The Princess and the Pen: How Carrie Fisher Secretly Helped Write Most of the 90s
What is the best way to remember a woman as iconic as Carrie Fisher? For many, her career can be summed up by the six year stretch from 1977 to 1983 and her unforgettable performances as Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy. However, that discounts much of the terrific acting she did outside of a galaxy far far away in movies like Hannah and Her Sisters, When Harry Met Sally, or The Blues Brothers (Check out a more comprehensive list here). Even when taking all that into account, we have only scratched the surface of Fisher's impact.
Throughout the years, Fisher found tremendous success as an author, penning several semi-autobiographical novels like 1993's Delusions of Grandma, and 1987's Postcards from the Edge, the latter of which she also adapted into a successful Meryl Streep vehicle in 1990. In the late 2000s, she moved away from fiction and began her next phase as a witty and heart-breakingly honest memoirist. Her first memoir, Wishful Drinking, was based on a one woman show that ran on and off-Broadway from 2006 to 2010. She followed that success with Shockaholic in 2011, and this year's The Princess Diarist, which made headlines for a section in which she cheekily admits to an affair with then-married Harrison Ford during the filming of Star Wars.
The most interesting, and probably least widely known, part of her career came in the nineties and early aughts when Fisher built a reputation as Hollywood's go-to script doctor. For those who aren't familiar, studios often hire un-credited script doctors to re-write dialogue and scenes in scripts they are producing. According to the Writer's Guild, a scriptwriter can only get credit for a screenplay if they are responsible for at least 50% of an original screenplay or 33% of an adapted screenplay. So these punch-up artists would get hired, smooth out the screenplay, and forego credit as long as they were paid buckets of money. People like Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing, The Social Network) and Joss Whedon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Marvel's The Avengers) worked in this sphere long before they became household names.
Fisher's stint as a script doctor really began after her work on the Postcards From the Edge film in 1990, although she had previously worked on the scripts for her acting jobs. She gained a reputation as a writer with a talent for dialogue who understood women, the irony of which was probably lost on the studio execs. From Postcards, she was hired to iron out the dialogue for Julia Roberts' Tinker Bell in Spielberg's Hook. She then worked on Lethal Weapon 3 and Sister Act in 1992, both gigantic hits. Having proven herself, the studios just kept throwing work at her. Throughout the nineties and beyond she wrote for Made in America, The Last Action Hero, My Girl 2, So I Married an Axe Murderer, The River Wild, Outbreak, The Mirror Has Two Faces, and The Wedding Singer, among many others. At the behest of George Lucas, she even did some work on the Star Wars prequels, although her deft wit couldn't save those turkeys (I'm just going to assume she had nothing to do with Anakin's anti-romance pillow talk from Episode II, "I don't like sand. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere." Ugh.).
By nature, a script doctor will never get the credit that he or she deserves. So I'm not surprised Fisher's lucrative fifteen year run is often overlooked in favor of her credited acting and writing. That she lasted so long in a field that can chew up and spit out even the strongest writers illustrates the tenacity and steely resolve with which she attacked life. What I think this side of her career highlights is just how talented and multifaceted she was as an artist and an icon. At nearly 700 words, this article still hasn't touched on her amazing work as a feminist and mental health spokesperson, and that is because her life was so grand and well-rounded that several books, as she proved, wouldn't be enough to sum her up.
In closing, I'd like to address that script page from Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back that has been circulating around the internet since yesterday. While the page is somewhat authentic (it was featured in the thoroughly researched The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back), it is not actually edited by Fisher. In a 2008 interview with the Phoenix New Times, Fisher states that she didn't start writing dialogue for Star Wars until the "third film." The real editor there is unknown, but would more likely be director Irvin Kershner, writer Lawrence Kasdan, or even Harrison Ford, who was known to attack his dialogue with a red pen. Which is a shame, because it would be a great illustration of Fisher's sought-after talent. Her pleasantly caustic intelligence and biting satirical wit will leave a giant Sarlacc pit-sized hole in the creative world. Hopefully, her example will inspire other amazing female writers and thinkers to try to fill it. For now, we can simply look back fondly at her amazing and brutally honest creative legacy, while she is off painting the stars in a galaxy far far away.
