By Erin Free
FilmInk salutes the work of creatives who have never truly received the credit that they deserve. In this installment: actress turned screenwriter Leigh Chapman, who penned Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, The Octagon, Steel and Truck Turner.
Up until fairly recently, the number of women working in exploitation, action, and genre cinema has been criminally, astoundingly, and embarrassingly small. In our own small way, we’ve tried to shed a little light on the important, often sadly under-celebrated female figures who’ve toiled in these male-dominated fields. In the Unsung Auteurs column, we’ve happily crowed the praises of women like Barbara Peeters, Stephanie Rothman, Mary Lambert, Katt Shea, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Lexi Alexander and more. We would now like to add to this list (via a tip-off in Stephen Vagg’s feature “Beach Party Movies Part Three: Over Exposure”) the late Leigh Chapman, who was also something of a rarity in that she made a successful move into the field of screenwriting after enjoying a solid career as an actress. Though appropriately eulogised by The Hollywood Reporter as “a pioneering female screenwriter in the action-adventure genre”, Leigh Chapman remains largely unknown today, except to hardcore cineastes and serious exploitation completists.
Born Rosa Lee Chapman in 1939 in Kannapolis, North Carolina, Chapman married immediately after graduating from college, and decamped to Hollywood with her new wannabe actor husband. Chapman got a job in the secretarial pool at the powerful William Morris Agency, a major force in Hollywood when it came to the brokering of talent. Chapman’s marriage didn’t last, but she parlayed her job at the agency into an acting career, scoring jobs both on the stage and the small screen, booking jobs on popular shows like McHale’s Navy, Dr. Kildare, Combat! and The Wild, Wild West. While appearing regularly on TV as an actress, the adventurous Chapman developed an interest in the way episodic television worked, and gradually gravitated toward screenwriting. “I was dating a writer, and he paid me to type some scripts,” Chapman told The Classic TV History Blog in 2015. “And as of about script number six, I thought, ‘You know, I think I understand how this works.’ I watched this particular show to check out the format, wrote a script, and sold it.”
That spec script was for the cop show Burke’s Law, a programme on which Chapman had previously appeared as an actress. Chapman made her big screen writing debut with Robert Parr’s 1964 beach party flick A Swingin’ Summer (much more about that right here) while she continued to work as an actress on episodic television. Chapman famously appeared on The Monkees (essaying a glamorous movie star, no less) and scored a regular role on the hit TV show The Man From U.N.C.L.E, playing savvy secretary to Robert Vaughn’s suave Bond-derived spy Napoleon Solo. Despite her acting success, the diligent and hard-working Chapman forged on with her writing career, and after a number of her on-assignment feature film scripts ultimately went unproduced, Chapman started to work solidly behind the scenes on television, penning episodes of My Favorite Martian, Mission: Impossible, The Wild Wild West and Mod Squad.
Chapman really found her footing as a writer, however, in the wild and woolly 1970s. Under the pen name of Jerry Wilkes, Chapman contributed to the script for 1972’s Truck Turner, a swaggering slab of Blaxploitation starring Isaac Hayes (as a hard AF bounty hunter) and directed by Jonathan Kaplan (White Line Fever, The Accused). This tough, fast-paced actioner was a perfect indication of where Chapman wanted to be in terms of genre and style. “It’s just my temperament,” Chapman told The Classic TV History Blog in 2015 of her attraction to action cinema. “I couldn’t write a romantic comedy or a chick flick or a love story if my life depended on it. I mean, I could write a love story, but it would have to be like a Casablanca type of love story, and some people would have to die. If I analyse this – and I have – growing up the way I did, my alter ego is male. I decided very early on that guys got to have all the fun. I mean, women, what did they do? They fall in love, they get married, they have kids. There are exceptional women in this world, yes there are. But when I was growing up, they were just totally boring…I like larger-than-life characters who do dangerous, heroic things. And that, to me, means men.”
Though she publicly shrugged off any suggestions that she might have been a feminist, Leigh Chapman did, however, co-create a great female character with the barnstorming 1974 exploitation classic Dirty Mary Crazy Larry, a car-crazy smash-up in which the great Susan George (Straw Dogs) lights up the screen opposite Peter Fonda as two lovers on the run. Though a seminal drive-in exploitation car flick of the 1970s, Chapman (and director John Hough too, for that matter) hasn’t received anything even close to the praise she deserves for her contributions to the hard-charging Dirty Mary Crazy Larry. That same year, Chapman also penned the barely remembered How Come Nobody’s On Our Side?, another double-act action romp, this time starring 1970s mainstay Adam Roarke and cult hero Larry Bishop (the fast-talking son of famed Rat Pack comedian Joey Bishop) as two stuntmen who turn their backs on Hollywood.
From there, Leigh Chapman wrote or co-wrote a consistently fascinating collection of films, including 1979’s Boardwalk (a crushing urban crime panic flick starring Lee Strasberg and Ruth Gordon), 1979’s Steel (a crackerjack action drama in which construction legend Lee Majors is hired by Jennifer O’Neill to lead a team to finish an unfinishable skyscraper), 1980’s The Octagon (a terrific and justifiably famed early Chuck Norris ninja-heavy actioner), 1981’s King Of The Mountain (a superior street racing actioner starring Harry Hamlin, Deborah Van Valkenburgh and Dennis Hopper) and 1990’s Impulse (an excellent undercover cop thriller starring Theresa Russell and directed by Sondra Locke).
Leigh Chapman might have downplayed her position as a feminist ground-breaker, but her impressive work in the action and exploitation fields, along with her quietly assembled list of secret “script doctor” credits (including a major polish on Robert Aldrich’s 1981 female wrestling flick …All The Marbles), mark her as a true one-off. If that’s not interesting enough in itself, Chapman was also a highly accomplished underwater photographer who staged regular exhibitions of her work. A gifted multi-hyphenate of the first order, Leigh Chapman passed away in 2014 at the age of 75, a true Unsung Auteur.
If you liked this story, check out our features on other unsung auteurs Joe Camp, John Patrick Shanley, William Peter Blatty, Peter Clifton, Peter R. Hunt, Shaun Grant, James B. Harris, Gerald Wilson, Patricia Birch, Buzz Kulik, Kris Kristofferson, Rick Rosenthal, Kirsten Smith & Karen McCullah, Jerrold Freeman, William Dear, Anthony Harvey, Douglas Hickox, Karen Arthur, Larry Peerce, Tony Goldwyn, Brian G. Hutton, Shelley Duvall, Robert Towne, David Giler, William D. Wittliff, Tom DeSimone, Ulu Grosbard, Denis Sanders, Daryl Duke, Jack McCoy, James William Guercio, James Goldstone, Daniel Nettheim, Goran Stolevski, Jared & Jerusha Hess, William Richert, Michael Jenkins, Robert M. Young, Robert Thom, Graeme Clifford, Frank Howson, Oliver Hermanus, Jennings Lang, Matthew Saville, Sophie Hyde, John Curran, Jesse Peretz, Anthony Hayes, Stuart Blumberg, Stewart Copeland, Harriet Frank Jr & Irving Ravetch, Angelo Pizzo, John & Joyce Corrington, Robert Dillon, Irene Kamp, Albert Maltz, Nancy Dowd, Barry Michael Cooper, Gladys Hill, Walon Green, Eleanor Bergstein, William W. Norton, Helen Childress, Bill Lancaster, Lucinda Coxon, Ernest Tidyman, Shauna Cross, Troy Kennedy Martin, Kelly Marcel, Alan Sharp, Leslie Dixon, Jeremy Podeswa, Ferd & Beverly Sebastian, Anthony Page, Julie Gavras, Ted Post, Sarah Jacobson, Anton Corbijn, Gillian Robespierre, Brandon Cronenberg, Laszlo Nemes, Ayelat Menahemi, Ivan Tors, Amanda King & Fabio Cavadini, Cathy Henkel, Colin Higgins, Paul McGuigan, Rose Bosch, Dan Gilroy, Tanya Wexler, Clio Barnard, Robert Aldrich, Maya Forbes, Steven Kastrissios, Talya Lavie, Michael Rowe, Rebecca Cremona, Stephen Hopkins, Tony Bill, Sarah Gavron, Martin Davidson, Fran Rubel Kuzui, Elliot Silverstein, Liz Garbus, Victor Fleming, Barbara Peeters, Robert Benton, Lynn Shelton, Tom Gries, Randa Haines, Leslie H. Martinson, Nancy Kelly, Paul Newman, Brett Haley, Lynne Ramsay, Vernon Zimmerman, Lisa Cholodenko, Robert Greenwald, Phyllida Lloyd, Milton Katselas, Karyn Kusama, Seijun Suzuki, Albert Pyun, Cherie Nowlan, Steve Binder, Jack Cardiff, Anne Fletcher ,Bobcat Goldthwait, Donna Deitch, Frank Pierson, Ann Turner, Jerry Schatzberg, Antonia Bird, Jack Smight, Marielle Heller, James Glickenhaus, Euzhan Palcy, Bill L. Norton, Larysa Kondracki, Mel Stuart, Nanette Burstein, George Armitage, Mary Lambert, James Foley, Lewis John Carlino, Debra Granik, Taylor Sheridan, Laurie Collyer, Jay Roach, Barbara Kopple, John D. Hancock, Sara Colangelo, Michael Lindsay-Hogg, Joyce Chopra, Mike Newell, Gina Prince-Bythewood, John Lee Hancock, Allison Anders, Daniel Petrie Sr., Katt Shea, Frank Perry, Amy Holden Jones, Stuart Rosenberg, Penelope Spheeris, Charles B. Pierce, Tamra Davis, Norman Taurog, Jennifer Lee, Paul Wendkos, Marisa Silver, John Mackenzie, Ida Lupino, John V. Soto, Martha Coolidge, Peter Hyams, Tim Hunter, Stephanie Rothman, Betty Thomas, John Flynn, Lizzie Borden, Lionel Jeffries, Lexi Alexander, Alkinos Tsilimidos, Stewart Raffill, Lamont Johnson, Maggie Greenwald and Tamara Jenkins.
