See Carrie Fisher’s fascinating handwritten script notes for ‘Star Wars: Empire Strikes Back’
Recognised as the greatest sci-fi flick of all time, as well as one of cinema’s most influential movies ever made, Irvin Kershner’s Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, co-written by George Lucas, is an icon of 20th-century cinema. Countless aspects make up the beauty of Star Wars, but it is the beloved lead cast of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher who have given the franchise so much longevity.
For Fisher, Star Wars was undoubtedly the high point of her career, despite the fact that she would later work with Woody Allen and John Landis, appearing in Hannah and Her Sisters and The Blues Brothers, respectively. Even still, however, the true extent of Fisher’s influence on the film industry cannot be truly appreciated until you peer behind the curtain of her acting career and focus on her work as an unlikely script doctor and ghostwriter.
A lover of literature, Fisher explained her first ghostwriting gig to the Phoenix New Times, noting: “I read mostly fiction and then it went to obligation. I was asked to write a book based on an interview I did for Esquire…I was asked to adapt that book and then I started doing rewrites”.
Whilst she would not take her role as a script doctor seriously until the 1990s, this didn’t stop Fisher from tinkering with each and every piece of dialogue she was handed, even in her early career. Despite the Star Wars movies being among her first-ever roles, Fisher would tweak the notoriously dodgy dialogue work of The Empire Strike Back’s writers George Lucas, Lawrence Kasdan and Leigh Brackett.
Speaking about how she would tweak such lines later in the interview with the Phoenix New Times, she stated: “It is easier as an actor to go into rewriting because you know what would fit into your mouth dialogue wise. We would tell George Lucas, ‘You can type this […] but you can’t say it’”.
Her efforts tweaking the script materialised in a piece of undisputed movie history, with The Prop Store sharing Fisher’s annotated copy of the original screenplay. As the stores representative, Brandon Alinger explains: “What makes it wonderful is not just the fact that she used it, but the fact that it was a working copy of the script and she’s put handwritten markup in it throughout, there are notes in pencil and in pen, there’s dialogue that’s been crossed out, there’s suggestions there’s notes about character, there’s notes about emotions”.
Containing scribbles, dialogue rewrites and much more, the annotated script is fascinating, to say the least, particularly as it reveals that Fisher was responsible for several iconic lines, such as when Harrison Ford’s Han Solo says, “Never tell me the odds” in The Empire Strikes Back.
In addition to Star Wars, Fisher would later become one of the most sought-after script doctors in Hollywood, working with Lucas again in 1992 for his TV series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles as well as with Steven Spielberg in 1991 for Hook.
