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Bad teen rising
Emerging megastar Lindsay Lohan's march through the New Orleans nightlife has drawn the attention of tabloids around the world, and the discomfort of the local movie crew trying to film a motion picture around the erratic behavior of America's latest 18-year-old millionaire star.
Tuesday, February 15, 2005
Chris Rose
Poor Lindsay Lohan. Will New Orleans be her undoing?
Will her undisguised petulance and her lusty embrace of our nightlife while she's in town making a movie render her damaged goods back home in Hollywood -- a hung-over, tantrum-hurling, no-show diva at the tender age of 18?
Or will her past successes ("Mean Girls," "Freaky Friday") and undeniable telegenics (something about those eyes) keep her in demand long enough to wreak havoc upon another film in another town someday?
She's certainly making a strong claim for the Most Troubled Teen in the Tabloids Award and is a lock as the most famous underage drinker in America, now that Britney, Christina, the Bush twins and all the rest have either grown up or simply faded into media irrelevance.
So here shines Lindsay -- Li Lo! -- the glint in the paparazzi's eye as she tanks her responsibilities to the romantic comedy she is shooting in New Orleans, instead enjoying her Big Easy tenure like a freshman on Spring Break.
Albeit, a freshman with a team of stylists, limo drivers and a suite at the Windsor Court .
Perhaps the great early 21st century sage Tara Reid put it best in a recent interview with the New York Post, when the questioner linked her and Lohan as dipsomaniacal soul mates.
Said the famed breast-baring tippler Reid: "Lindsay Lohan is way more wild than I was when I was her age. Don't put me with her; I don't want to be dragged into her s - - -."
There you have it, folks. When Tara Reid says you're partying too much, surely it's time for some self-reflection.
Every day, it seems, one of the national tabloids or celebrity gossip rags reports on the wide swath Lohan is cutting through our city's social scene; most famously, dancing on the bar above a sea of ogling frat boys (and, appropriately, under a Girls Gone Wild sign) at The Boot, an event of such staggering import that it appeared in People, Us, The Star and at least a dozen Web zines.
While there, she charged the DJ booth and gave a Tulane shout-out: "Go Green Wave!" she yelled, indicating an impressive knowledge of one of college sports' more esoteric nicknames.
News travels fast in LindsayWorld; The Boot's owner, Charles Napoli, first heard about Lindsay's visit to his bar, not from employees, but from his niece . . . who lives in Georgia.
At One Eyed Jacks in the Quarter, her advance bodyguard button-holed management one night and said Lindsay would like to come in but she didn't want any attention. "As he was saying that, I could see over his shoulder that she had already climbed onstage and was dancing," a Jacks source says.
So much for demure.
It was at One Eyed Jacks that a rendezvous with local gridiron hero Eli Manning failed to pan out. The two met in New York City this fall (in a nightclub, as hard as that is to imagine) and swapped numbers but when the Newman alum and his preppy-shirted posse arrived at the hipster hangout one recent night, the Mean Girl's reception was brief and cool.
She did what rich girls do when they want to say no: whipped out the BlackBerry and started text messaging somebody somewhere, looking bored, while her co-star, former "O.C." cast member Samaire Armstrong, danced with a couple of transvestites on the dance floor.
Manning was in and out of the place in 20 minutes.
Lohan tripped the light fantastic herself one night, dancing the whirling dervish at Oz, a gay bar on Bourbon Street.
And on many nights, she holds court until the wee hours at Club 360 with a pack of glam girls in tow (Samaire almost always included). It all takes its toll on her work.
Oh yeah, the work.
She's making a movie, a romantic comedy originally called "Lady Luck," then changed to "Just My Luck" and now officially tagged "The Untitled Lindsay Lohan Project." That's an appropriately vague name for a movie that will probably end up so disjointed because of its erratic shooting schedule -- dependent upon Lohan's moods and frequent sick leaves from the set -- that even money says it will bypass theatrical release and go straight to video.
Says a veteran New Orleans film crew member who has worked about 10 films in the past two years: "I've never seen anything like this. She is making our lives a living hell. It's just not professional."
A local actor who worked two nights on the set with Lohan at the Contemporary Arts Center (which was portraying a New York City art gallery) reports that tension was constantly in the air.
While everyone else would rehearse for a scene, Lohan would sit in a corner and a stand-in would do her scene with the other principle actors. Then, when film rolled, Lindsay would saunter over and repeatedly flub her lines.
Said the local actor: "If I had to learn four lines and had all day to do it -- and was paid millions of dollars to do it -- I think I could do it. The whole thing was more like a scene from a movie than a set for a movie: The star throws a fit and someone has to console her and lead her away. That happened twice while I was there."
And she calls in sick. A lot. Tummy aches. The flu. She called in sick a lot on the set of her last movie, "Herbie: Fully Loaded," a title whose irony was lost on no one who put up with the same party-girl lamentations last fall and who had to cool their heels while, mid-production, Lindsay was hospitalized for unspecified ailments.
For a suntanned, teenage millionaire in the prime of life and exposed to every luxury and opportunity afforded the rich and famous, she sure is a sickly little thing.
Am I piling on here? I don't mean to. In fact, I think she's got fantastic potential. I loved "Mean Girls." She melted my soul. It's impossible not to be charmed by her. "Freaky Friday," same thing, almost.
Almost everyone who has encountered her on her nocturnal roamings through our town says she's an effervescent delight. Laughing. Dancing. Mugging for pictures. She even says please and thank you to service workers!
So maybe I'm reading it all wrong. After all, her publicist has maintained on several occasions to the tabloids that Lindsay is just an innocent checking out the local scene. That she is, in fact, not drinking anything harder than club soda. And that she had ear aches that kept her out of work for a while.
Those pesky ear aches again!
I hope her publicists are well compensated for selling their souls.
What the girl needs is parental guidance, but then, her parents are playing out their nasty divorce in the pages of the New York Post, which gleefully serves as the official go-between, as the two of them publicly bicker over who is entitled to more of a percentage OF THEIR DAUGHTER'S EARNINGS.
So sad, really.
But there's hope: One night over Mardi Gras, at 360, Lohan's posse was seated in the VIP area right next to infamous Sex-Starved Rock Sleazeball Gene Simmons, who was filming a reality TV show and had a dozen strippers sitting on and in near proximity to his lap.
The invitation to join in was intimated to Lohan, who waved it off. "She wanted nothing to do with that," said a source on the scene.
Which tells you a lot about Lindsay Lohan, really. Because that's an opportunity Tara Reid never would have passed up.
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I'm not a businessman, I'm a business..........man.
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