I *really* didn’t want to do back-to-back Lindsay Lohan posts, but I just can’t pass up an opportunity to talk about A Star is Born. Blame Jeff Wells.
Okay: back in June, I wrote a column for the Huffington Post, in which I placed Ms. Lohan’s downward spiral in a trajectory of wrecked childstars that possibly began with Judy Garland. I wrote:
Lindsay and Judy have an awful lot in common. Both were child stars, raised by stage mothers far more interested in their daughter’s fame than in their actual well-being. Judy’s life-long drug addiction began when her mother (in cahoots with Louis B. Meyer) put her on uppers to lose weight; if Lindsay’s mom isn’t actually doing drugs with her daughter, she’s at the very least accompanying Lindsay to clubs and turning a blind eye on her daughter’s substance abuse…[W]hen that letter from the producer of Georgia Rule leaked, all I could think of was Garland’s famous suspension at MGM in the late 40s, which inevitably led to the end of her career in movies. The drugs that kept [Judy] slim and energetic in musicals as a teen and 20-something had taken their toll by her 30s, and through a combination of her declining looks and her inability to show up on time, she became virtually unemployable. She lived out the last decade of her life broke, semi-homeless, and all but forgotten by the producers who made millions off of her as a teenager.
Four years after Judy Garland was dropped from her MGM contract, she famously tried to make a comeback by producing and starring in a musical remake of A Star is Born. In that film, Garland played an up-and-coming singer/actress whose rise to the top of the Hollywood ladder parallels her alcoholic actor husband’s fall. At the end of the film (spoiler alert!), the husband, whose stage name is Norman Maine, gets arrested for drunk driving and, in an attempt to spare his wife further embarrassment and bother, walks into the ocean. Seen today, with Garland’s drug-fueled demise far in the rearview, A Star is Born plays like a failed attempt on the part of the former childstar to publicly exorcise her crippling demons. Needless to say, that didn’t work; Star also didn’t do much to revitalize her film career.
As news of Lohan’s latest arrest spread across the web this afternoon, various self-appointed experts have rushed to diagnose the damage done by this incident to Lohan’s career. E! Online speculates that Lohan will almost surely lose a role currently on her slate, and Perez Hilton says (caps, of course, his), “NO ONE is going to want to work with her now. And IF they do hire her, Lohan will most likely be forced to pay for her own insurance on films, which will be VERY COSTLY.” Jeffrey Wells puts it like this (again, emphasis his):
She can’t be an “actress” any more because there’s no accepting her as anyone other than herself — the dumbest and most arrogant meltdown case in Hollywood history…It goes without saying that she’s become the industry’s youngest-ever Norman Maine. If this was a movie, the classy sad solution would be to walk into the Pacific…and stay there.
This, just a week after Jeremy Blake, in response to the suicide of girlfriend Theresa Duncan, allegedly did the same thing with a different ocean. Nobody seemed to think Blake’s walk into the Atlantic was “classy”–in fact, a friend of Blake and Duncan told the New York Post that he thought it was “cliche” and “calculated.” But I guess Blake wasn’t famous/famously messed up enough for his walk into the sea to qualify as a career “solution.”
In other news, Lindsay has a movie coming out this weekend!
Kristin Thompson
