Write, write, write

Niven who, you ask? There you have it, in a nutshell. We'll remember the films, the stars, the directors ... but the screenwriters behind all of that magic? Nowhere near our consciousness. 

Niven Busch, B&W still, 1944

We, the screenwriters, should take the time to look back at the lives and stories of our screenwriting ancestry. We can marvel, we can learn - but most of all, it allows us to always remember just what an incredibly vibrant world we live in - the mad world of film.

Niven Busch's last mention came with the obituary in the New York Times on 27 August 1997. "Niven Busch, a screenwriter and novelist best known for his novel "Duel in the Sun" which David O. Selznick made into a classic western film in 1947, died at his home on Sunday. He was 88 years old and lived in San Francisco."

The article went on to mention the he moved to Hollywood in 1931, after having worked for the Time magazine and The New Yorker (click here for his 1929 articles). His 21 years in Hollywood saw him working with all of the big names that are , for us, the stuff of Hollywood legend. For Niven, it was daily business. He wrote original material, most often collaborated with other writers - and quickly tried to get a greater sense of control as most of the work he did didn't end up on screen as he'd hoped.

Niven started writing novels when he could find the time and made constant efforts to get into the producing side of the business to gain that artistic control he was after. After two decades in Hollywood there was only a handful of films he was truly proud of. "Pursued" (1947), the film that stared Robert Mitchum and Teresa Wright, was one of those.

Theresa Wright was a major star then - and Niven Busch's wife. You see - Busch wasn't afraid to mingle. He was a dandy and a smooth talker and came across more like a movie star than the guy one traditionally envisioned behind a typewriter.

In "Backstory", a series of Golden Age screenwriters are interviewed. At the beginning of the Niven Busch interview it reads:

"The best measure of his optimism and his physical bravura is his abiding openness to doubt. Hollywood veterans, especially the sportsmen, sometimes become monolithic, vain, and macho. The muscle in Niven Busch has never allowed him to abandon irony and humor, and there was nothing as touch to me in our interview as his 1983 realization, half amused, half bereft, that he still wasn't sure whether his going to Hollywood had been for the best."

Niven Busch 1984 in San Francisco

His life might have been different, of course. But, purely selfishly, I have to say I'm grateful he went. He had his hands in more than twenty films, among them "The Postman Always Rings Twice", "Duel in the Sun" (Busch wrote the novel and but didn't want to write the script), "The Westerner", "The Capture", "Man from the Alamo" and the aforementioned "Pursued."

Click here for the full Backstory interview in Google Books. (Backstory 1: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age - by Patrick McGilligan). Find out about his early connections with David and Myron Selznick, his move to Hollywood, getting around, making connections, staying sane. Great insights into story conferences and legends like Michael Curtiz and Howard Hawks. Also packed with the history of the old Hollywood system, about hired guns, weekly checks, collaborating and much more. All of it most excellent film history - worth your time! I mean, just read this two snippets:

• "Anyway, David (Selznick) was kind of a gofer and errand boy. He was like fifteen and I was eleven. So once in a while he'd let me sweep out a cutting room. And that as a big treat because of the smell of the film, for chrissake!"
• "I said "How are you, Myron (David Selznick's elder brother)?" I knew by this time he was an important agent. In fact, he was the first important agent in Hollywood and he turned everything around. Garbo was working for $75 a week and he got her $7'500."

I spotted a list of top ten women screenwriters everyone should know. Leigh Brackett wasn't on the list and when it was pointed out to the creator of said list, he admitted he'd never even heard of her. Well, we can't know everything ... but Leigh Brackett? Come on!

Film critic Tony Macklin visited Leigh Brackett in 1975 for an interview that took place at her farm house in Kinsman, Ohio, where she lived together with her husband and fellow sci-fi writer Edward Hamilton. For Leigh Brackett's bio, click here.

• And here's the gem - the audio recording of the interview with Leigh Brackett.
• And a related gem - here's Tony Macklin's interview with the Howard Hawks, the guy who really gave Leigh Brackett the chance to bring her skills to some of today's classic films, such as "The Big Sleep" and "Rio Bravo".

And here (hell yes I was procrastinating and hell yes I think it was time well spent) a collage I put together with the few images of Leigh Brackett floating around the web, framed by some of the gems she helped bring to the silver screen.



Interested in more about Leigh Brackett?

• Here's a post about her work with Howard Hawks
• And here's one about women screenwriters (features her, of course)

I've recently come across a few posts proclaiming just how easy it actually is to write a script. There's also posts out there celebrating the writing of scripts in as little as a day. All of that can be terribly misleading for newbies. Don't be fooled.

Not that easy

The act of writing in itself is magical - a nightmare to think I couldn't write anymore. I know that I'll always will - it juices me, it liberates me, it drives me, it makes my life fuller, richer, better ... but all of that writing may still be crap from a movie business point of view.

Of course the actual act of writing doesn't take much time. Takes me a few minutes to write this post. But we're talking screenwriting here. Let's take a closer look:

1. The idea - that can be anything, a flash, a conversation, an agent/director/producer's comment - an actual assignment. Takes no time at all, IF that happens. But the works starts there.
2. From core to characters to plot - that's ruminating, researching, taking notes, dumping notes, more notes - this process - often seen by the outside world as "not doing anything", is essential and will most often take weeks and months. This process includes everything from exposes to detailed treatments. In my case, it's an average of three months from an idea to beginning to write an actual draft.
3. The first draft - IF all the work has been done, if the road is clear, if the research is in place, the characters are known with their back stories, their language, their wants and their needs, if the plot is clear (at least the major structure, twists - and the ending) - then a first draft is indeed a quick job - it usually takes me 30 days to write it. But only if I've put in the months of thinking work into it before.
4. Then the real work begins - drafts will be rewritten again and again based on what agents, managers, directors, producers, sometimes even actors want. All of that is a lot of talk, hopefully a lot of useful feedback and then a lot of speedy new deadline rewriting - that's a lot of writing work right there. More tips here > 6 things to do after finishing the first draft

Long story short - writing is easy but good writing isn't, it does take time - the thing to remember is that screenwriting is a marathon - there's no quick fix - if one doesn't have the stamina and the willpower to stick with the characters through all of the above - a career as a screenwriter will not happen.

"The Big Sleep" and "Rio Bravo" will always be among my top ten films of all times. Everything clicks. A brilliant outcome from a collaboration of first-rate pros led by Howard Hawks. The scripts was penned by Leigh Brackett and Jules Furthman. As did some research for a post about Rio Bravo, I discovered more and more about what must have been a very special friendship between Brackett and Hawks. So here's a post about this instead!

Someone will spot this article and think - hey, there's a great biopic in here - and I'll be the first to agree. Fascinating times in Hollywood, larger than life stars - an elder man (Hawks) and an upcoming woman writer (Brackett) who would work together on classics like The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo and more. And enduring friendship in a cut-throat town. Do we have bad guys in this stories - oh yeah, there's a few up for grabs!

Leigh Brackett was born in LA in 1915. She was an only child, her father died when she was little. She was raised by her mother and grandparents in Santa Monica. Without delving deeper, I could already see story potential of a young woman very comfortable around older men. Was Howard Hawks such a father figure? I bet she wouldn't have agreed.

She was an early reader and started writing when she was thirteen. In an interview she says that it seemed the only thing to do - a good way to make a living. Edgar Rice Burroughs' Gods Of Mars
opened the world of science fiction for her. She was sold and sci-fi remained her great love
throughout her life. She met Ray Bradbury and Robert Heinlein, she joined the LA Science Fiction Society and published her first story "Martian Quest" in 1940.

In her own words: "I did have a knack for science fiction, which I dearly loved, so for quite a while I wrote nothing but science fiction. I was never a quantity producer and it was a very small field. Inasmuch as I had some financial responsibilities, I had to broaden out so I took to writing detective stories. I wrote quite a few of them for the pulp magazines. Then at long last I wrote a novel, which was perfectly frightful, and I couldn't say that it set any worlds on fire, but I loved it. It was my child, my first born, full-length novel."

Her first novel "No Good From a Corpse" (1944) focused on a hardboiled detective determined to clear an innocent man of the murder of his girlfriend. In an interview Brackett shared that a friend of hers had worked at the bookstore where Howard Hawks would show up every couple of weeks to get a stack of thrillers. Her friend made sure that Brackett's novel was part of that stack - and that's how one of Hollywood's very special relationships began. Hawks got his agent to contact Leigh Brackett's agent. He basically said "I want to talk to that Brackett guy."

In her words: "... my agent rang me up and said, "Howard Hawks wants to see you." I fell on the floor. I went to Warner Brothers for an interview and started to work on "The Big Sleep" and we got a contract for two and one half years then."

Yes, Hawks was expecting to meet a man - quite a natural assumption as "Leigh" can cut either way. Plus - what woman would write a tale of a hard-boiled detective? Apparently, Hawks wasn't that impressed by the story - but all the more so by the dialogue. Clearly a talented writer who might be just right to come on board for the screen version of Chandler's "The Big Sleep".

So she showed up - a 28 year old woman with barely any screenwriting experience (she did work on "The Vampire's Ghost" the previous year) in a business mostly run, driven, crafted, powered by men. The fact that she and Hawks instantly got along and started a professional partnership that would last through the years speaks volumes about them. Hawks himself was, at that time, 62 years old. But maybe equally interesting - she would be teaming up with screenwriter Jules Furthman who was also getting up there - he was nearing his 60th birthday. Furthman was, at that time, slowing down, judging from his IMDB credits (a whopping total of 119!). And now he'd work with this woman wannabe writer whom Hawks seemed to like? Now that must have been an interesting situation, right?

Let me be clear here - I've listened to an interview with Leigh Brackett and she's adamant that her being a woman was never an issue - that she did not have to fight left and right. On the contrary, that she was part of a small empowered team. They worked personally for Hawks and didn't have the same tight regimen as regular studio staff writers.

In her words: "I was very fortunate, I think, because I was never under contract to the studio. I was under contract personally to Howard Hawks and Charles Feldman of H-F Productions, which dissolved about two and one-half years later and I got dissolved along with it. I never had to go through the business of checking out and all that. I came in through the side gate. Hawks had his own bungalow, whereas so many of the people who were under contract to the studio were working in sort of a barracks and they were checked in and out."

Fast forward to the mid fifties. Brackett was always writing and never got sucked into the Hollywood rat race. She was very much her own woman and stayed true to her first love, science fiction (something that would much later bring her further glory as she was the one who delivered the first draft of "Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back". Hmn... older man - makes me think whether there's a connection with the Yoda character (Yoda was initially called Minch, by the way) - who knows, right?!

I've read that Hawks and Brackett had a lot in common: "They shared the same literary taste, she was sophisticated, dressed in somewhat outdoorsy manner, which the director liked, and she had spent much of her childhood in Pasadena, not far from the Hawks home. Moreover, her portrayal of the spirit of comradeship was of the kind that appealed to him. "There's probably no stronger emotion than friendship between men," Hawks once said."

Now then, was Brackett given equal treatment. Let's take the situation with Jules Furthman. In 1957 Howard Hawks paired the two again to collaborate on "Rio Bravo". Furthman was seventy at that point. Brackett apparently did more of the writing and received a weekly paycheck of 600 bucks. Furthman received a weekly 2500 for his thoughts (I've read he hated putting things on paper ... go figure!).

In her words: "I don't like to say this, because it sounds presumptuous, but Hawks and I kind of tuned in on the same channel with regard to the characters, and I think this is probably one reason that I worked with him so long. He was able to get out of me what he wanted because I had somewhat the same attitude towards the characters as he did."

After the phenomenal success of Rio Bravo, the partnership with Howard Hawks and John Wayne continued and Brackett worked on Hatari, El Dorado and Rio Lobo with them. Rio Lobo (1970) was their final collaboration and Hawks' final film - he died in 1977. Brackett continued to work in film - most notably with Robert Altman on The Long Goodbye and, as already mentioned, she topped off her screenwriting work with Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back.

Leigh Brackett and Howard Hawks, wherever they are, may the force be with them. And if the force isn't, I'm sure at the very least John Wayne is.

Since I've just hammered out another first draft myself, I'm exactly at that point where I will apply these rules. So - you've finished your first draft, right? Cool. These are the next steps: