Leigh Brackett was born on 7 December 1915.

If you’ve heard of her, it is probably because she co-wrote The Empire Strikes Back. But she did so much more.

She started writing for science fiction magazines in 1940. She went on to write quite a lot of crime and western pulp fiction. And starting in 1944, she wrote novels. She was best known for interplanetary romances. This is how she earned the moniker as The Queen of Space Opera.

Her first novel, No Good from a Corpse, provided her an entry into Hollywood. Apparently, Howard Hawks loved the novel and reached out. He thought she was a man and often noted that she wrote like a man. (Whatever that means!)

She co-wrote five films for Hawks: The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, Hatari!, El Dorado, and Rio Lobo. Additionally, she wrote screenplays for The Unholy Four (directed by Hammer regular Terence Fisher) and Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt (directed by William Castle during his studio period). And she wrote some TV, including two episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.

George Lucas hired Brackett to write the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back based on his story. Fans have spent the last 4+ decades arguing that Lucas hated her script and threw it all out. This is almost certainly not the case. It rather shows a complete lack of understanding of how collaborative art works. This comes from the natural but unfortunate tendency to want to give all the credit to a single man.

She died of cancer shortly after finishing her draft of the screenplay. She was primarily a science fiction writer. But this was the first time she wrote a science fiction screenplay. So it was a fitting end to her career.

So let’s celebrate Leigh Brackett’s birthday by watching Crime Doctor’s Man Hunt. It’s one of the few films that she gets sole screenwriting credit. And it’s a good opportunity to see what William Castle (who directed 4 of the 10 Crime Doctor films) was doing before he became the wacky producer we all know and love.

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Leigh Brackett via Picryl. It is in the public domain.