(The 2012 Disney screen adaptation, John Carter, starring the marvellously monickered but ultimately untalented Taylor Kitsch, was one of the biggest-budget flops of recent years.) There is something very appropriate about Brackett’s first literary hero being Burroughs, a writer whose work straddled very different genres (from jungle novels to science fiction), given that she also demonstrated remarkable versatility as a writer.īrackett first began publishing her own sci-fi stories when she was in her early twenties, and became one of the regular contributors to such classic “space fiction” magazines as “Astounding Science Fiction” and “Planet Stories”.
Burroughs, of course, was the creator of Tarzan, but at the same time that he was depicting a man growing up among the apes (and ultimately preferring their society to that of his fellow men), he was also writing another series about an earthling, John Carter, who was mysteriously transported to Mars to take part in a series of extraordinary gladiatorial contests. However, given that four of those 11 films were classics – The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, The Long Goodbye and The Empire Strikes Back – her enduring importance as a screenwriter (and especially as a female screenwriter) is surely undeniable.īrackett was born in California in 1915 and always claimed that she was “birthed” as an author at the age of eight when she read one of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Mars-set novels, The Gods of Mars. Ultimately, perhaps, even her status as a “great screenwriter” is arguable, in that she only ever wrote or co-wrote a total of 11 films in more than three decades. She first made her name as one of the few female stars of science fiction’s first “golden age” (in America in the 1940s and 1950s), producing an extraordinary number of short stories, novellas and novels, but is probably better remembered today as a screenwriter rather than as a writer of prose. That sense of uncertainty and ambiguity extended to her career. Almost everything about Leigh Brackett was uncertain, ambiguous and even androgynous, beginning with her name, which many people (including the legendary director Howard Hawks) initially took to be that of a man.
0 kommentar(er)
