film of The Long Goodbye to be made, although there had been a television production in 1954 with Dick Powell. By the time of Chandler's death, the only novels of his that had not been made into films were The Long Goodbye and Playback. In October 1965 it was announced the rights to Goodbye were held by producers Elliott Kastner and Jerry Gershwin who would make it the following year in Los Angeles and Mexico. In 1967 producer Gabriel Katzka had the rights. He wanted to make it as a follow up to their adaptation of The Little Sister (which became Marlowe). Stirling Silliphant, who wrote Marlowe, did a script. However the film was not made and MGM let their option lapse. Producers Jerry Bick and Elliott Kastner bought the rights back and made a production deal with the United Artists distribution company for them to finance. Sales of Chandler had been consistent over the years and in the early 1970s the author's books were selling as much as when Chandler was alive. Leigh Brackett They commissioned the screenplay from Leigh Brackett, who had been Kastner's client when he was an agent and had written the script for the Humphrey Bogart version of The Big Sleep. Brackett: ... set the deal with United Artists, and they had a commitment for a film with Elliott Gould, so either you take Elliott Gould or you don't make the film. Elliott Gould was not exactly my idea of Philip Marlowe, but anyway there we were. Also, as far as the story was concerned, time had gone by—it was twenty-odd years since the novel was written, and the private eye had become a cliché. It had become funny. You had to watch out what you were doing. If you had Humphrey Bogart at the same age that he was when he did The Big Sleep, he wouldn't do it the same way. Also, we were faced with a technical problem of this enormous book, which was the longest one Chandler ever wrote. It's tremendously involuted and convoluted. If you did it the way he wrote it, you would have a five-hour film. Brian G. Hutton, who had made a number of movies for Kastner, was originally attached as director and Brackett says Hutton wanted the script structured so that "the heavy had planned the whole thing from the start" but when writing it she