Lindsay Lohan appears to be doing great

I find Lohan's "fall from grace" so fascinating. She was on the verge of being the next big thing. The comparison I remember the most was Reese Witherspoon, someone with right combination of looks and talent to be an A-list star and really the only reason she wasn't is because she self-destructed and has now fallen so far that she hasn't had a movie acting credit in two years. That's actually somewhat of a fucked-up accomplishment.

I'm curious if there is really anyone similar to her when it comes to career arc. She's almost a decade removed from any respectable work. There are tons of people in Hollywood who are tough to work with and tons who have drugs or alcohol issues and they still find someone who will hire them.

 

Andy Dick says hello.

Not the same career arc, but what a consistent fuck-up.

 

He never reached the levels she did, and he still works.

 

OTOH, for a child star, her career has lasted much longer than average.

 

That's one way to look at it. I would argue that she was 16-17 at the heart of her popularity, which was when she did Freaky Friday, Teenage Drama Queen and Mean Girls. This wasn't Dana Plato. She was on the cover of Rolling Stone. She was the IT girl. I think people have forgotten how high (pun intended) she was before the tumble. Look at the rest of the cast of Mean Girls... Rachel McAdams, Lizzy Caplan, Amanda Seyfried, I'm guessing they're all a couple years older than her, but still...

 

It says a lot too, though, about how superficial "fame" has become. Brittnay Spears becomes Lindsay Lohan becomes Paris Hilton becomes Kim Kardashian. At each stage of the ladder, less and less talent was required to become famous. When the shine fades and we discover the next hot little number with firmness in all the right places and a willingness to sexualize themselves for magazine covers and the gossip press, it becomes harder and harder to stay relevant if you don't have real talent to fall back on. Lohan's fall was complicated by: Drugs, a crazy family, a poor work ethic, emotional instability. Paris Hilton didn't have a lot of talent, and she's mostly faded from view, but she's managed to carve out a lucrative career as a DJ (based presumably on branding, not actual music mixing talent). Kim Kardashian's eventually fall will likely be softened considerably by the fact that she's a savvy and ruthless business shill, and that likely includes her marriage. Lohan wasn't worth the headache in her "field" once her looks faded a little and she couldn't show up for work on time.

 

Come on DD, are you suggesting Kim and Kanye's marriage is a sham? Say it ain't so!

 

Like Steve Howe, she'll be given as many chances as necessary.

 

What puts Lohan in a different class than Spears, Hilton and Kardashian is that she wasn't able to parlay her "talents" into riches, at least not at the level of the other three.

Lohan's ruined her career right before she could cash in, at least at the level of most A-street actresses.

 

It's amazing to me how many talented actors and actresses there are out there but a relative handful get all the decent parts and most are left waiting tables or parking cars.

For example, no knock on her, but how many movies is Rachel McAdams in?

 

A shit load, it seems.

 

Plenty. She's easy to work with, she gives a professional performance, she's decent enough as an actor, so she gets jobs. She's a "talk-show actor." She's great on talk shows, she has a lot of energy, she throws herself into stuff with gusto, and energy is what audiences tend to respond to. If you want to play laconic and smolder and be late and be difficult, man, be so good at acting you get reclassified as a great actor. You'd be better Faye Dunaway or something. (Who was notoriously difficult.) Winona Ryder, the it girl to end them all in the early 1990s, doesn't get great regular work, and she may never again.