FFB/MS: THE LONG GOODBYE, a 1972 draft of the screenplay by Leigh Brackett; BRASS KNUCKLES by Stuart Dybek (University of Pittsburgh, 1979)

This copy of a 1972 draft of Leigh Brackett's film adaptation of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye is missing some key pages (not simply page 21 as annotated on the title page) but nonetheless is a very worthwhile reading experience, as Brackett proves she's as adept a scriptwriter as one might've guessed from her often brilliant, and diverse, fiction, and the films made from her scripts. It's offered as part of a multimedia web post on the Cinephilia & Beyond blog, along with several interviews with Brackett and others, and the draft was written before Robert Altman was associated with the project, but with knowledge that Elliott Gould was meant to play Philip Marlowe. One of the points of rage regarding the film for many Chandler/Marlowe fans is that Gould seems unlikely to be the Marlowe of Chandler's fiction (he doesn't seem quite right to Brackett, either, as it turns out, but not so much for the reasons that most of the Chandler fans resent so volubly...she sees Gould as insufficiently hardboiled, essentially). She also makes clear, both in the script and the discussion about it, that she takes full responsibility for the single fact that most enrages so many Chandler purists, the murder of Terry Lennox at the end of the film, a matter Brackett notes is left far more nebulous at the end of the novel. She also heightens the degree, in her script, to which Marlowe is not just sardonic but a smartass, which might well have been in part inspired by knowledge that Gould was meant to have the role, while retaining what Brackett sees as the most important aspect of the character, his basic uncompromising incorruptibility, his unwillingness to play along with those around him who want him to look the other way or go along with the gag even when it would be safer for him to do so. (I should admit at this point I remember the film, which I've seen about three times over the decades in its entirety, better than I do the novel, which I've read once thirty-plus years ago.) The film differs in notable ways from this draft of the script...Marty Augustine the gangster doesn't abuse his girlfriend-of-sorts as a way to get at Marlowe, and Altman's obsession with nudity, whether a thrown away joke as with Marlowe's neighbors or used to further heighten the insanity of Augustine in a setpiece in the film, is also missing from this script...though the abuse of his wife Eileen by the drunken bully Roger Wade is if anything more intense and vile in the script as written. (And how much Chandler's, or Brackett's, Roger Wade is meant to be after Hemingway is an interesting question.)

The utter concision of the dialog, and the grace with which the boiled-down version of the novel is conveyed in her script (Brackett notes that to truly film the novel as written, it would take at least five hours...perhaps a project someone should attempt), and the adeptness with which Brackett makes the adaptation believable as a contemporary story in 1972 is all very much worth experiencing firsthand, even, again, given that the PDF document is missing a few pages. Having read the novel or particularly seen the film will help with those elisions...and I have to wonder if the PDF document is missing the later pages through a slip-up on the part of the blogger. There are apparently a few other script drafts floating about from Brackett's career, but a formal, complete collection is more than overdue, given the importance of her work as a whole and of most of the films she scripted or wrote treatments for.

Stuart Dybek's Brass Knuckles is another odd choice, I suppose, even for the heavily crime-fiction-oriented FFB roundelay, as it's his first collection, from 1979, of poetry and prose-poetical vignettes. Divided into four sections, "Exile at 7", "The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street", "Grand Entrance" and "My Neighborhood", it's largely a set of evocations of the tougher parts of Chicago, in and around the Polish-American neighborhood where Dybek was raised. A lot of the ground tread here falls somewhere between the abuse of children and its consequences in Joyce Carol Oates's similar work and the self abuse of Charles Bukowski's, though the writer I'm most reminded of is Ed Gorman...even if Dybek is more a Romantic than Ed was, in several ways, and has some manic asides and foregrounded metaphors, such as the suggestion of a not completely bad marriage that has the diminutive groom standing for a while on his wedding cake, holding hands with the wax bride figurine, while his actual bride cavorts with most of the wedding party, that fit in well with the mythical allusions, gritty details and explorations of lust and frustration throughout the lives of the characters. And much of the book is very funny, only some of it tragic. 

Perhaps almost as sad as some of the more sober bits is the fate of even some of the colleges, much less their little magazines, that this work first appeared in, in the 1970s, though looking again I suppose it's just the Goddard Journal that would be utterly vanished now. Though perhaps it's telling in a small way that the book has seen its more recent edition from not the state-owned University of Pittsburgh Press, but Carnegie-Mellon's...

For more of today's books, please see Patti Abbott's blog.