Leigh Brackett worked on an early draft of The Empire Strikes Back, elements of which remained in the film; she died before it went into production.
21 Facts About Leigh Brackett
2.
Leigh Brackett was born and raised in Los Angeles, California.
3.
Leigh Brackett's father died when she was very young; her mother did not remarry.
4.
Leigh Brackett attended a private girls' school in Santa Monica, California, where she was involved in theater and began writing.
5.
Leigh Brackett's first novel, No Good from a Corpse, was a hard-boiled mystery novel in the tradition of Raymond Chandler.
6.
Leigh Brackett finished the first half before turning it over to her close friend Bradbury, so that she could leave to work on the screenplay of The Big Sleep.
7.
Leigh Brackett returned to science fiction writing in 1948 after her movie work.
8.
In "Queen of the Martian Catacombs", Leigh Brackett created the character of Eric John Stark.
9.
Leigh Brackett is saved by a Terran official, who adopts and mentors Stark.
10.
Leigh Brackett adopted an elegiac tone in her stories, no longer celebrating the conflicts of frontier worlds but lamenting the passing of civilizations, and concentrating more on mood than plot.
11.
Leigh Brackett produced other stories over the next decade, and revised and published some as novels.
12.
Leigh Brackett's Skaith combines elements of her other worlds with fantasy elements.
13.
Burroughs's heroes set out to remake entire worlds according to their own codes; Leigh Brackett's heroes are at the mercy of trends and movements far bigger than they are.
14.
Shortly after Leigh Brackett broke into science fiction writing, she wrote her first screenplays.
15.
Hollywood director Howard Hawks was so impressed by her novel No Good from a Corpse that he had his secretary call in "this guy Leigh Brackett" to help William Faulkner write the script for The Big Sleep.
16.
Leigh Brackett worked on the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, the first Star Wars sequel.
17.
George Lucas said that he asked Leigh Brackett to write the screenplay based on his story outline.
18.
Leigh Brackett was credited in tribute despite not being involved in the final film.
19.
Laurent Bouzereau, in Star Wars: The Annotated Screenplays, said that Lucas disliked the direction of Leigh Brackett's screenplay, discarded it, and produced two more screenplays before turning the results over to Kasdan.
20.
On December 31,1946, at age 31, Leigh Brackett married another science fiction writer, Edmond Hamilton, in San Gabriel, California.
21.
Leigh Brackett died there in March 1978, of cancer, at age 62.