Leigh Brackett

I'm a long-time science fiction fan, so I'm not unfamiliar with the name of Leigh Brackett. But I have to confess I've never read any of her work, and I was completely unaware that she wrote for the movies, let alone for some of my favorite movies. Unaware anyway, until I read Queen of the Martian Mysteries: An Appreciation of Leigh Brackett. Here's an excerpt about Brackett and Howard Hughes:

It was a tribute to Howard Hawks that he wasn't phased by the famous revelation that the guy he had hired for The Big Sleep was actually a gal in a gingham dress. Hawks was as famous for his regard for strong women as he was for his
exploitation of weaker ones. And Leigh's steady integrity impressed him. She stayed on the picture. There are many who believe she materially helped make it the classic it became. She worked with Hawks and Wayne on movies like Hatari! (about which she had some hilarious stories) and Rio Lobo, as well as the classic Rio Bravo and she also wrote for television.

A little bit more about Brackett and Hughes:

Only once, with The Empire Strikes Back, did she ever script a science fantasy tale. In a sense she had the privilege of self-imitation, just as she had when doing Eldorado, which she knew was a rehash of Rio Bravo. At one point she had suggested to Hawks that he simply change the names of her previous script and save himself some money.

Considering that Empire is easily the best of the Star Wars films, it's a shame she didn't write the screenplays for all of them. Consider this:

But, of course, Leigh was also influential in Hollywood. Her contribution to Star Wars wasn't limited to the script she did for The Empire Strikes Back. When I saw the first Star Wars movie I was disappointed. I had expected something as good as Brackett. What I got was a dilute of Brackett and the Brackett style. Han Solo's origins lie, it seems to me, in those tough, semi-piratical spacers who took the interplanetary work nobody else would do. I suspect they all looked a bit like Bogart in Leigh's mind! Which says something for Bogart, I'd say, since Leigh got to know him when she was working with Faulkner on the The Big Sleep. She and Bogie enjoyed each other's company. They were the same kind of tough-talking romantics. Her spacegoing heroes were not a million miles away from the seagoing Bogart of Key Largo.

First - how fucking cool is it to find a line, a connection between a Bogie character and Han Solo? Is this not why the internet was invented, to delight geeks worldwide?

Ok, anyways... Harrison Ford's Han Solo is clearly the star of The Empire Strikes Back. I have no idea if this was intentional or not, but like Eli Wallach's Tuco in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Han Solo in TESB is a secondary or supporting character who leaps to the forefront and dominates the picture . Not only does he have the best lines in the film (again like Tuco) but he seems to be more fully realized. Luke Skywalker and The Man With No Name are archtypes (or cardboard cutouts depending on your taste in movies) - great fun to watch but a bit one-dimensional. Han Solo and Tuco seem like real people, however odd it may be to apply the term 'real' to movie characters. Luke is a whiny farm boy on your standard Joe Campbell hero quest; The Man With No Name is a mysterious stranger, with no past to speak of*, who laconically shoots a whole bunch of people. Han and Tuco, in contrast, have personality. They have a past, sometimes only hinted at, that the viewer can imagine occurring off screen before the film starts, and a future too. Don't you wonder what Tuco got up to after 'Blondie' rode off and left him in the graveyard? You know just know what Eastwood's character did - shoot some more people. But what kind of trouble did Tuco get into? What kind of scams did he think up? You wonder because you think of him as real. And you get mad when Lucas changed the Cantina scene to have Greedo shoot first because goddamit you know Han Solo, you know there's no freakin' way he'd let Greedo get the drop on him like that.

*I think the reason that Unforgiven and The Outlaw Josey Wales are my favorite Eastwood films are because they seem to me to round-out the Man With No Name character that made Eastwood famous.