Inside Leigh Brackett’s Mysterious Scriptwriting Process: Secrets Never Revealed Before
Ever wondered what it really takes to build a story that grips you from first scene to last? Well, Leigh Brackett—brilliant screenwriter and queen of noir grit—might just have the answer. “She wrote that [The Big Sleep] like a man. She writes good,” said Howard Hawks, capturing a timeless truth about her punchy dialogue and razor-sharp storytelling. But beyond the Hollywood glamour and sharp one-liners lies a fascinating journey: from being shoehorned into writing ‘bug-eyed monster’ flicks to collaborating with literary giant William Faulkner. What sparks that transition from pulp fiction to iconic cinema? Dive into the guts and grit of Brackett’s craft, and you might just discover why screenwriting is the ultimate school for story structure—one wild chapter at a time. LEARN MORE
“I don’t think there’s anything better than screenwriting to teach you the construction of a story.”
“She wrote that [The Big Sleep] like a man. She writes good.” — Howard Hawks, quoted in “Hawks on Hawks”.
The “she” to whom Hawks was referring was screenwriter Leigh Brackett. Brackett, whose career spanned four decades, demonstrated incredible breadth in terms of genres with writing credits on movies as diverse as The Big Sleep (1946), Rio Bravo (1959), Hatari! (1962), Rio Lobo (1970), The Long Goodbye (1973), and ending with a posthumous co-writer credit on Star Wars: Episode V — The Empire Strikes Back (1980), shared with Larry Kasdan.
Here are some notable excerpts from the book “Backstory 2: Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1940s and 1950s”, edited by Patrick McGilligan:
ON HOW SHE GOT HER START AS A SCREENWRITER
My agent, Hugh King, had been with Myron Selznick, my agency at that time, and he had gone over to Republic as story editor and had sort of managed to shoehorn me in because they were doing this horror film . They decided to cash in on the Universal monster school, and I had been doing science fiction, and to them it all looked the same — “bug-eyed monsters.” It made no difference. I did The Vampire’s Ghost there, and just out of the clear blue sky this other thing happened, purely on the strength of a hard-boiled mystery novel I had published. Howard Hawks read the book and liked it. He didn’t buy the book, for which I can’t blame him, but he liked the dialogue and I was put under contract to him.
ON HER ‘COLLABORATION’ WITH WILLIAM FAULKNER ON “THE BIG SLEEP”
I went to the studio the first day absolutely appalled. I had been writing pulp stories for about three years, and here is William Faulkner, who was one of the great literary lights of the day, and how am I going to work with him? What have I got to offer, as it were? This was quickly resolved, because when I walked into the office, Faulkner came out of his office with the book The Big Sleep and he put it down and said: “I have worked out what we’re going to do. We will do alternate sections. I will do these chapters and you will do those chapters.” And that was the way it was done. He went back into his office and I didn’t see…
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