On 21/8/03 7:22 pm, "William Denton" <
buff@pobox.com> wrote:
> Does anyone know if Chandler mentions Brackett in
his letters, or if she
> talks about meeting him, or how well they knew each
other back in the '40s
> and '50s? They must have met when Chandler was in
Hollywood.
In a letter dated October 12 1944 addressed to Charles Morton
of the Atlantic Monthly, Chandler refers to the script of THE
BIG SLEEP: 'Bill Faulkner and a girl named Leigh Brackett
wrote the script. 'Twill do. Hawks shoots from the cuff more
or less, he tells me, merely using a rough script to try out
his scenes and then rewriting them on the set.'
There's no other reference to Leigh Brackett in SELECTED
LETTERS OF RAYMOND CHANDLER, ed. Frank MacShane. In
MacShane's biography of Chandler he mentions that Chandler
attended a meeting with Faulkner, Brackett, Hawks and Bogart
during which he said that he liked the script, particularly
the ending devised by Brackett - ironically enough later
replaced by another written by Jules Furthman.
In THE BIG BOOK OF NOIR Leigh Brackett herself wrote an
entertaining account of her work on THE BIG SLEEP and THE
LONG GOODBYE. She confirms Hawks' impromptu working methods
and reports that Faulkner simply told her that they would
adapt alternate chapters, without further reference to each
other, submitting material direct to Hawks.
Brackett's defence of her adaptation of THE LONG GOODBYE is
too long to quote here, but the final paragraph runs:
'In its first release, the film was greeted, by some critics,
with the tone of outrage generally reserved for those who
tamper with the Bible. This seems just a bit silly to me. I'm
an old Chandler fan from way back, probably further back than
a lot of the critics. He was a powerful influence on my own
work in those years. But I don't feel that any sacrilege was
being committed. And I doubt that Chandler himself would have
regarded every aspect of his work as Holy Writ.
I think he might even have liked Altman's version of THE LONG
GOODBYE.'
Nigel
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