Written Interview: Leigh Brackett & Edmond Hamilton
This is a great find: A 1976 interview in Tangent magazine with screenwriter Leigh Brackett and science fiction novelist Edmond Hamilton. You can check the links to see their backgrounds as writers, but cutting to the chase, Brackett wrote the first draft of Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back, earning a co-writing credit. Also note: Brackett and Hamilton were married. Some interview excerpts:
TANGENT: What led you into writing science fiction? What were the reasons?
HAMILTON: Economic reasons were never one of them because it was one of the poorest ways to make a living. Some people, myself included, are born with a feeling about these things. In my case I couldn’t even read. This was on a farm in Ohio back in 1908 when I was four years old. I got hold of some magazine that contained an article by H. G. Wells called “The Things That Live on Mars.” It was, as I see it now, a follow-up to his very successful The War of the Worlds. And it had these pictures of tall, slender trees; strange looking Martians moving about. I looked at that magazine until it wore out. I wasn’t yet able to read it, to read the article, but those pictures! I sat and wondered if Mars was a long way off and if it was a very strange place. This feeling I say; I think people have a bent toward this. That is to say, I had a very large family and I don’t think any of them read anything but maybe my first story. They just had no interest in science fiction. They were all great readers, but not science fiction.
TANGENT: Back in those days it was considered second-class literature, wasn’t it?
HAMILTON: Very much.
TANGENT: What changes have taken place in the writing since those early days?
HAMILTON: It has of course changed a great deal. I’m thankful that I got into it at a very early day because frankly the first story I wrote I could never sell today. It wouldn’t be accepted; it would be crude. In those days science fiction was in very little magazines, they were very anxious for printable material, therefore a lot of us―Jack Williamson and I were talking about this last night―succeeded in breaking into print and getting a little money for it, very little, while we learned to write. Nowadays the youngsters have a much harder time. They’ve got to write really good from the very first story. Being a product of the older days I can’t help feeling affection for those old magazines. I prefer the old stories, but that doesn’t change the fact that the field has advanced in literary quality, technique, and everything. We chaps, most of us who started in the old days, could never make it now, with what we did then.
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TANGENT: In The Big Sleep, Leigh, there’s always a question Bogart fans seem to ask: Whatever happened to the chauffeur? He just dropped out about halfway through.
BRACKETT: The whole thing is confusing; the novel is confusing. I was down at the set one day and Bogart asked me who killed Owen Taylor, the chauffeur, and I said I didn’t know, and they asked Bogart and he didn’t know, and Hawks said let’s send Chandler a wire and find out, and his answer came back, “I don’t know.” It’s a very confusing plot and one of my favorite novels because the forward momentum is so tremendous and the characters are so interesting that you really don’t care.
HAMILTON: The Big Sleep appeared in the summer of 1946. I was assiduously playing court to this young lady, and so I was living with my sister in Arcadia and I had to go all the way downtown — -not having a car at that time―to see that. Well, I got in on the middle of that damn picture, and let me tell you…it’s confusing enough when you get in on the beginning of that picture. But the picture improves; by that I mean that when you overcome all the mind boggling difficulties with plot and so on — I liked it better than I ever used to. It really had a beautiful tempo.
TANGENT: What was it like working with William Faulkner? I’ve heard a lot about his peculiarities.
BRACKETT: Well, he did used to disappear in the middle of a script from time to time. It didn’t bother me because in any real sense we didn’t work together. This was my first big job; I had had one job at Republic a month or so before doing a thing called The Vampire’s Ghost, and I was three weeks on the script with another writer, and they shot the film in ten days and that was two days over schedule (laughing). They fired the cameraman after the second day because he was taking too much time. But uh, it was not the greatest film ever made.
So then this thing was dropped into my lap because Howard had read the book and liked the dialogue and put me under contract, and I’m making this thing with Humphrey Bogart, who, you know, is my favorite actor, and William Faulkner’s already on the script. I walk in, you know, feeling about this big and I think how in the world am I going to work with Faulkner. Well, there was no problem. He greeted me courteously. He put the book down and said, “We will do alternate sections. You will do these chapters and I will do these chapters,” and so on. But that’s the way he wanted it done. He turned around and walked into his office and I never saw him again, except to say good morning. He lived behind a wall about eight feet thick. I think you could have worked with that man for ten years and never known him. He had a few close friends… He did, he disappeared occasionally.
HAMILTON: There was one story about the time they pulled him out of a gutter in Paris.
BRACKETT: Yeah. He was doing Land of the Pharaohs in Paris and went on one of these tremendous benders, and he was just a mess. He’d been rolled, beaten up, all his money, his passport, was gone. He was so upset about the whole thing he sat down for weeks and worked like a demon at the typewriter. But uh, he had a problem. But his secretary loved him. See, he was actually on loan from the studio. Now I worked for Hawks, I didn’t have to check myself in and out through the front gate. Not now, but in those days a writer came in at 9:30 and left at 5:30 and they checked you in and out and don’t take too long for lunch. But anyway, I was over in the Hawks bungalow, I came in the side gate, but Faulkner had to come in the other gate and on these days when he’d be absent his secretary would call and say, “Mr. Faulkner’s just checked in,” and everybody covered for him. He was a charming gentleman, it was just that you never got close to him.
For more of the interview, go here.