthur Conan Doyle's detective character Sherlock Holmes intruding upon a pseudo-supernatural burglary. The film, considered the first detective movie, ran for only 30 seconds and was originally intended to be shown in hand-cranked Mutoscope machines.
Sherlock Holmes (1939 film series)
The two 20th Century Fox films—"The Hound of the Baskervilles" and "The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes"—had survived complete and in good condition, but those in the Universal series suffered badly over the years, as they passed through the hands of different copyright owners. In 1993 the UCLA Film and Television Archive started a restoration project on the series after the unstable cellulose nitrate film was found to be suffering from deterioration. Restoration on the first six films—"The Woman in Green", "The Pearl of Death", "Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon", "The Scarlet Claw", "Terror by Night" and "The Spider Woman"—took four years from 1993; the costs for the restoration were met by UCLA and Hugh Hefner, who was a fan of the Rathbone-Holmes series. From 1998 Warner Bros. matched Hefner's funding and the remaining six films—"Dressed to Kill", "Pursuit to Algiers", "Sherlock Holmes Faces Death", "The House of Fear", "Sherlock Holmes and the Voice of Terror" and "Sherlock Holmes in Washington"—were then restored, a process that was completed in 2001.