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Carrie Fisher

“You’re A Jittery Little Thing, Aren’t You?” (an interview with Carrie Fisher)

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A.)     Quote From Princess Leia In Return Of The Jedi

or

B.)     The First Thing Carrie Fisher Said To Bill Pote

 

Bill Pote, Carrie Fisher And J.T. Ryder

The oddly arranged living room held treasures and memorabilia that competed for attention so ferociously that it was difficult to focus in on one particular item. Celebrities smiled forth, frozen in frames strewn about shelves and tables. R2D2 sat on top of an old suitcase, peeking out from behind a leather couch as I walk in and a lone coffee table cascaded with various items, including cans of Coke Zero and a prescription bottle filled with M&Ms. The only thing that shattered the illusion of entering an eccentrically rich crazy cat-woman’s home was the glaring spotlights…and the 1,300 or so seats that were lurking out in the darkness. Of course, this was not someone’s home: this was the set of Carrie Fisher’s one woman show, Wishful Drinking.

Bill Pote (the über brain of Dayton Most Metro) and I were granted an audience with the princess and she did not keep her diligent followers waiting. She breezed onto the stage as naturally as most of us cross through our living room. Bill tried to ply Miss Fisher with cookies from Ghostlight Coffee & Thistle Confections, the fantasies of his youth playing through his head. Luckily, Miss Fisher was not aware that he had worn his favorite Star Wars underwear for the occasion…you know…the ones that have Yoda saying, “Size matters not. Judge me by my size, do you?”

Anyway, after Bill presented her with the cookies and a list of things to do in Dayton while she was here, we dove right into the interview rather quickly…

Bill: So, J.T. here interviewed you on the phone a couple of weeks ago…

J.T.: Yeah, you had just gotten back from overseas. You sounded sleepy.

Carrie: Yeah, I had just gotten back from Asia. It was very exciting. Which part of Asia was I getting back from?

J.T.: Japan.

Carrie: Oh, Japan!

J.T.: Coming back from the ‘celebrity lap dance,’  is, I think, the way you put it. I was talking with someone, another writer, last night about you and one of the things he brought up was something that I hadn’t noticed.  I had to go back and reread some of your fictionalized work. He was amazed with your dialogues and the natural way in which it flows. Is it so natural because it is based on real conversations?

Carrie: Well, a lot of it is, but I also think it’s a self consciousnesses, like you are sort of watching yourself or listening to yourself. I would also say that I write some of the stuff that I wish I had said or something that I didn’t say in that context and so I drag it over.

J.T.: That is probably the more fun part of writing. Well, he was just talking about the natural flow and the way that you craft your writing. Is all that natural or something that you have been honing?

Carrie: Well, I fell in love with words as a kid and I used to go through books and underline things. Really, I like wordplay more, but that’s also how I talk. I talk in wordplay. I once saw a line of mine, although I don’t know that they knew that it was mine, that said, “Start putting the ‘fun’ in ‘funeral.’” I hear words and they break down automatically.

J.T.: Right. Bill can attest to this: I don’t speak in the same way that I write. Most people who have read something I have written before meeting me don’t believe that I wrote it when they do meet me.

Carrie: Some of my writing isn’t how I talk.

J.T.: Well, with the show, the connectivity that you have with the audience is amazing. How do you get that when most of the events that you’re talking about are so disparate from most people’s experiences?

Carrie: Well, I don’t think that they are necessarily. Also, it’s not so much what your experiences are, it’s how it hits you. I mean, everyone has had, from a certain slant, a weird childhood. It may not be exactly like mine and it probably isn’t, but from a certain slant, you’re going to have funny stories.

J.T.: So it’s based off of the emotion rather than the event.

Carrie: Definitely!

J.T.: So how are you finding the Dayton audience’s responding?

Carrie: They are fantastic!

J.T.: Just as receptive?

Carrie: Beyond receptive! Last night they were talking back! A lot!

Bill: I know that we have a thing about sex and nakedness here in Dayton, Ohio…

Carrie: Apparently! That was what was hilarious about it. The questions that they asked like, “Was he naked?”, “Were you naked?” That’s where you mind goes. If you find a dead body, they’re usually not naked. (Writer’s Note: A reference to Carrie waking up next to the lifeless body of Republican Party media adviser R. Gregory Stevens who died from a OxyContin/cocaine overdose in her bed)

Bill: That’s a great way to start the show too. It kind of lets you know that…

Carrie: Yeah, “This is where we are at and it’s going to get more normal from here…but not much.”

I know this probably isn't the time nor the place, but looking at these pictures, I believe I am going bald.

J.T.: Well, Daytonians aren’t the only nudity focused people. Look at George Lucas’ No Underwear In Space Theory… (Writer’s Note: According to Lucasian Physics, one would face many different pressure changes while tooling around in space and with all the expansion and contraction of the human body under these conditions, you would be strangled by your underwear. I think that this is based upon twisted yet justified fantasies and not on any kind of scientific protocols.)

Carrie: That’s what he said. I think it just destroyed the line of that stupid white dress and then if people were aware that you were wearing a bra, they wouldn’t accept that you were Darth Vader’s daughter. No, I think not.

J.T.: True. With Shockaholic, is that kind of a stepping stone to the next memoir?

Carrie: God no! I think that I’ve said about all I can say.

J.T.: Really?

Carrie: Well, about…the stuff that I’ve written about that was the toughest is that I exposed my daughter to any kind of drug abuse and it would be something that you would figure would happen, (whispering) but I didn’t do a lot. The fact that it happened at all is probably the thing that is most shameful about my life. But most of it was already out. They (the tabloids) wrote about me being in a mental hospital, so then I’m going to write my version and I’m going to say my version. Then they (the tabloids) write stuff saying that I’ve had a facelift and that just kills me because this would be the worst facelift ever! I’ve seen online…go online and I read that I’ve had a facelift and it’s not that good and there’s like three doctors commenting how it looks pulled here and pulled there (Carrie demonstrates by tugging at her face). I’m like, no, but I’ve been thinking about having one…

J.T.: Ryder: That’s another thing about the show, since you kind of brought it up: Somehow you have managed to avoid it seeming tabloid-ish. It’s not sensationalized.

Carrie: It’s not sensational. If you were in the situation, it’s just people. I mean, they might wear more make-up or they might have gotten where they are because they have…(pause)…more well ordered features, but they are just humans. It’s not…now I’m intimidated by the ‘good looking’ people, but you shouldn’t treat ‘good looking’ like it’s an accomplishment. It’s kind of valued that high, like you did something amazing and it was just that they were born with really nice features. Those are the people inHollywoodwho…I don’t know how to talk to them and I’m not really curious about them either. ‘How did you get those eyes? Oh! Your mom had them?’ Those are the people who got where they are purely on their features.

J.T.: That is across the board. People being ‘proud’ of genetics. A lot of people equate that with celebrity…

Carrie: It would have been a bigger trick to stay out of show business than to go in. I didn’t go in. It was…I had to tiptoe out. No. I wouldn’t have picked it, because I was sort of introverted, watching all those people.

J.T.: Which is hard to believe when one sees your stage show.

Carrie: Well, now I’m older and it’s now it’s acceptance run riot. Self acceptance. I mean, you get to a certain age…

J.T.: ..and you say to yourself, ‘Ah, screw it!’

Carrie: Right! ‘What the fuck!’

Bill: So if you weren’t thrown into that at an early age…

Carrie: I might not have chosen it.

Bill: What would you be doing?

Carrie: Well, I might have been a writer because of the whole word thing. It killed me, the word thing. I would have liked to have been Beethoven….not for his whole life, but just the part where he wrote his music. I want to be someone who can hear music like theat. Where does that come from? There are those people like that that have that kind of gift, but I do have a thing with words and I am grateful that I’ve got it because it a distraction for me and I listen to people better  so it makes me enjoy reading and listening  to people’s points of view and the way people say things.

Bill: You mentioned last night (during the opening night performance) that poetry was is something that you started at an early age and it actually helped you.

Carrie: I started writing, but you wouldn’t call what I wrote ‘poetry.’ It would be more like lyrics. But, I like some of what I wrote and I remember getting into states where I would be kind of taking dictation from somewhere that had nothing to do with me, but it did have to do with my emotional state. The way that it organized itself into…it’s an intense experience, then your way of managing it is basically to photograph it verbally so that you’re not just at the effect of it then, so you’re not saying, ‘Okay, now what is this like?’ It’s finding some way to say it. Otherwise, I’m just an incredibly emotional person, which I am.

J.T.: Well, at least when you’re performing, you have the ability to emote and convey a tone or meaning more than writing.

Carrie: Well, I’ve also gotten to the point where I’m also able to receive it. You just kind of get out of the way, so it isn’t me. I’ve been given something where impressions come to me and I can say, ‘Oh, that’s what that feels like!’ If I just wait, I let this thing in me that does that anyway…I can’t ignite it, I can just get out of the way of it.

Bill: Well, that leads me to this then: after watching your show last night, which I enjoyed a lot by the way…

Carrie: Thank you.

Bill Pote And J.T. Ryder Double Teaming Carrie Fisher...Wait...That's Doesn't Sound Right....

Bill: How much…I know it’s mostly scripted, if not all scripted, so how often do you go off script?

Carrie: A lot! I open it up for questions and the because the people that you (the audience) are talking with, I’ve never met them before…

Bill: Well, not even talking about audience members, but even with bringing up stories from your life, how often do you just think of something like, ‘I haven’t even told anybody this.’

Carrie: I said something the other night and…I say things by accident and it is sort of leaving it open to mess with, so there is a lot more I could say about any of the things I talk about and sometimes I will go off into it…and it’s more fun if I do. You really have to be alert…hyper-vigilant and hyper-alert, and that’s exhausting, but it’s interesting.

J.T.: Yeah, it’s great fun when you shut off all the filters.

Carrie: Yeah! And you’re in front of a lot of people and that can be very interesting.

 

(Photographs by Blush Boudoir, then heavily edited by J.T. without permission nor any sense of artistic content.)

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Shocking Stories From Beyond The Stars With Carrie Fisher

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An Interview With Actress Carrie Fisher

Debbie Reynolds, Carrie, Todd and Eddie Fisher

(see details on our ticket give-away to Carrie Fisher’s show “Wishful Drinking” below the article)

It seems apropos that the daughter of Hollywood’s Royalty would eventually take up her predestined mantle as a Princess. Yet, for whatever charms that galaxy far, far away might hold,  Carrie Fisher’s real life is more of an epic tale than anything Lucas could ever deem to dream. From awakening to Republican Party media adviser R. Gregory Stevens’ lifeless body lying next to her (a victim of an OxyContin/cocaine overdose), to having the father of her daughter leave her for another man, Carrie Fisher’s life make the cantina scene in Star Wars look about as interesting as a seminar on new accounting techniques.

Carrie was born on October 21st, 1956 in Beverly Hills,California to America’s Sweethearts, singer Eddie Fisher and actress Debbie Reynolds. When Carrie was only two, Eddie Fisher left the house to console Elizabeth Taylor after the death of her husband Mike Todd (who was also Eddie’s best friend and whom he named his son after) and he never came back. The next year, Carrie’s mother Debbie married shoe magnate Harry Karl, whose penchant for roaming about without pajama bottoms and an acute case of chronic flatulence added yet another odd character in Carrie’s galactic menagerie.

            Sometimes, there are those born into celebrity who, through no fault of their own, do not realize that their lives are much different than that of the average person. During a recent telephone interview, I asked Carrie when she became aware that her life was vastly unlike the lives of others and what her perception of her early years were.

“Obviously it’s nice to live comfortably and I really didn’t know that there was another way to live until I was like ten. People would say, ‘You think you’re so great because you’re Debbie Reynolds’ daughter!’ I was embarrassed of that.” Carrie paused, rolling over in bed as she had just returned from a celebrity meet and greet in Japan. She went on to say that, “I did know that other people didn’t live like this and I didn’t like it because that separated me from being like everyone and I couldn’t fit in. I wanted to fit in, and none of this stuff makes you fit in. I wanted to have the option to join up. Anything that made me different…I don’t know…I lived mostly in my head, so I don’t know that I was very aware of my surroundings. I was extremely introverted.”

At seventeen, Carrie landed a role in Shampoo with Warren Beatty and Goldie Hawn. In 1973, as Carrie puts it, “George Lucas ruined my life” by casting her in the iconic role of Princess Leia Organa in his upcoming sci-fi movie, Star Wars – released in 1977. In reflecting on the deal that was made at the time, Carrie has been quoted as saying that, “We signed away our likeness, so when I look in the mirror, I have to pay George a couple of bucks.” Following Empire Strikes Back (1981) was Return of the Jedi (1983) in which Carrie once again reprised her role as Princess Leia, becoming the gold plated bikini babe – slave to and amorphous arm candy of the gelatinous villain Jabba the Hutt. It was this revealing representation that launched Carrie into the stratosphere as a sex symbol, a position that she was uncomfortable with and an image that she unwittingly didn’t realize at the time would follow her throughout her whole career.

Having been inundated and interrogated throughout the years pertaining to her experiences with George Lucas and the Star Wars empire, I wanted to only briefly touch on that topic. I asked if she felt that there was a weight from living under the legacy of such an iconic movie so early in her career, to which she replied:

“I mean, I never really wanted…I was never much of an actress. It was never really what I wanted to do. If I had wanted to be an actress, it would have been bad.”

Click On Image...It's Animated

Carrie has been oft quoted as saying she never really wanted to become a celebrity as she had seen firsthand what fame such as that had wrought. The ensuing years after Star Wars were fraught with drug addiction and psychological problems, becoming overly apparent both on and off the screen, as evidenced in her appearance on the Star Wars Holiday Special in 1978. Her erratic behavior and rampant drug use even led to her almost getting fired from the set of The Blues Brothers, where she was unable to turn in a decent performance due to her intoxication.

After entering rehab and cleaning herself up (with a few admitted slips here and there) it seemed that Carrie eventually returned to the refuge that she had found in her teenage years: writing. I asked Carrie if she found that writing became a part of her self-therapy.

“Well, I never did it for that reason, but when I was young, I guess I did.” After a slight pause, she went on to say that, “My thoughts would get all kind of crowded, so it kind of became a way of kind of organizing the crowd.”

I Always Suspected This...

I was curious as to whether Carrie felt more comfortable writing about her life veiled behind the safety net of fiction or if it was easier to just write it all down without having to think up scenarios and plots to introduce one event or another.

“Fictionalized!” Carrie said, without hesitation. “Well, it’s a different kind of writing. Your tone with first person prose is much more conversational, so it’s hard to get more descriptive. There’s a certain kind of way that I like to write that doesn’t suit itself to a first person narrative.”

Was it easier to tell the whole truth about something that happened to herself and the people involved in a situation when it was couched behind the shroud of fiction?

“I don’t know about myself, but I would never say anything that would make anyone uncomfortable that was obvious, no. I don’t want to do anything like that.” Carrie said. “I have probably made people uncomfortable with certain things, but I do my best not to do that. It’s easier in fiction because you make up stuff and you use stuff and you disguise stuff.”

While still appearing in acting roles (When Harry Met Sally, Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery, Scream 3), a large portion of her creative energy seemed to go into her writing, whether it be fictional (Postcards From The Edge, Surrender The Pink, Delusions Of Grandma), screenwriting (These Old Broads, The Young Indian Jones Chronicles) or non-fiction (Wishful Drinking, Shockaholic). In 2006, Carrie debuted her screenplay of Wishful Drinking as a one woman show, replete with videos, photos and more anecdotes that you could shake a light saber at.

In a world saturated with reality entertainment, it seems as if celebrities’ bad behavior is sometimes an intentional ploy for attention or a casting call for the next Lifetime Network show, yet in Carrie’s case this is not so. Most of her life was not lived out in front of the camera lens, like most other celebrities bent on revealing their day to day lives. When you read or watch Wishful Drinking, you are left with the impression of a woman coming to the realization of what the events in her life meant and accepting the repercussions that her decisions and actions have produced. It is also not a ‘woe is me’ pity fest, yearning for the audience’s sympathy in a desperate maneuver to gain forgiveness and acceptance. I did wonder if performing her own life out night after night desensitized and somewhat separated her from the integral epochs of her past.

“God I wish! What it does is, it makes me own it and I’m not ashamed of it. It makes you feel brave. It certainly makes you feel not ashamed and sometimes it can make you feel like, ‘Look at me motherfucker! I used to not even be able to talk about this!’” Carrie went on to define what she meant by saying, “Well, I mean, if I’ve gotten through the stuff I’ve gotten through, you can get through anything. I look for the ordinary in the extraordinary, whether it being bi-polar or a celebrity or the child of a celebrity or any of that.”

At the age of forty, Carrie had a full blown breakdown which required her to be admitted into a psychiatric hospital. Over the course of time, medications were tried and therapies instituted, but the real breakthrough came when electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) was applied. In Carrie’s words, it was as if there was cement obstructing her mind and the ECT treatment seemed to break all of that away. There has been some short term memory loss, indicated by her answering machine, which asks callers to leave their name, number and how they know Carrie. She has some problems with remembering names or some events, but she highly recommends ECT, stating that it is not how it is depicted in movies like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

“I would recommend it to other people if they were in a massive depression, but the way it’s depicted” She paused before going on, “…I saw it on a preview of that show Homeland, and it’s not like that! I mean, maybe they do it like that in some places, but from my experience, they put you out and…it’s just weird. Anyway, I would recommend it or any measure you needed to take to deal with a massive depression, but of course, I tried everything else first.”

For a taste of what it’s like living life on the edge, collecting the postcard and coming back, check out Carrie Fisher’s one woman show, Wishful Drinking. Also, read her short follow up book, Shockoholic, which details some of the funnier anecdotes from her life. AS we wrapped up our interview, I asked Carrie what I should tell Daytonians about the show and what to expect. She stated that there was a lot of audience interaction, making each show a unique experience. Carrie signed off by simply saying…

“I do involve the audience, so come and see me and tell me some stories!”

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Ticket Giveaway

We have a pair of tickets to see Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking on Tuesday April 10, courtesy of the Victoria Theatre Association!  Simply this article, On Stage Dayton and then in the comment section below, tell us your favorite Carrie Fisher role and why (make sure it posts to your FB page as well).  We will randomly draw one winner on Monday 4/9 at 3pm.  GOOD LUCK!