Carrie Fisher's Unsung Legacy as a Script Doctor
Extraordinaire
By Maddy Myers
The Mary Sue, themarysue.com
November 9, 2015
It's time for another TMS video history lesson, this time
about Carrie Fisher's unsung skills as one of Hollywood's
most notable script doctors! The video above details
Fisher's career history working as a punch-up writer on
some of the greatest films of the 90s -- as well as a few
unsalvageable stinkers. Read the transcript for our video
below.
**
Carrie Fisher is still best known for her role as
Princess Leia, in spite of the fact that her legacy in
Hollywood -- both on-screen and behind the scenes --
stretches way beyond her Star Wars debut decades ago.
Fisher deserves to be remembered, but not necessarily as
the gold bikini-wearing sex symbol that will likely
pervade her search engine results for decades to come, in
spite of her own wish that she'd fought against that
outfit. In that spirit, let's give Carrie Fisher a little
more recognition for a very different and very
significant role that she took on in the world of film,
over and over again: script doctor.
Script doctoring, or script consulting, is a skill that
often goes uncredited and unacknowledged in Hollywood.
Writers will get hired to polish up an existing
screenplay; just like doctors, they diagnose problems and
suggest solutions. In the case of script doctoring, that
means anything from adding in a few new jokes, to
implementing massive structural changes or reworking
entire characters and scenes.
Carrie Fisher's career as a script doctor became the
stuff of legend in the 1990s. Fisher was responsible for
fixing up Hook in 1991, Sister Act in 1992, Lethal Weapon
3 in 1992 and The Wedding Singer in 1998. In 1992,
Entertainment Weekly called Carrie Fisher "one of the
most sought after doctors in town" -- high praise, and
one of the only accolades that Fisher would ever receive
in printed form, given that she was not credited by name
as a writer for any of the films in which she had a hand.
Continues at:
http://www.themarysue.com/carrie-fisher-script-doctor/
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