After her recent alarming weight loss and erratic behavior, I suspect she’s gotten hooked on drugs.
After reading a lot of the responses here, it does seem probable that this is more a of CYA strategy predicate to booting her form the production, rather than a serious attempt to get her to straighten up.
My guess is that he is so sick of her he is trying to tank whatever she is in negotiations for. This leak isn’t accidental. Her contract probably keeps him from doing too much but suing her. But his hope is that suddenly her agent’s phone stops ringing because she’s irresponsible and jepordizes the production.
And don’t think “star power” will saver her. Val Kilmer’s career isn’t going gang busters. Julia Roberts had several years where her prima donna behavior meant it was hard for her to find good work. Lohan is tabloid fodder. She cleans up her act or she’ll be “who was that babe from 2005?”
Yeah, I agree that anyone who thinks this is ‘employer to employee’ is missing the point.
This is ‘lawyer to non-performer’. The entire reason this was done is to establish a stern paper trail for whatever action is considered to be likely to next occur. They can now ding her for her salary and damages to the production and present it to a judge and say ‘look! We tried!’
In addition, I’d bet there’s been some informal talking to her about her behavior. And I’ll bet it’s been carefully logged and recorded each time it occured.
But we’re likely never to know.
Agreed. And it’s a damned shame, too. I really liked her in Mean Girls and Herbie.
[SUB]Yeah, I watched both of ‘em. Wanna make somethin’ of it?[/SUB]
There’s an obvious, very good reason for a written letter rather than a verbal tongue-lashing. A written warning carries legal weight. In some places, you can’t even fire someone without having given them a written warning first. She’s been served.
As for the letter being condescending and not fit for an adult - maybe she should stop acting like a child then.
They discussed this on TV tonight, and the segment describing the letter actually showed video of Lohan partying at some club at 1 AM the night before she called in ‘sick’. I’m sure the studio execs had plenty of evidence. They probably sent someone from the studio out to check on her that night, and found her drunk, high, or otherwise incapacitated. Then she calls in sick the next day, and the crap hit the fan.
Is that you, Margaret?
You’re absolutely, 100% wrong. Lohan in fact CAN act; she’s an excellent comedic actress and her dramatic chops aren’t bad either.
That is, really, the shame of it. She’s talented, and could be remarkably beautiful if she’d eat and stay away from the booze and the drugs, but she’s had “Train Wreck” written all over her since she was 15. Overexposed, too rich too soon, bad family life. Too much money and not enough brains. She is destined for rehab.
Sam is right about why they sent a letter. It’s a document trail. Remember; if it’s not written down, it never happened. If you want to dismiss someone - whether it’s an actress or a secretary - you need to create evidence that you tried to resolve the situation before you resorted to dismissal.
The tone of the letter is likely a response to her refusal to listen to previous warnings. The “spoiled child” bit, though accurate, was a bit over the top, but at some point you do have to tell someone “This is the last fucking straw,” and the language has to be pretty clear.
I didn’t see either of those, but I saw Parent Trap and Freaky Friday. And I’ve been meaning to see Mean Girls. I probably wouldn’t have seen either of those on my own - I only saw them because I was with my extended family including young cousins - but I was quite charmed by her. She’s a decent young actress, and back when her body mass index was in the double digits, she was cute as a button. Her total meltdown has been rather sad to me, rather than amusing the way celebrity trainwrecks usually are, because she has some actual talent in addition to her popularity.
I assumed “dehydration” was a euphemism for “alcohol poisoning.” I had a friend in college have to go to the hospital for that. They made him eat charcoal and put him on IV fluids. Next day, he walked outta there feeling fantastic, not even a hangover. Sounds like what happened to LL. I can see why her boss is aggravated with her.
“Bogus” has been in the slang since 1797. I had heard it came from the counterfeiter’s last name (Boggus or similar) but have no way to verify that dubious claim. I think he’s using it in the same way that Barack Obama used “awesome” to say “our God is an awesome God” in that speech – the older more formal usage applies, but younger listeners will parse it in a different but not entirely invalid way.
What difference does it make how Robinson delivered his ultimatum? It’s up to Ms. Lohan to decide if she’s going to get her act together or not. Robinson is not asking for anything unreasonable: showing up on time is what actors are supposed to do. I don’t get this mindset, that there’s some kind of wrong way to tell people that they’re screwing up. She was screwing up, and that is not mitigated by Robinson’s approach to the problem. She doesn’t have the option of saying, “Well, I would have started showing up on time, but he was soooooo rude!” If she had quit yesterday, or if she starts slacking again, then it’s all on her.
I’m sorry you don’t care for his tone, but Robinson can say what he wants. He’s. The. Producer. Producers have power far beyond that of actors. Actors come and go, but it takes a lot for a producer to fall from grace. Robinson has been around for a long time before Lohan was even playing a buttercup in her grade-school variety show. Granted, he’s 70, so he might not be around much longer, but Morgan Creek Productions will be, and it would have been no skin off their nose or Robinson’s if Lohan had told him and them to get bent. This is one movie. MC can continue producing movies after they’ve absorbed the deficit from this one. Lohan’s career deficit will be much harder to recoup even now, and impossible if she keeps pulling this crap.
And, what others have said about a paper trail.
Didn’t something similar happen back in the eighties with Melanie Griffith where Mike Nichols nearly fired her from Working Girl?
Lindsay’s not going to tell anyone to “fuck off.” And Robinson knows it.
If she tells Robinson to “fuck off,” her career is destined to go straight down the toilet. She’ll not only get fired from the movie, she’ll have a big black mark on her name all across Hollywood. As it should be. If my boss reprimanded me for not doing my job, and I told her to “fuck off,” I’d be fired, and nobody she knows would ever hire me. I’ve got a lot less to lose than Lindsay Lohan, but I’d still take a warning seriously if I didn’t want my life to take a huge turn for the worse.
If you guys don’t think the producer holds all the cards in these sorts of arguments, you’re nuts. Actors who develop a reputation for being hard to work with have their careers go into a tailspin; when was the last time you saw Linda Fiorentino heading up an A-list movie? She had a Sharon Stonesque break in “The Last Seduction” and has been bouncing in and out of the A-list ever since because she’s impossible to deal with.
The only actors who could possibly get away with this shit for long are those who have producer-like power anyway - Tom Hanks, Tom Cruise, etc. And you’ll find actors who’ve reached that level have a reputation for being good workers, which is one of the reasons they’re AT that level.
To my regret, Sean Young never quite got to stage of having to do porno, though she came close with some light bondage in Love Crimes.
Shannon Doherty has managed to survive somehow, though.
Julia Roberts. Apparently, in the early 90s, Ms. Roberts was tagged with “difficult to work with.” If you review her filmography from that period, you’ll see that - although she was still much more successful that a lot of actors - it wasn’t her most productive or successful period. And I think it took a lot of work for her to shake that tag.
Winona Ryder. Another actress with “issues” is another one with a ton of talent, but a spotty career.
Roberts and Ryder though, for all their flakiness - have never had the amount of drug rumors surrounding them that Lohan does. Difficult to work with you may be able to work around. Calling in sick because of drug and alcohol abuse throws a huge kink in the production schedule - its better than rehab…or ODing.
I hope Lohan pulls it together. But I don’t expect she’ll get too many more chances to try.
Well, after that, she had a main role in Dogma, but that was seven years ago, and I haven’t heard anything about her since then. I heard Kevin Smith supposedly claimed he’d never work with her again, but I didn’t know he wasn’t the first to say so.
IMDB lists only five movies to her credit after Dogma. One of them was Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back, in which she’s apparently uncredited, and I’ve never heard of the other four. Has anyone else heard of them?
Speaking as a hobbyist actor, I agree about the bad reputation thing. I’ve seen it — and I’ve seen how that stuff spreads. It does not spread in a letter. That all happens behind the scenes, at parties and get-togethers, on the phone, where Keith auditions for Don the director; and Don calls Mike (Keith’s previous director) and asks, “So, is Keith any good to work with? Works hard, shows up on time? Does he learn his lines? Does he take direction well?”
The only thing I’d have to object to is calling Lindsay Lohan an employee. She is, sorta kinda, in that they’re paying her; but I’m not aware that she’s a full-time employee of the studio system in the way Humphrey Bogart belonged to the Warner Brothers back in the day.
She’s more kinda like an independent contractor: she signed a paper saying she’d do the film for a certain amount.
I don’t believe the letter isn’t about formalizing disciplinary procedures for firing an employee; rather, it’s about formalizing attempted resolution for a suit of breach of contract.