The Spiderwick Chronicles director Mark Waters is, in some ways, the guy who made Lindsay Lohan a star, directing her in Freaky Friday and on location in Toronto in Mean Girls.
And he says she wasn't going to be a "wild child" on his watch. "Lindsay actually was very well-behaved on my movies. I hire ADs (assistant directors) and teachers who let them know they're still kids in school when they work for me. I try to give the mindset that acting is one small subset of life, and you're probably not going to be doing it anymore after you're no longer a kid."
As for LiLo's current substance abuse problems, he says, "she's reached the age where she does need to take responsibility for her own life. You can talk about good parenting or bad parenting. But once you become an adult you can no longer complain about how you got to where you got. It's up to her to get her life in order.
"And, y'know, the good thing about her and another sad story Britney, is the two of them are actually talented.
"A lot of people in the tabloid press are celebrities for taking their clothes off or whatever. Lindsay and Britney are really talented. Lindsay's a talented actress, Britney's a great singer. They actually can get focused again and do good work and Lindsay could have a good second act."
THE SINCEREST FLATTERY: No, says Mark Canton, producer of the surprise hit 300, he hasn't seen the spoof Meet The Spartans -- which topped the box office despite (or because of?) being universally panned by critics.
"I don't want to see it," Canton told us, "But I thought the trailer was really funny. And there was something about the fact that it did better than Rambo that I found very satisfying."
TARANTINO SPIED: To put it generously, Quentin Tarantino has always been more impressive behind the camera than in front of it.
At least when he's acting.
Consider, though, the heavily circulated YouTube clip ("Tarantino Slaps a Cameraman") of the Pulp Fiction Oscar-winner tangling with a video paparazzi outside a Starbucks in Park City, Utah, at last month's Sundance Film Festival.
Watching it, one can't but feel -- well, aside from sympathy for the subject of the ambush -- nostalgia for when the 44-year-old writer-director was working on films, not his flying jump kick.
He's (still) prepping Inglorious Bastards, a Second World War adventure he has been circling for 10 years. Now he tells Sight & Sound magazine he might one day make a spy movie -- specifically, one based on the literary espionage trilogy Game, Set and Match. We'll believe it when we see it, although Tarantino's interest in secret agents is well-documented.
Years before Daniel Craig landed his license to kill, Tarantino was pitching the idea of a gritty adaptation of Casino Royale -- albeit for Pierce Brosnan.
MONSTER MASH: Hollywood has a long, erratic history of remaking horror classics -- case in point: the forthcoming The Wolf Man with Benicio Del Toro -- but only recently have producers started revisiting modern movie monsters. Transformers director Michael Bay -- responsible so far for the remakes of a Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror and The Hitcher -- has announced plans to reboot both Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street.
The first sign of trouble? The recasting of Freddy Krueger, played by Robert Englund since 1984. Then again, it couldn't possibly be worse than Tyler Mane's Michael Myers in Rob Zombie's Halloween. Could it?
