Carrie Fisher and the Hollywood Walk of Fame

Jennifer Lopez got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame last Thursday.  Jane Fonda, her Monster in Law comedy movie co-star, was present at the festivities to praise JLo's talents.  Today, producer Jerry Bruckheimer gets a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  He produced Disney's upcoming movie version of The Lone Ranger.  It opens soon. Starring Johnny Depp...as Tonto.  Next year, actors Orlando Bloom and Matthew McConaughey get stars on the celebrated stretch of Hollywood Blvd.

Why doesn't Carrie Fisher have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame yet?  If she does not, here's why she should and perhaps be put in line ahead of Orlando. She's got more than one impressive talent.  She starred in three of the biggest blockbuster hits to come out of Hollywood  -- movies that were a cultural phenomenon.  Even renowned mythologist Joseph Campbell talked about the power of Star Wars.

She was Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy!  Even her initial hairdo became part of pop culture history all over the world.  Then came the golden bikini.

OK, Hollywood, let's talk about this:  The first Star Wars adventure was one of the five Oscar nominees for Best Picture of 1977.  Its cultural and financial impact was the stuff of Hollywood legend.   Carrie Fisher was the female lead in that movie, released in 1977...the same year Orlando Bloom was born.  He'd not yet reached puberty when we saw her again as Princess Leia in the further Star Wars adventures, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983).

Remember how folks stood in long, long lines in Hollywood to see those movies more than once?

She's also a princess of Hollywood royalty.  Her parents were two of the biggest stars of the 1950s -- people who have their own stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame -- Singin' in the Rain, The Tender Trap and The Unsinkable Molly Brown musical comedy film actress Debbie Reynolds and hit pop music recording star Eddie Fisher.

Besides the three globally successful sci-fi action adventures, Carrie Fisher also co-starred in another Oscar nominee for Best Picture -- Woody Allen's 1986 classic Hannah and Her Sisters.  Carrie, on the right, acted and sang in this Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor and Actress.  Woody Allen won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay.

Carrie co-starred in another big hit, the romantic comedy When Harry Met Sally.  She was Marie, the friend to Meg Ryan's Sally.  Those are five heavyweight credits for an actor to put on one's resumé.

Well, she doesn't just act.  Besides writing hysterically funny memoirs, Carrie Fisher has written best-selling novels.  That's plural.  The first novel was Postcards from the Edge.

Her screenplay adaptation of her first novel is stunning.  The actress mother is a minor character in the book.  Only in a few pages.  Her screenplay expanded the show biz mother/daughter relationship brilliantly and provided Meryl Streep and Shirley MacLaine each with one of the juiciest roles of their film careers.  Carrie wrote Meryl to another Best Actress Oscar nomination in this 1990 Hollywood-on-Hollywood comedy directed by Mike Nichols.  The movie's celebrated mother/daughter staircase argument scene was not in the book.  Streep starred as Suzanne Vale, who survived a near-fatal accidental party drug overdose, and Shirley MacLaine as her loving but overprotective movie star mom.  MacLaine should've been nominated for Best Supporting Actress.

Inspired by her real-life relationship with her own former movie musical queen mom, Carrie Fisher wrote a script that should have landed her an Oscar nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay.  She gave us memorable characters and lines that people still quote.  I'm one of those people.  ("It twirled up!" and "Instant gratification takes too long.")  The scene with fresh out-of-rehab and insecure actress Suzanne Vale playing a cop and Annette Bening as an actress playing a hooker having "girl talk" during a break in shooting was brilliant.  Suzanne's horndog boyfriend had a fling with the slutty actress and it's really an interrogation scene with an "art imitates life" vibe.  Fabulous.

Carrie Fisher co-wrote the 2001 ABC TV comedy movie, These Old Broads.  It starred Carrie's mom, Debbie Reynolds (who got the movie musical starring role in The Unsinkable Molly Brown that Shirley MacLaine expected to to), Shirley MacLaine (who got the part in Postcards from the Edge that Debbie Reynolds wanted to do), Elizabeth Taylor ( Carrie's former stepmother who got Eddie Fisher when he was still married to Carrie's mom, Debbie Reynolds) and Joan Collins (who once got Shirley's brother, actor/director Warren Beatty.  He starred in the hit 1975 movie Shampoo, in which Carrie made her film acting debut. She did her scene with Warren.  This was two years before the birth of actor Orlando Bloom).

So, Hollywood...Carrie Fisher been an actress in Oscar-nominated movies and she's written the screenplay for an Oscar-nominated movie.  She's been doing this since the 1970s.  Where is her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame?  I think she's due.  Let her hit the pavement -- in a good way.