LOS ANGELES — Nobody, Larry A. Thompson says, should have to endure the emails that he has gotten since deciding last month to cast Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor in a television film for the Lifetime cable channel.
Some, he acknowledges, are supportive.
But others - from friends of Taylor, people who claim to have known her and the public at large - are less kind.
“I’m an idiot” is one theme, says Thompson, who spoke at his home along a Los Angeles Country Club fairway.
“How dare you?” is another. And some of the correspondence asks, “Why are you rewarding Lindsay Lohan?”
His answer is simple: “I am a producer.” It is a way of saying that Thompson knows when a whole lot of attention is worth a little risk, and that in a cluttered media world, attention may be the most valuable commodity of all.
Thompson, meanwhile, had worked his way into show business, first as a lawyer for Capitol Records, then as a manager and confidant of television and recording stars like Jim Nabors and Sonny Bono. Later he was an executive with, and major shareholder in, an independent studio called New World Entertainment.
Though never a major presence in the movie world - his best-remembered film credit may be Crimes of Passion, a steamy thriller directed by Ken Russell in 1984 - Thompson eventually became a prolific producer of television films with a particular weakness for celebrities of the old school. (Still a manager, his clients include David Hasselhoff, Joan Rivers and William Shatner.)
TAYLOR MADE
As for Taylor, Thompson reckons that he met her only twice, in some business dealings years ago. But he says he conceived of making a film about her famous love affair with Richard Burton - whom she married and divorced twice - some months before her death at 79 last year.
At the Emmy ceremony the August before she died, Thompson asked Christopher Monger, nominated as a writer of Temple Grandin, to consider writing Liz & Dick, which he is financing as an independent production and licensing for distribution in the United States by Lifetime. Monger’s father, it turned out, had long ago given Burton his start as a stage actor in Wales,so he was in.
But casting Elizabeth Taylor was more difficult.
Megan Fox, Olivia Wilde, Kate Beckinsale and Jennifer Connelly were on Thompson’s list, but none quite worked out.
Lohan, he noted, looked credible when she posed as Taylor on a 2006 cover of Interview magazine. But when Thompson met her at the Polo Lounge earlier this year - and this is complicated - she was still on supervised probation for an earlier probation violation after pleading no contest to the theft of a necklace and to a probation violation that stemmed from earlier legal problems involving drugs and alcohol.
“Elizabeth had her struggles, as well,” notes David Cooley, founder of a bar, the Abbey, in West Hollywood, that is known as a gathering point for Taylor fans (and the occasional Taylor impersonator). He described himself as “a drinking buddy” of Taylor’s during her visits in recent years to the bar. And he argued, like Thompson, that Lohan would nail the portrayal.
“You hear of lot of people question it,” Cooley acknowledges.
Through her publicist, Steve Honig, Lohan declined to discuss her reasons for taking the role or any steps to prepare for it.
Taylor, like Lohan, was in and out of the Betty Ford Center as she contended with drug and alcohol abuse. Both were child stars: Taylor had her film debut at 9, in There’s One Born Every Minute; Lohan at 12, in The Parent Trap. As a young woman, each had her brushes with the paparazzi.
Indeed, that general term for celebrity photographers was coined, Thompson maintained, after Federico Fellini watched shutterbugs in Rome buzz around Taylor in her prime. It is a story point in Liz & Dick, which will begin shooting June 4, with the first showing planned Nov. 3.
But that assumes that Thompson can find his Richard Burton.
In casting a wide net for that role, Thompson says, he is looking for someone perhaps less famous but more like the “working thespian” he will portray.
“We’re looking for someone to balance Lindsay Lohan, in a way,” he says.
Style, Pages 32 on 05/22/2012