Fischer appeared in Robert Altman's first three Hollywood movies: MASH, Brewster McCloud, and McCabe and Mrs. Miller and many of the best-known TV comedies of the 1970s, including All in the Family, Sanford and Son and Barney Miller as well as the TV version of M*A*S*H. In 1972-75 he played Givits, a guitar-playing ex-rabbinical student in Sunshine starting with the groundbreaking TV movie that became the prototype for a number of "Disease-of-the-Week" movies that followed.
With them, he toured nationally in America Piece by Susan Yankowitz and the company-created Voice of the People.
Fischer's one-man show Sometimes We Need a Story More Than Food was voted one of the ten best productions of 1993 by the Los Angeles Times and won a Marin County playwriting fellowship.
In 2000, the San Francisco Bay Guardian voted him one of the year's best directors for God's Donkey, an original TJT production.
His last work was as a playwright and director of In the Maze of Our Own Lives, a play inspired by the story of the Group Theatre which was produced in October 2011, to launch TJT's 34th season.