Bradford Swain Linaweaver (September 1, 1952 – August 29, 2019) was an American science fiction writer, film producer, actor, and magazine publisher. Over a 40-year career, he completed a body of work including novels, short stories, and screenplays.
Early years and education
Brad Linaweaver was born September 1, 1952, in Washington, North Carolina, the only child of Melville and June Linaweaver (née Swain). The family moved to the outskirts of Orlando, Florida in 1958, when Brad was six years old, where his father engaged in real estate development and investments. Linaweaver attended Orange County public schools, before attending Florida State University. He obtained his MFA degree in a program for poets and writers from Rollins College. Although he spent the better part of his career in Hollywood, he eventually settled at the family lake front home in Apopka, which his father designed and built shortly after moving to Florida in 1958.
Career
Political essayist
In late 1970, during his freshman year at Florida State University, Linaweaver joined the local college chapter of the national conservative organization Young Americans for Freedom (YAF). Both conservative and libertarian ideologies were represented within the local YAF chapter, prompting Linaweaver to begin writing and debating about the various political philosophies competing for followers on college campuses at that time. This eventually led to his first sale to a national publication, a short article The Wish, which made the case for capitalism over socialism. The article appeared in The New Guard, the magazine published by YAF. Subsequent articles in that publication drew the attention of public intellectual, conservative author, and YAF founder William F. Buckley. Linaweaver and Buckley subsequently struck up a friendship and correspondence, which lasted decades until Buckley's death in 2008. Through that relationship, Linaweaver eventually published essays in Buckley's magazine National Review. Unknown to him at the time, Linaweaver's writing also caught the attention of Ronald Reagan. In 1976, Reagan devoted one of his radio show broadcasts to a discussion of The Wish, praising Linaweaver in the process. Reagan summed up his commentary on Linaweaver with the line, "How right he is!" The radio broadcast is included in the Reagan CD set In His Own Voice and in the book Stories in His Own Hand: The Everyday Wisdom of Ronald Reagan. Linaweaver didn't learn about the endorsement from Reagan until decades later. He mused that if he had known about it earlier, it might have changed the trajectory of his career path. "I never would have had my career in Hollywood. I might have been a boring political hack in Washington, trying to capitalize on the Reagan endorsement to be a political speechwriter. I'd be a worse libertarian than I am today." Instead, Linaweaver soon took up writing science fiction, and stories for movies, inserting his libertarian ideology into the works whenever feasible. In a 2007 interview, he noted that "I've been getting libertarian messages into everything for a quarter of a century". But, he observed, not every genre lent itself to his form of political promotionalism. "My involvement with movies has been mostly low-budget, exploitation stuff where ideology is not that relevant. When you're writing science fiction for a New York publisher, you actually achieve something when you slip in a libertarian idea. But with independent, exploitation, low-budget Hollywood, there's already an anti-authoritarian attitude. That culture is by nature fairly libertarian. There's less need to be a propagandist."
Film
Linaweaver began his film career in 1978 with an original story credit for The Brain Leeches, the film that also jump started the career of prodigious Hollywood director producer (and sometimes professional wrestler) Fred Olen Ray. The Brain Leeches was completed, on budget, for $298.00. His association with Ray continued throughout Linaweaver's life, and included work on Jack-O which Linaweaver wrote and Ray produced, as well as later projects like Super Shark, a 2011 Ray film where Linaweaver was executive producer. Linaweaver's long association with independent film also included writing credits on low budget direct-to-video titles like The Boneyard Collection, Space Babes Meet the Monsters and The Low Budget Time Machine. Linaweaver's association with Ray, and others, led to a number of small acting roles, both uncredited and 16 credited in numerous independent films.