This might be old news but I just stumbled across it today.
“The first draft of Brick was written on a Mac SE on the poo colored carpeted floor of a cramped Santa Monica apartment during a summer of post collegiate unemployment in 1996. Although it was always intended to be a screenplay, it was first put to paper in prose as a glorified treatment which I enjoy calling a novella. The reasons for this
circuitous writing process were twofold: first I was very intentionally cribbing from the novels of Dashiell Hammett, and thought that doing a prose pass imitating as best I could his style of writing would help shape the thing as a whole. Second, I did not own a professional screenwriting program, and had to format the whole damn thing using tabs in Word, so the less I goofed around with it in screenplay format the better.
The novella and screenplay are here for the curious. Both are untouched and unrevised, presented warts and all. The novella includes some new original illustrations by the immensely talented Naeim Khavari.
I have annotated the script with a few footnotes, which I hope prove more interesting than distracting.”
Still one of my favorite films.
