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Epiphany
by Michael Connelly
The Afterword in No Good From A Corpse, by Leigh Brackett. Limited edition volume, published by Dennis McMillan Publications, 1999.
I think that maybe all writers, when and if they look back over their lives and work, come across the "epiphany" that moment of clear, cold understanding when they know for better or worse that this must be what they do with their lives. For me, Leigh Brackett is inextricably linked to my moment, my epiphany.
It happened to me, for better or worse, when I was in my second year of college. The son of a builder who was the son of a builder, I was following a curriculum that would lead me to a
degree in what else? building construction. I wasn't sure that this was what my destiny was to be, but everybody needs a direction at that age or so they told you at the registrar's office.
I was taking classes like Building Construction Science 101 (yes, it is a science in Florida) and Introduction to Concrete. (No lie featuring the seven different kinds of concrete.) And
so it was no wonder that I carried a failing average and sought almost nightly respite from this in the bars, bookstores, and movie theaters of Gainesville, Florida.
This is where Leigh
Brackett comes in. One night the dollar movie at the Student Union was the Robert Altman film "The Long Goodbye", based on the Raymond Chandler novel and written for the screen by Leigh Brackett. Elliot
Gould played the lead, the private eye named Philip Marlowe.
I went by myself.
The films at the union were usually introduced by somebody either teacher or student from the school's fledgling film school which was housed within the English Department. That evening's introduction came just before the lights went down. I don't remember whether it was a teacher or student but I remember that the man who introduced the film, which was a year or so old at the time, said the film had raised the ire and protest of the Chandler/Marlowe purists because the Marlowe character in the film did not follow or have the same moral fiber of the Marlowe in the books, because Brackett/Altman/Gould had messed with the man. They even gave him a pet cat, and the real Marlowe (fictionally speaking) wasn't a cat man.
Well, while I had grown up reading crime novels and crime news rather voraciously, the work of Raymond Chandler had somehow escaped me until that point. I had never heard of Philip
Marlowe, let alone his moral fiber or his lack of a cat. So I watched the film and I fell in love with it for what it was; a movie, an entertainment.
Gould's laconic though cynical Marlowe was fine by me and the story by Chandler/Brackett kept me in the seat the whole time. Shot in contemporary L.A., the city was portrayed as this strange, attractive mix of corruption and naivetι under a blanket of smog.
The next night I shirked my concrete homework and came back and watched it again. The next day I went to the bookstore and got the book it was the movie tie-in with Elliot Gould.
I read "The Long Goodbye" and that's when the epiphany hit me. I knew. I wanted to write.
I wanted to write stories and characters like this.
Within a week I had read every novel Chandler had published. Then I read "The Long Goodbye" once more. Sure the book was different from the movie, but they were just two different ways of telling the same story of friendship and trust betrayed, of hope shrouded in cynicism.
My building construction days were over after that thanks to an epiphany I can trace to Leigh Brackett's screenplay.
I dropped concrete and switched to a major comprised of journalism and creative writing. And I kept rereading the Chandler books all the time.
Many years later I moved to Los Angeles to
practice journalism and to hopefully start writing fiction. It had been almost fifteen years since I had seen the film "The Long Goodbye" and it wasn't available yet on videocassette. One day I was
looking through the listing of revival films in the paper and there it was double-billed with "Chinatown" at a downtown theater. I went by myself and watched them both.
Brackett's film still had its hold on me. I remember that night very clearly watching two inspiring films in the dark, both about the city in which I now lived. It wasn't long after that that I started writing a novel that would be my first published work.
Now the film is available on videocassette and I own it. I take it out from time to time and watch all or just part of it. I think I love Brackett's Marlowe as much as I do
Chandler's.
They are different characters, different men, but beneath the layers of cynicism and wisecracks they both have a heart made of hope. They both have inspired me in different ways. Without one I would not have had the other. I would have had no epiphany.
Michael Connelly, Los Angeles, October 15, 1998
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