The Screenwriter Strikes Back: Leigh Brackett in Hollywood | Los Angeles Review of Books (2025)

IN 1978, SHORTLY before her death from cancer at 62, screenwriter Leigh Brackett submitted her final screenplay: a draft for the film that was then titled “Star Wars Sequel” and would eventually become The Empire Strikes Back (1980). This year, as the film celebrates its 45th anniversary, the consensus holds that Empire remains the best of the still-burgeoning franchise and one of the greatest sequels of all time. Yet few of even the most fervent Star Wars fans are aware that its original screenplay was written by a woman—a seasoned Hollywood screenwriter and pioneering SF author whose 1955 novel The Long Tomorrow earned her distinction as the first woman short-listed for the prestigious Hugo Award. While scholars have acknowledged Brackett’s significance in that field—as Bridgitte Barclay notes, “her critiques of capitalist-extractive-militaristic science help establish later feminist science and environmental narratives”—Brackett’s traces in film studies are still relegated mostly to cursory mentions in weighty tomes on better-known male collaborators like Howard Hawks and Robert Altman.

It’s an old story. Brackett’s almost complete absence from film history constitutes the kind of omission that is hardly exceptional in Hollywood historiography. Even as the post-#MeToo era has seen increased attention paid to women directors, the contributions of women screenwriters continue to be overlooked, to say nothing of women editors (paging Marcia Lucas and Verna Fields!). In the vast universe of Star Wars discourse, Brackett’s work on the franchise’s second installment continues to be elided, with rare exceptions like a recent episode of the women-hosted Skytalkers podcast and Rebecca Harrison’s 2020 BFI Film Classics volume, which finds Brackett’s first draft “foundational to the shooting script’s structure and character development.”

For her efforts, Brackett received from Lucasfilm a onetime fee of $50,000 (despite the fact that it was the norm for writers with her experience to negotiate points). Alongside the forfeited profits, Brackett’s death ensured that she also lost any say in how her script would be revised or remembered. In the intervening years, Lucas crafted a narrative that “her script went in a completely different direction” and insisted that virtually nothing she had written survived his own and co-credited screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan’s rewriting.

But Brackett’s own papers tell a different story. Recently, I had the chance to visit her archive at Eastern New Mexico University’s Jack Williamson Special Collections Library, where I found early drafts and revealing notes written by Brackett that make it clear she deserves significantly more credit for her two final screenplays, the deconstructionist detective film The Long Goodbye (1973) and the galactically successful The Empire Strikes Back, ironically the movie for which she is least known.

These discoveries confirm Brackett’s status as a primary author of both films. They also reveal what Brackett accomplished over three decades in Hollywood. Not only did she claim her seat at the table; she also had a substantial hand in transforming three perennially popular genres of Hollywood filmmaking, all of which are habitually gendered masculine: the detective film, the Western, and the sci-fi/fantasy action-adventure. Moreover, Brackett’s contributions decidedly did not “soften” or “feminize” the material—far from it. Indeed, it’s Brackett’s signature toughness in reckoning with humans’ disposition toward “the dark side” that makes these films so enduringly compelling. There’s no doubt that Brackett’s premature demise and choice to house her materials at a remote public university in Portales (population: 11,770) factor into her all-but-forgotten place in American film. But that oversight also reflects the situation of women screenwriters throughout Hollywood history, who—like Brackett—have too often seen their creative imagination and labor credited to their male collaborators.

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As Howard Hawks, with his typical bluntness, said of Brackett’s work on the film for which she is still best known, The Big Sleep (1946), “She wrote that like a man. She writes good.” As Brackett would recall of being summoned in 1944 by Hawks to the Warner Bros. lot to work on the screenplay adaptation of Raymond Chandler’s novel, the legendary director-producer “was somewhat shaken when he discovered that it was Miss and not Mister Brackett, but he rallied bravely and signed me on anyway.” Having a gender-neutral name had proven helpful in the overwhelmingly male community of SF writers where she was already better known, having sold her first story in 1939 and more than 200 others over the course of her career. Yet No Good from a Corpse (1944), the hard-boiled detective novel that had caught Hawks’s attention, auspiciously signaled Brackett’s ear for noir dialogue and plotting. If their shared taste for macho writers like Chandler, James M. Cain, and Dashiell Hammett convinced him to sign her, no doubt Hawks also found appealing Brackett’s willingness to work cheap. She earned $125 per week (whereas top screenwriters at the time earned several thousand) and displayed a distinctly gendered gratitude for the privilege: “I’d have done it for nothing,” she would later say.

Thus 29-year-old Brackett, possessor of only a single co-writing credit on a B horror movie, found herself paired with none other than the studio’s boy-wonder-turned-embittered-inebriate William Faulkner to adapt Chandler’s book. At one point, Humphrey Bogart appealed to Faulkner to rewrite his character Philip Marlowe’s lines; having found the dialogue too gentle, he assumed they were the work of the “lady writer,” only to learn that he was mistaken. From then on, as Hawks’s biographer Todd McCarthy writes, “Bogart went straight to Brackett, whom he nicknamed Butch, whenever he wanted any of his dialogue toughened up.”

The most widely circulated image of Brackett—a headshot of a smiling middle-aged woman wearing pearls—would seem to be at odds with her butch persona and status as a screenwriter of “masculine” genres like film noir and, later, John Wayne Westerns. Even if Brackett was by all accounts straight, I would venture that—like her contemporary Dorothy Arzner, who deftly deployed her own butch-lesbian persona as the only woman directing studio movies for two-plus decades after the post-sound transition purge of the late 1920s—Brackett’s self-presentation and readability as not strictly gender-conforming were assets in the predominantly men’s worlds she inhabited. In other words, Brackett was engaged in a “masculine masquerade” enabled as much by her hard-boiled writing style as by her inclinations; as she put it in a 1975 interview, “I’ve always been bent on masculine things.” We can only speculate about whether Brackett was aware that “bent” is British slang for “queer,” but photographs of her cross-dressing in high school theatrical productions, or grinning in a ducktail haircut in an early studio publicity photo, offer visual corroboration of her tomboyish androgyny.

In a joint interview with her husband and fellow SF writer Edmond Hamilton, he echoes both Brackett’s self-assessment and Hawks’s praise: “[Y]ou have an advantage in that you’ve always written like a man,” to which Brackett replied about the projects she was drawn to: “It’s the type of thing I always liked to read and it was the only thing I ever wanted to write. […] [D]omestic problems always bored me.” Another advantage was Brackett’s prolific SF publishing career that allowed her the autonomy both to retreat from Hollywood and to bypass the temptation of more lucrative writing gigs for publications targeting female consumers. As Brackett once quipped, “I can’t read the Ladies’ Home Journal and I’m sure I couldn’t write for it.”

Even in her inaugural outing in Tinseltown, Brackett’s gift for distilling the structural and moral essence of unwieldly source material would prove indispensable to mounting much-needed genre revisionism—first and foremost in classic noir’s gender politics. Though her five Hawks-directed screenplays chiefly centered on male protagonists, Brackett also deserves some of the credit for the creation of the so-called “Hawksian woman” as embodied by Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep and (in her breakout and arguably career-best role) Angie Dickinson in Rio Bravo (1959). Off-screen, Brackett was herself such a Hawksian woman, able to write tough prose sufficiently deferential to the masculine code while, at the same time, working to update it. As scholar Kyle Barrett observes in the rare article to focus on Brackett’s screenwriting, The Big Sleep’s memorable pairing of Bogie and Bacall achieved more than cementing their on-screen chemistry; in Brackett’s hands, Bacall’s character Vivian Rutledge becomes Marlowe’s equal and ultimately his co-investigator as well as his object of desire, thereby complicating classic noir’s presentation of female characters as either irresistible femmes fatales or unalluring good girls.

The requirements of the Production Code meant that other contributions by Brackett—including an original ending that sees Marlowe sending the conniving Carmen Sternwood to her death, in keeping with the novel’s own unsentimental conclusion—didn’t make the cut. It was changed along with much else in the film’s second half by Hawks regular Jules Furthman, hired to address Code-related matters; Casablanca co-writer Philip G. Epstein would also contribute additional dialogue. Perhaps despite and because of this content-neutering and script-doctoring, The Big Sleep remained plenty salacious and became further notorious for its cavalier treatment of plot. Famously, not even Chandler himself, when consulted by the scriptwriters, could answer the question of “who killed [chauffeur] Owen Taylor,” a mystery that also remains unresolved in the screen adaptation.

If The Big Sleep’s proto-postmodernism anticipates neo-noir’s self-referentiality and narrative subversion, its reenvisioning of gender alongside genre similarly shows Brackett’s stamp. But Brackett would have to wait for the demise of the Code and the studio star system, until the Hollywood Renaissance of the 1970s, to give a Chandler adaptation an unflinchingly hard-boiled ending.

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Producer Elliott Kastner had no director in place when he commissioned Brackett to adapt Chandler’s last, longest, and murkiest novel, The Long Goodbye (1953). The result stands for me as Brackett’s crowning achievement, even if it was a critical mixed bag and a commercial flop upon release—and even if director Robert Altman, not unlike Lucas, has monopolized credit. Try entering “Leigh Brackett’s The Long Goodbye” into a search engine; my last attempt turned up one reference, whereas “Robert Altman’s The Long Goodbye” gets over 5,000 hits.

Written while his wife was dying from cancer and toward the end of a life plagued by wartime trauma and alcoholism, Chandler’s last completed novel was “depressing,” in Brackett’s estimation. In a 1971 letter to producer Jerry Bick, Brackett wrote, “Marlowe’s involvement ought to be more personal and intense, more ruthless, and certainly more exciting. […] There ought to be more sex, more sentiment […] more action, and a lot more fun along the way.” Apart from streamlining a novel so densely plotted and meandering that Altman himself admitted to not finishing it, Brackett’s foremost act of revision was to update Chandler’s postwar setting to the contemporary era. In recreating the archetypal detective who had become identified with Bogie, Brackett conjured the half-Candide, half-Columbo whom Altman would christen “Rip Van Marlowe” and star Elliott Gould would play as a chain-smoking wiseass.

Approaching 60 in an industry increasingly overtaken by boy wonders and movie brats, Brackett seems to have identified with her central character—a “man out of time” who tools around town in a 1948 Lincoln convertible and treats his pot-smoking nudist neighbors with amused detachment. Whereas Altman, by contrast, would describe Marlowe as a “loser all the way,” Brackett saw, as she wrote on page one of her script, “a loner, and a lonely man.” What they agreed on was that Chandler’s ending wouldn’t do. Altman got the script from Gould, with whom he’d worked on M*A*S*H (1970). Intrigued by Gould’s counterintuitive casting, it was ultimately Brackett’s revised conclusion, in which Marlowe kills his longtime pal Terry Lennox, that convinced Altman to sign on. As he said, “If she hadn’t written that ending, I guarantee I wouldn’t have done it.”

Altman’s contract stipulated that the ending could not be changed. But that’s not to say that Altman didn’t modify other aspects of Brackett’s screenplay. While her plot structure remains intact throughout, the improvising and stylized distancing under Altman’s directorship transformed Brackett’s minatory tale of American amorality into something more whimsical and satirical of “Me” Decade vacuity and Hollywood hokum. Altman himself regarded The Long Goodbye’s narrative as “merely a clothesline on which to hang a bunch of thumbnail essays, little commentaries,” that cumulatively make the film “more politically engaged and socially conscious” (as Mark Minett details in his 2021 book Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling). Yet however suggestive those vignettes on the screen’s fringes are, Brackett’s script already contains the core elements of what makes The Long Goodbye more than a mere “nose-thumb” at Marlowe, as Time’s critic alleged in one of many scathing reviews that greeted the film’s release. This is not to minimize what Altman’s sly irreverence manifested on-screen, nor to overlook the film’s glinting SoCal surfaces, courtesy of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond, which provide a brilliant counterpoint to the moral opacity of the film’s array of Angeleno stoners and swindlers. Yet Altman’s flashy realization of Brackett’s script arguably obscured what was on the page a sobering tale of the importance of morality over loyalty and—like another classic of the era, Shampoo (1975)—a wake-up call to the danger of doing nothing. Put simply, Altman gave the film its style, but Brackett gave the story its stakes.

On Brackett’s watch, violence against women gets more serious, and more compassionate, treatment. The scene reportedly conceived by Altman in which gangster Marty Augustine (Mark Rydell) smashes a Coke bottle across his own mistress’s face, shocking in its casual brutality, contrasts starkly with Brackett’s choice to have crime-scene images of murder victim Sylvia Lennox kept off-screen yet unsettling enough to jolt Marlowe out of his insouciance. An early draft, unquestionably Brackett’s work, has Marlowe rescuing new client Eileen Wade—later revealed as the accomplice of the treacherous Terry Lennox (Jim Bouton)—from being roughed up by her drunken husband Roger (Sterling Hayden), a Hemingwayesque has-been writer. The finished film only has her sporting a facial bruise that Marlowe notices, yet Brackett’s notes express a desire to humanize Eileen more than Chandler sought to do. As Brackett wrote in response to notes on her first draft,

I see her as being under great strain, trying to keep up appearances; a person of iron will who recognizes her own corruption, yet still goes through with the plan to murder Sylvia and pin it on Roger […] and now is faced with all the problems resulting from the failure of that plan. Her prime motivation is love for Terry.

Nina van Pallandt’s performance as Eileen, more flighty than flinty, fails to solicit the sympathy Brackett sought for her. Nevertheless, the fact that Marlowe is the only central male character who isn’t a wife (or mistress) beater ensures that Brackett’s concern for gendered violence isn’t totally suppressed by Altman’s whimsy. This concern seems all the more exceptional in a year when The New York Times sounded an alarm about “rape—an ugly movie trend.” An outlier in a decade notorious for depicting such assaults as enjoyable to their victims, Brackett’s script reorients classical noir’s obsession with violence by women to confront violence against women.

This revisionist twist has often been overshadowed by another: Brackett’s choice to have Marlowe shoot the remorseless wife-killer Terry. Reflecting on her radical departure from Chandler’s original, in which it is Eileen who murders Sylvia, Brackett expressed her sense that it was “the only satisfactory ending […] partly to keep Terry from getting away with it all, partly out of sheer human rage.” It was an idea that occurred to her, complete with allusion to another tale of betrayal between old friends, in notes dated 1971: “It seems a more interesting twist in the story to have Terry as the killer—of course it’s a bit like ‘THE THIRD MAN’ but what’s wrong with that.” Brackett’s final draft makes doubly clear the intended homage:

EXT. MEXICAN HOUSE – DAY

As Marlowe comes out, Eileen is just driving up in a Landrover. She is astonished to see him. […]

He walks past her without looking at her, as though she is not there. He walks away along the dusty road.

Yet what comes next to close out the film—Marlowe’s jaunty jig to the strains of “Hooray for Hollywood”—is all Altman and Gould. What in Brackett’s script constitutes a restoration of the moral code, Altman turns into something performative and self-satisfied that risks rendering it all, in neo-noir scholar Edward Gallafent’s estimation, “meaningless.” Altman’s ending caps off the cleverness throughout that has earned the film subsequent generations of fans and makes its influence felt in neo-noir works such as The Big Lebowski (1998), Brick (2005), Inherent Vice (2014), and Under the Silver Lake (2018). By adding this final flourish, Altman defuses Brackett’s damning indictment of an amorality bred by money’s corrupting influence, weakening the effect of analogizing wife-killing Terry Lennox with Third Man’s war-profiteering Harry Lime in favor of a last jab at Tinseltown.

Compared to the era’s other consummate works of neo-noir, Chinatown (1974) and Night Moves (1975), in which the hapless detective’s meddling makes the situation worse, Brackett’s scripted conclusion to The Long Goodbye is at once less cynical and arguably more conservative inasmuch as it locates the source of moral rot in corrupt individuals rather than an insurmountable system. Her ending struck viewers at the time as out of character for Marlowe, but as Altman observed, “what they were really saying was that Elliott Gould wasn’t Humphrey Bogart.” While Brackett’s vision won out, her uncompromising view of man’s propensity for cruelty and revenge, casually undermined by Altman’s impudence and Gould’s chutzpah, proved again too tough for its time. Written like a man, indeed.

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Brackett’s final script was also an unfinished one: her February 1978 draft of what has come to be known as Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back. As someone with a proven track record in Hollywood genre filmmaking and known in SF circles for her work in the (inter)planetary romance subgenre (she was celebrated as the “Queen of Space Opera”), Brackett was a choice candidate to write the screenplay. But she was also obscure enough that Lucas recounts not having realized she was the same Leigh Brackett credited on multiple Hollywood productions. As the follow-up to Lucas’s space-fantasy sleeper hit, which, more than any other, established the system of financial speculation that has prevailed from 1970s Hollywood to the present—in which ever-ballooning budgets are offset by endless IP extraction through merchandising and franchise extension—to say that it was the biggest script in town is an immense understatement. As a sixtysomething woman in an industry increasingly dominated by so-called whiz kids, whose products seemed designed to appeal first and foremost to teen boys, it was simultaneously well deserved and downright astonishing that Brackett got the job.

As Rebecca Harrison’s BFI volume observes of the resulting screenplay, “Leia and Han’s screwball-comedy dialogue is evident, although in Brackett’s script their interactions tend to be gentle rather than aggressive. […] In later editions of the script, Han’s admission of women’s power is erased and his exchanges with Leia become more brusque.” While it might seem to diverge from Brackett’s reputation for writing “like a man,” I, too, found this contrast striking: Brackett’s draft has more kissing and fewer daddy issues. Not only does it deliver more of the banter between affectionate equals that Harrison observes; it also borrows from rom-coms the device of a love triangle involving its three leads. In a handwritten note, presumably to herself, Brackett muses, “Leia in love with Han or Luke? Better if Luke.” Perversely funny now, that setup clearly couldn’t survive the subsequent introduction of (spoiler!) Darth Vader’s paternal relationship to Luke and Leia. (Presumably, this is what Lucas meant when he referred to the film’s “completely different direction.”) But Brackett didn’t just endow Luke with a secret sister—she also had him give voice to the root struggle between integrity and power in passages such as this one, following his defeat by Vader: “I almost beat him at that, but the wrong way … the more I was winning, the more I was losing. I was so full of hate, and rage, and the desire for revenge. I was using the dark side of the force without even realizing it, and he was making me destroy myself.”

What was, in Brackett’s telling, predominantly an existential conflict for Luke and a cautionary tale about fascism would become, in Lucas’s hands, an Oedipal drama that trades medievalism for Greek tragedy, makes Luke less knightly than Christlike, and turns Han from horny romantic to reluctant hero. Even this draft reflects Lucas’s reasons for seeking out Brackett—her proven talent for conjuring richly compelling speculative worlds with fleshed-out characters, including nonhuman ones (her writing for Artoo and Threepio is particularly adroit) and her attention to antiauthoritarian themes. At the same time, Brackett’s interests in orchestrating a Luke-Leia-Han love triangle and otherwise humanizing her characters plays down the Triumph of the Will–influenced aesthetic that Lucas applied to the point of pastiche in the film now called Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope. Brackett’s draft even features, in apparent homage to Jean Renoir’s Grand Illusion (1937), a scene in which Vader hosts his captives for dinner, though he himself does not eat: “I have had to forego those simple pleasures,” he explains.

Reassessing three such legendary works—The Big Sleep, The Long Goodbye, and The Empire Strikes Back—long attributed to Hollywood mavericks and movie brats reveals not only Brackett’s indispensable contributions to these films but also what a savvy operator she was in navigating the gendered and generational challenges arising over three decades of drastic industry transformation. Teamed with male titans like Faulkner and Furthman and macho personalities like Hawks, Wayne, and Altman, Brackett continued to face erasure into her career’s final decades, an undervaluing that persists today. This fact seems attributable to the same quality that enabled her improbable studio success: her willingness to write for, and strategically defer to, the outsize male ego.

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Acknowledgments

I thank Regina Bouley Sweeten at Eastern New Mexico University’s Golden Library, Louise Hilton at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library, and Hilary Swett at the Writers Guild Foundation for their help in accessing Leigh Brackett’s archival materials. I extend my gratitude to Emerson College’s Department of Visual and Media Arts for funding to visit Brackett’s archive at ENMU.