Leigh Brackett: Co-screenwriter, “The Empire Strikes Back”
In honor of Star Wars day — “May the fourth be with you!” — a terrific feature on screenwriter Leigh Brackett who, along with Lawrence Kasdan, is a credited writer of Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, in my view the very best of the SW movies. Some excerpts:
Leigh Brackett wrote the first script draft of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back, and her contributions helped make the saga epic.
But before Brackett had a major hand in creating the best Star Wars movie, she was a science fiction novelist in the 1940s, writing a slew of space adventure novels with titles like The Starmen and Alpha Centauri or Die!. People called her the Queen of Space Opera — and it was not always a compliment.
At that time, space opera (like Star Wars) was looked down upon as less worthy of appreciation than other types of pulp fiction, including other types of science fiction. Brackett also wrote a lot of pulp crime fiction, and had co-written the screenplay for The Big Sleep with William Faulkner. But she chose to spend a lot of her time writing these despised novels. As her friend Michael Moorcock explains in an essay:
Like so many of her heroes, Leigh preferred the outlaw life. She always said her first love was science fantasy. She said it defiantly, when it paid less than other pulp fiction. When it paid less, indeed, than other kinds of science fiction. If she had chosen, in her fiction, to hang out with the scum of the L.A. streets instead of the dregs of the spacelanes, she could have made a lot more money… Her keen sense of freedom made her, like many other fine writers of her generation, choose the more precarious life of writing science fantasy…. There was a time when the kind of science fantasy Brackett made her own was looked down upon as a kind of bastard progeny of science fiction (which was about scientific speculation) and fantasy (which was about magic).
According to John Baxter’s book Mythmaker (quoted here), a friend handed Lucas a copy of one of Brackett’s books, and told Lucas: “Here is someone who did the Cantina scene better than you did.” Baxter describes the phone conversation between Lucas and Brackett thusly:
Lucas: Have you ever written for the movies?
Brackett: Yes, I have. Rio Bravo, El Dorado, The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye…
[pause]
Lucas: Are you that Leigh Brackett?
Brackett: Yes. Isn’t that why you called me in?
Lucas: No, I called you in because you were a pulp science fiction writer!
After that, Lucas started out by having a week-long story conference with Brackett, according to The Secret History of Star Wars. During this time, he hashed out a lot of the story points that wound up in the final film, including the character of Yoda — and the notion that Luke has a twin sister, which isn’t brought up until Return of the Jedi. After a Thanksgiving break, they resumed the story conference, which led to a 55-page transcript in which a lot of stuff was hashed out, according to J.W. Rinzler’s The Making of The Empire Strikes Back.
If you are a Star Wars fan, this is a must-read.
For more of the article, go here.
HT to Shaula Evans for sourcing this story.