Leigh Brackett

      Ed here: I grew up on Leigh Brackett novels and stories. Since she worked in so many genres  there was always plenty to read. Writers from Michael Connelly, James Sallis and Michael Moorcock have all praised her work. Here are excerpts from an extraordinary profile of Brackett and her husband the science fiction writer Edmond Hamilton. This is a great piece.

Leigh Brackett:
Much More Than the Queen of Space Opera!

by Bertil Falk

part 1 of 2

http://www.bewilderingstories.com/issue250/brackett1.html

I had come to interview Edmond Hamilton and slept one night in Leigh Brackett’s study, a small house besides the main building. After interviewing Ed, I also took the opportunity to interview Leigh Brackett, then a writer I had not read, except for a short Mercury story published in Swedish in 1941, though I had seen The Big Sleep. So I asked her about that period of her life.

“I was young and curious and was at the studio all the time during the shooting. One day Humphrey Bogart came over to me with a manuscript and asked if I had written the cues. I said no and he said, ‘They cannot be said’. You see, William Faulkner wrote wonderful Faulkner dialogues, but they were not written to be uttered. Faulkner went down in history as the screenwriter whose every single line was rewritten in Hollywood.”

“I was young and curious and was at the studio all the time during the shooting. One day Humphrey Bogart came over to me with a manuscript and asked if I had written the cues. I said no and he said, ‘They cannot be said’. You see, William Faulkner wrote wonderful Faulkner dialogues, but they were not written to be uttered. Faulkner went down in history as the screenwriter whose every single line was rewritten in Hollywood.”

                                          

Later on, I got to know that Howard Hawks himself sat by ringside during the shooting and rewrote Faulkner’s lines more or less like the way a student’s essay is critiqued. Raymond Chandler visited the studio and was very pleased with the job Leigh Brackett had done. But a craft-union strike hit the movie business in the summer of 1946. No more script-writing jobs were available. Leigh Brackett went back to writing her space opera stories. And that is the way it was to be. She took on many assignments of different kinds over the years, but when done, she always returned to her space opera adventures.

Edmond Hamilton admired the ease with which his wife moved, in his own words:

“from one kind of fiction to a completely different kind. In eighteen months, in 1956-57, she wrote not onlyThe Long Tomorrow but also two novels of crime and suspense, The Tiger Among Us, which became an Alan Ladd movie, and An Eye for an Eye, which formed the pilot for the “Markham” series on television. At the end of that period, she returned to Hollywood and to her old producer Howard Hawks, to write Rio Bravo, the first of a series of John Wayne action epics she wrote.”