HBO to air film after Reynolds, Fisher die

In the wake of the tragic deaths of Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher this week, HBO announced Friday morning that it has pushed up the debut of the mother-daughter documentary “Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds” to Jan. 7 at 8 p.m., the Los Angeles Times reports.

HBO describes the film, which had showings at several film festivals, including Cannes and Telluride, as “an intimate portrait of Hollywood royalty in all its eccentricity.”

The documentary, directed by Alexis Bloom and Fisher Stevens, features vintage family films.

Fisher died Tuesday at age 60 after being stricken on an airplane flight last week. Her mother was rushed to the hospital and died the next day. “She said, ‘I want to be with Carrie,’ ” her son, Todd, told The Associated Press. “And then she was gone.”

“Bright Lights” is an examination of the lives of two women, once estranged, who were living in their final years next door to each other in a compound in Beverly Hills, Calif. “Their loving interdependence seems unbreakable,” the Hollywood Reporter wrote in a review.

Fisher was dealing with the mental illness that fueled some of her memorable writing through the years, and both women were dealing with the toll that increased frailty was taking on Reynolds.

“The axis on which the film turned was their relationship and their love, even though show biz warps the best of people and warps the best of relationships and I’m sure to some degree they would agree it’s warped their family,” Bloom told The Los Angeles Times this fall. “But at the center of it is love, and that’s sort of undiminished.”

GETTY/FILE Debbie Reynolds, 84, and her daughter, Carrie Fisher, 60, died within a day of one another this week.