The first thing you do when you’re searching for an image of Leigh Brackett is eliminate the book covers, of course. She was a pioneer in mid-century science fiction, a contributor to what was probably the first all-female sci-fi fanzine. She was called the Queen of Space Opera. I must confess I’ve never read any of her books—the Burroughs-influenced stuff she wrote isn’t really my bag. I do, on the other hand, find it interesting that she stopped writing science fiction with aliens in our solar system once the Mariner missions proved there was no life on Mars, at least of the sort she was writing about.
Her first published novel, on the other hand, was No Good From a Corpse. It’s not science fiction; it’s apparently a Chandler-style detective novel. And in fact Howard Hawks read it and wanted “this guy Brackett” to adapt Chandler’s The Big Sleep for the screen. Brackett took the job, passing a novella she was working on to Ray Bradbury (who’d been best man at her wedding) to finish so she could. She took a break from screenwriting for a while after that, but she wrote the scripts for four John Wayne classics, including El Dorado, one of my own personal favourites. Also Altman’s The Long Goodbye.
She is only credited as a screenwriter on one science fiction movie, but it’s a doozy. She didn’t write the final version, of course, and there’s a great deal of controversy about how much she did contribute. Which I can’t resolve, because the only two places where you can legally access copies of her draft of the screenplay are at Eastern New Mexico University, where it cannot be copied or checked out, and Lucasarts. But it’s worth noting that she has a posthumous credit on The Lego Movie. As the creator of Lando Calrissian.
George Lucas says he sent her a story outline of The Empire Strikes Back. She produced a script before dying of cancer on March 18, 1978. How much or how little of her version made it to the screen depends on whom you ask. I’m certainly not able to say myself, though I’ll certainly say that Lucas doesn’t have a credit on the film, which Brackett does. Obviously, the finished script was written by Lawrence Kasdan; that’s not a matter of dispute. But there are claims that Lucas did a few drafts himself, that he rejected Brackett’s draft entirely, that she actually created most of the major story beats—I don’t know, and I can’t get to either of the locations that would let me resolve it.
Whether she shaped Empire Strikes Back or not would only put the capper on her legacy, however. The Big Sleep itself ought to be enough to make more people remember her. She gets overshadowed by Faulkner there, of course. But if Faulkner had been capable of writing that script, Hawks wouldn’t have called Brackett in to begin with. And there’s Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Long Goodbye. Even if you don’t believe Leigh Brackett wrote a single word that ended up in the finished movie of The Empire Strikes Back, she still left an impressive legacy.
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