Carrie Fisher’s Unsung Legacy
While best known as an actor, it shouldn’t go unacknowledged that Carrie Fisher was also ONE HELL of a writer. As a matter of fact, she had a hand in writing some of the best movies in Hollywood.
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.
So now you know. Carrie was a brilliant writer, and her legacy will live on forever in many, many different forms. We may never know just how many movies she worked on and fixed up!
