Pop Culture

NO MEAN FEAT

If you had never seen a Lindsay Lohan movie, you might wonder what all the fuss is about. Nine months ago, the red-haired teenager seemed to appear out of nowhere, trading bodies with Jamie Lee Curtis in the remake of Freaky Friday. Since then, only two of her movies have been released, both of them high-school comedies. One was a flop; the other, Mean Girls, opens in Australia today.

But despite this meagre CV, she is being hailed as one of America's top teenage female stars, along with perky Hilary Duff, arty Scarlett Johansson and those young tycoons Ashley and Mary-Kate Olsen, who -- after making their millions in video movies -- recently made their big-screen debut in New York Minute.

Lohan will soon record her first album, spends more time in the gossip pages than she would like, and was reportedly paid $US1 million for Mean Girls. OK, that's small change in Hollywood, but for a 17-year-old (she turns 18 on July 2), it isn't bad.

It all seems like another hype-driven career, until you watch her on-screen, and realise that the kid actually has talent! If this is hype, it's well-deserved. Her comic timing is excellent; her style is wonderfully natural. "She's not a weird, robot child actor," says Tina Fey, the writer and co-star of Mean Girls.

"I don't really 'get into' a role," says Lohan. "I'm not really one of those people who can get very 'method' and stuff like that. If the script is written well, then it's easy to see [the character]... It shows through more."

She might appear to be an overnight sensation, but then, the Americans thought the same about Cate Blanchett. Lohan, in fact, has been in showbiz much longer than Blanchett. She became a model at age three, and as a young child, her freckled face was seen in over 60 television commercials.

While the Olsens became famous as two twins playing the one role (in the sitcom Full House), Lohan became a movie star by playing twins -- and playing them very well. In The Parent Trap (1998), another Disney remake, she took on Hayley Mills' roles of two twins -- one American, one English. Now that she was a star, she did the only logical thing: she vanished for three years.

"I was 12, and I just wanted to be in school," she recalls. "I didn't want to work. I was tired, and I just wanted to be with my friends. My parents wanted me to be in school as well, and get a normal elementary high-school experience. That's what I did."

She returned in Freaky Friday, making a sudden leap from cute child actor to teenager with attitude. "The character was very Gothic. It was a little bit weird, and I didn't love it, so I sucked at my audition." She was, however, given another chance. "They rewrote the script, and the character was more like Avril Lavigne. I was, like, 'OK, I like this now.'"

As usual, Australian distributor Buena Vista invited media to previews of Freaky Friday. But the signs were not promising. High-school comedy-fantasy? Remake of goofy Disney film? A few days after the initial invitation, BV sent another, pleading that the media consider it, and insisting that it was "surprisingly good".

"Surprisingly good" was a common feeling among reviewers. Freaky Friday wasn't just another high-school comedy -- and Lohan isn't just another teen heroine, as became obvious when Mean Girls topped the US box-office. Like Freaky Friday, it wasn't just for kids.

"It's a bit edgier than most teen films," says Lohan, "which is a great thing. In the States, a lot of adults love the movie, as well as young teenagers and kids. It's nice to have that wide audience."

A wide audience is the secret of the new batch of teen stars. Look at Johansson, who makes grown-up movies like Lost in Translation. Lohan also appeals to teens, who either identify with her or covet her. (Someone in Mean Girls tells her that she's "a regulation hottie.") But with her unaffected presence, adults enjoy her as well.

In Mean Girls, Cady Heron (Lohan) enters high-school for the first time after being raised in Africa by zoologist parents. Soon, she enters the "Girl World" of bitchiness, one-upmanship and social climbing, torn between her outsider friends and the school's most popular (and vicious) girls. The story is nothing new, but as written by Fey (who has practised edgy humour as head writer of Saturday Night Live), it might have shaken up the high-school movie genre for the current generation.

Teen cattiness is just as common among movie stars. If you believe the gossip, Lohan and Duff's personal feud makes them the Bette Davis and Joan Crawford of the teen set -- despite Lohan's recent attempt to call a truce. "I don't like [it] when people bring up what's been written," she says. "If I said it's not true, it's not true."

Depending on what you believe, Duff must have been fuming this month, when Lohan won the MTV Movie Award for the best breakout performance. "I was really nervous about losing the award," says Lohan, who happened to be hosting the show as well, "because that would have been soooo embarrassing! When I won my award, it was, like, 'Oh my God, are you kidding? What am I going to say?'"

As if to rub salt in Duff's wounds, Lohan has signed a recording deal, just like Duff and, well, most self-respecting teen stars. Playing a rock musician in Freaky Friday, Lohan learned to play guitar. Her next (and less popular) film, Confessions of a Teenage Drama Queen, showed off her formidable song-and-dance talents. She even has notebooks full of her own lyrics, which she hopes to sing in her album.

At the moment, the sky seems to be the limit for Lohan and her ilk. It isn't, of course. There's a looming problem called adulthood, which has effectively ruined several careers: Deanna Durbin in the thirties, Annette Funicello in the sixties, Tatum O'Neal (an Oscar winner, for heaven's sake!) in the seventies, Molly Ringwald in the eighties... the list goes on.

Obviously, Lohan wants to be more like Jodie Foster, one of her acting heroes, who played the same role in the original Freaky Friday. "The transition was much easier for her, because she went from Freaky Friday to Taxi Driver, where she played a young hooker." Would Lohan do the same? "It depends on the script and who else is doing it. If it was someone like Robert De Niro, I think it would be something that was a little bit hard to turn down."

But she can't risk offending her fan base. So far, her characters haven't lost their virginity. "You've always got to be careful, because your fans are the people that are going to go see your movies. If you stop people seeing your movies, then you don't have a career."

So she is choosing her roles carefully -- and of course, she has a number of choices. For now, she is still queen of the Disney remakes, taking Dean Jones' role in the upcoming Herbie: Fully Loaded (based on The Love Bug). Eventually, she is hoping to star in a remake of the (non-Disney) musical Bye Bye Birdie. Ann-Margret, the original star, is another of her heroes.

And what next? In the past few years, two of the best films about high-school girls (Looking for Alibrandi and Bend It Like Beckham) had 20-something women in the lead roles. We even forgave Grease for trying to pass off 33-year-old Stockard Channing as a teenager. But failing such anomalies, Lohan and her cohorts can't play high-schoolers forever.

Right now, nobody knows whether they will make the break to adult stardom, or whether Lindsay, Scarlett and Hilary will turn out to be the Deanna, Annette and Molly of their generation.

Fortunately, they have an advantage. Grown-ups already like them. It seems to have worked for recent teen stars like Kirsten Dunst and Keira Knightley, and it leaves the class of 2004 in good stead.