Background

Charles William Brackett was born on November 26, 1892, in Saratoga Springs, New York. He was the son of Edgar Truman Brackett, a lawyer and New York State senator, and Mary Emma Corliss.

Education

After receiving a B. A. from Williams College in 1915, Brackett entered Harvard Law School. His studies were interrupted by World War I, in which he served as an assistant liaison officer on the staff of the French general Michel Henri Martin Coutanceau. During his miliatry service Brackett was decorated with the Médaille d'honneur en argent. After studying in Harvard, Brackett received his LL. B. in 1920, and then joined his father's law firm.

Career

Brackett's first novel, The Counsel of the Ungodly, appeared serially in the Saturday Evening Post in 1920. In the 1920's and early 1930's, Brackett published over thirty-five short stories and five more serialized novels, primarily in the Saturday Evening Post.

When his novel Week-end (1925) attracted the attention of Harold Ross, the editor of the New Yorker, Brackett was offered a post as the magazine's drama critic. He held this position from 1926 to 1929, but he also continued writing novels.

Brackett resigned from the New Yorker in 1929 to write full-time. In 1932, he accepted an offer to become a screenwriter for Paramount Pictures. After a six-week stint in Hollywood, he briefly returned East, then went back to the film industry.

His career blossomed when he was assigned by Paramount story editor Manny Wolf to collaborate with a young Viennese writer, Billy Wilder, in July 1936. Their first screenplay, Bluebeard's Eighth Wife (1938), began a fourteen-year, thirteen-film collaboration between Wilder and Brackett that made them one of the most famous screenwriting teams in Hollywood history, renowned as "the happiest couple in Hollywood. " After co-writing Midnight (1930) and, with Walter Reisch, Ninotchka (1939), for which they received an Academy Award nomination, Brackett and Wilder began to achieve creative independence, a status enjoyed by few screenwriters during the studio era.

Beginning with Five Graves to Cairo (1943), they became a writing-directing-producing team; both wrote, Wilder, directed, and Brackett produced.

Under this arrangement, they made their two most famous films.

The Lost Weekend (1945), a powerful film about an alcoholic writer (Ray Milland), won Oscars for best film, director, actor, and screenplay, while Sunset Boulevard (1950), a portrayal of the relationship between an aging movie queen (Gloria Swanson) and a youthful, down-and-out screenwriter (William Holden), won the respect of critics and earned three Oscars, including the award for best screenplay. Sunset Boulevard also marked the end of the Brackett-Wilder collaboration. The personalities and writing skills of Brackett and Wilder complemented one another. Bracket was calm, suave, and urbane; Wilder was buoyant and mercurial.

Whereas Wilder paced and talked incessantly while writing, Brackett preferred to relax on a couch, discarding some of Wilder's suggestions and writing down others as he thought about the development of the story and the tone of the dialogue. Wilder was the more cynical of the two, Brackett the more cautious. Wilder's biographer, Maurice Zolotow, has suggested that though Brackett seemed the more dependent member of the team, he was probably stronger and more stable than Wilder.

Brackett was active in the Screen Writers' Guild, serving as its president from 1938 to 1939. In 1949, he became president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, continuing in that position until 1955.

Brackett retired from Twentieth Century-Fox in 1962. Brackett retained his ties to Saratoga Springs throughout his life as a partner in the law firm of Brackett, Eddy, and Dorsey, and as vice-president of the Adirondack Trust Company in the same community.

Like a character in his novel Entirely Surrounded, he claimed to abhor physical exercise and was passionately devoted to cribbage. He died in Bel Air, Calif.

Achievements

• Charles Brackett achieved many accomplisments in various professional areas, but he was most successful as a movie screenwriter. By most film historians he is remembered as a successful member of the famous screenwriting team of Brackett and Wilder. Brackett's best-known films during this decade were Titanic (1953), for which Brackett, Walter Reisch, and Richard Breen received an Oscar for best screenplay, The King and I, as a producer, 1956, and Journey to the Center of the Earth, as producer-screenwriter, 1959. In 1957, he was given a special Oscar for outstanding service to the academy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Sunset Boulevard

    (Norma Desmond was a silent screen goddess but in fifties ...)

  • Best Picture Winners Spotlight Collection (The Sting / The Deer Hunter / The Lost Weekend)

    (The Sting: Winner of 7 Academy Awards, Paul Newman and Ro...)

  • Blue Denim

    (Two young teenagers faced with the coming of an unwanted ...)

  • Titanic (1953) Blu-ray

    (Passengers mingle and a couple bicker before the packed l...)

  • Jocelyn: A Play and Thirty Verses 1915

    (Originally published in 1915. This volume from the Cornel...)

  • Great Moment VHS

    (GUARANTEED!!!)

  • Sunset Boulevard
  • The Big Sleep (1946)

Connections

Brackett married Elizabeth Barrows Fletcher on June 2, 1919. They had two children.

Brackett's first wife died in 1948, and in 1953, he married her sister, Lillian Fletcher.

Father:

Edgar Truman Brackett

Mother:

Mary Emma Corliss

collaborator:

Billy Wilder

writer

Wife:

Lillian Fletcher

Wife:

Elizabeth Barrows Fletcher

References

• Talking Pictures. Screenwriters in the American Cinema 1927-1973.
• Billy Wilder in Hollywood (Limelight) by Maurice Zolotow (2004-08-01)