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Australian interview with Carrie Fisher

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 (Edited)

Last night I saw on Australian tv (ABC1 to be precise) a program call "A quiet word with Carrie Fisher". Basically it was a half hour interview with Fisher conducted by comedian/media personality Tony Martin done while Fisher is/was in Australia for her "Wishful Drinking" tour (I'm pretty sure it's still going on she's been here for months).

ABC is pretty good at putting its content online yet I don't see anything yet; video or transcript.

I found it pretty entertaining and I'd thought I share the interesting bits.

The greatest thing she revealed was whilst talking about some of the terrible movies she's made during the height of her drug addiction (movies I've never heard of) she mentioned that none are as bad as the Star Wars holiday special.

Tony and her joked how bad it is and she talked about how George has been going around "pulling" all copies from existence but she has one. Like a legit copy from Lucasfilm. She said she asked for one and was given one as part payment for doing the 2004 dvd commentaries. Go Carrie.

Semantics, but I'm interpreting her words though because she said it was part of her payment when she did "voice over" for the last re-release.

She commented on her coke habit and drug use during filming of ESB making headlines recently saying it's a pretty slow news day when it's a 30 year old story about an admitted drug addict. She also mentioned that the crew member she did coke with on ESB was her stand-in. Carrie said her name (the stand-in) wasn't "Suzy Coke" for nothing . I may have gotten the Suzy part wrong.

They talked about her writing and Postcards from the Edge and, this might not be interesting to anyone else but to me it is, her "script doctoring". When people do uncreditied script work it's usually not openly taked about so I love hearing anything about it.

She said she is usually brought in to punch up female characters (make them stronger characters, sassier and what not) and their dialogue and work on love scenes. Three projects she mentioned working on were Hook, Lethal Weapon 3 and Sister Act. No mention of The Phantom Menace but I could see George bringing her on to work on Padme making her more Leia like. I'm not going to comment on whether she succeed or failed in that regard.

When they talked about the endurance of the original Star Wars movies it was said it was down to the core three characters and the humour and personality she, Harrison and Mark infused them with. When Tony Martin criticised the new movies as failing in this regard where characters just seemed the be talking about trade tariffs and such Carrie didn't get on board with critising them only saying that George was creating a more visual experience.

That's all the Star Wars stuff the talked about but I'm not going to get into the rest like Carrie talking to Cary Grant about LSD and going on coke binges with John Belushi.

 

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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Ah ha, thanks Johnny Ringo. International viewers would have to watch it using an Australian proxy.

"Well here's a big bag of rock salt" - Patton Oswalt

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There's a documentary about independent writers trying to get their scripts produced. One of them goes to Carrie Fisher (his script is not produced), another gets his movie made (straight to DVD a couple years ago), and the third cracks up and stops participating with the documentary crew. She was introduced as "Carrie Fisher, script doctor," with no hint of her previous career, and we see her talking the writer through the changes she recommends. Kinda neat.

"It's the stoned movie you don't have to be stoned for." -- Tom Shales on Star Wars
Scruffy's gonna die the way he lived.
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I'll try firing up Bingowings 4 and moving into the Antipodes to see if I can watch this, I always like a Carrie Fisher interview.

Her chats with Ruby Wax are always entertaining.

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Scruffy said:

There's a documentary about independent writers trying to get their scripts produced. One of them goes to Carrie Fisher (his script is not produced), another gets his movie made (straight to DVD a couple years ago), and the third cracks up and stops participating with the documentary crew. She was introduced as "Carrie Fisher, script doctor," with no hint of her previous career, and we see her talking the writer through the changes she recommends. Kinda neat.

Sounds interesting.  Any idea what it was called?

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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreams_on_Spec

Dreams on Spec is a 2007 American documentary film that profiles the struggles and triumphs of emerging Hollywood screenwriters. It was written and directed by Daniel J. Snyder, who learned first-hand about the screenwriter's travails in the late 1980s when he was a teenager working alongside aspiring writer/directors Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary in the famed Video Archives video store in Manhattan Beach, California.