io9’s Charlie Jane Anders has a nice piece on Leigh Brackett, who wrote the first draft of the Empire Strikes Back.
She quotes Andrew Liptak’s look at Brackett’s planetary romances in Kirkus, among other tributes.
One Reply to “May the 4th: Remembering Leigh Brackett”
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Reading the Brackett version was one of my biggest fanboy dreams for years, and when it finally popped up on the web, it was one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever read. And I don’t mean that in an insulting way, quite the opposite really: It’s so very much like the first Star Wars movie, it’s the perfect sequel sequel – as opposed to the “saga” sequel that Empire became -, and it has all those weird, very comic book -esque twists like Vader having an actual Dracula styled lair, weird alien civilizations on Bespin and a lot more snow monsters on Hoth, a Jedi oath ceremony, esoteric visions, mind control powers, and metaphoric battles. It’s a lot more John Carter than John Williams but I think it would make for a terrific follow-up to Dark Horse’s The Star Wars adaption in that it is familiar but very different. Honoring Brackett that way would be really nice.
Plus you could throw in a couple of visual tributes to Rio Bravo and El Dorado. Had Empire not copied the Gone with the Wind love story to the letter, Rio Bravo might have been a really nice template for Star Wars. :-)