San Filippo on Screenwriter Leigh Brackett’s Legacy: LA Review of Books
Visual and Media Arts assistant professor Maria San Filippo examines the career of screenwriter Leigh Brackett, as The Empire Strikes Back notes its 45 anniversary this year. Star Wars enthusiasts may not know it was written by a woman. Brackett is also the screenwriter of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.
San Filippo writes women in these roles in Hollywood continue to be overlooked for their accomplishments.
Brackett is also the screenwriter of The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye.
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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