Read: The Great Screenwriters: Part 3 – Leigh Brackett 9. In writing film noirs, Westerns and sci-fi so successfully, Brackett proved that whatever she lacked in the quantity of credits to her name, she more than made up for in quality. Then, finally, and perhaps most impressively of all, Brackett was one of the co-writers credited on The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the second installment of the original Star Wars trilogy. Remarkably, another decade passed before she wrote The Long Goodbye (1973), Robert Altman’s extraordinary updating of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe to the counter-culture of the early 1970s. More than a decade later, she was reunited with Furthman to write another Howard Hawks film, Rio Bravo (1959), this time a Western about a sheriff (played by John Wayne) and his hopeless sidekicks, a drunk (played, appropriately enough, by Dean Martin) and a young boy (played by contemporary singing sensation Ricky Nelson).

It was her breakthrough, showing the devilish side to the so-called “City of Angels”. The Big Sleep (1946) was an adaptation of the Raymond Chandler novel that she co-wrote with another great novelist, William Faulkner, and a journalist, Jules Furthman. Fortunately for her, at least four of them are masterpieces. Leigh Brackett was hardly prolific, writing or co-writing fewer than a dozen films in three decades. The first is Leigh Brackett, a native Californian who was one of the few female screenwriters to become successful in Hollywood before the first wave of feminism in the 1960s finally began to open up cinema and screenwriting to women (a process that even today is obviously still nowhere near completion). There are a pair of “Bracketts” on this list, but they are unrelated (other than both of them being exceptionally fine writers). Consequently, since the birth of cinema, it has been home (or become home) to many of the world’s greatest screenwriters. In cinematic terms, Los Angeles is Hollywood, and Hollywood has been so successful as a filmmaking city that it effectively has various “twin” cities around the world, not least “Bollywood” in Bombay and “Nollywood” in Lagos, the capital of Nigeria. He has previously covered London and New York.įor Part 3, he looks at Los Angeles, the home of Hollywood. Famous Screenwriters is a new series by The Script Lab for the new year, in which our resident cinema historian, Martin Keady, looks at the great screenwriting cities of the world – those that have produced many of the world’s greatest screenwriters.

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