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The passing of Joan Didion, one of the 20th century’s greatest writers, is tough to put into words. Really, only Didion herself could fully pull off the mighty task of encapsulating her grand and wildly influential output. Her clear-eyed and no-nonsense view of American culture, stripped of its own propaganda to reveal the grimy hypocrisies lying underneath a gleaming surface, could be as elegiac as it was merciless. During the most confusing and incomprehensible of times, be it the paranoia of post-Manson Hollywood or the battlefield of her own grief, Didion provided a guiding light forward. Even as some of her most famous words have become iconography for Pinterest boards devoid of their original context, Didion's anti-Romantic glance lost none of its potency.Given her status as one of California’s homegrown talents, a Sacramento girl who partied with the Doors, hired Harrison Ford as her carpenter, and had dinner with Sharon Tate,...

Grant Bowler / Richard Burton: Liz & Dick Grant Bowler as Richard Burton in Lifetime’s fall movie Liz & Dick looks less convincing than Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor. Burton met Taylor at the time the two were making Cleopatra for 20th Century Fox. A troubled production, Cleopatra was initially to have starred Taylor, Peter Finch, and Stephen Boyd, under the direction of Rouben Mamoulian. Mamoulian left, Taylor fell seriously ill, nearly died, and had to have a tracheotomy performed. The end result was a Best Actress Academy Award for her troubles (and for Butterfield 8) and brand new leading men for Cleopatra: Richard Burton as Marc Antony and Rex Harrison as Julius Caesar. By then, Cleopatra also had a new director: two-time Best Director Oscar winner Joseph L. Mankiewicz. A respected stage and screen actor in the ’60s, Richard Burton was nominated for seven Academy Awards. Best Supporting Actor...

Lindsay Lohan / Elizabeth Taylor Lindsay Lohan as Elizabeth Taylor in the Lifetime movie Liz & Dick. Lohan, 26 next July 2, plays Elizabeth Taylor (apparently) at about the time she met Richard Burton in the early ’60s. (Though the Lohan/Taylor picture above looks like something out Richard Brooks’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, with Lohan as Maggie the Panther.) Grant Bowler, best known for True Blood and the box-office and critical cataclysm Atlas Shrugged: Part I, plays Richard Burton. The makeup job looks quite impressive, helping to transform Lohan into Taylor. We’ll see — or rather, hear — if Lohan is able to reproduce Taylor’s tones as well. A tabloid queen in her heyday, Elizabeth Taylor won two Best Actress Academy Awards: Daniel Mann’s Butterfield 8, 1960; Mike Nichols’ Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, 1966. Taylor was nominated three other times: Edward Dmytryk’s Raintree County, 1957; Brooks’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,...

Lindsay Lohan Elizabeth Taylor movie Liz & Dick (Grant Bowler as Richard Burton) Lindsay Lohan‘s Elizabeth Taylor movie Liz & Dick, to be shown on Lifetime, has its first official photo. Lohan does look like Taylor; whether or not Atlas Shrugged: Part I‘s Grant Bowler passes for Richard Burton is unclear, as he seems to be playing Christopher Lee in the above pic. Much has been said about how absurd it was to cast Lindsay Lohan, of rehab and courtroom notoriety, to play one of the most glamorous stars Hollywood has ever produced. What those people seem to forget — or be ignorant about — is that Elizabeth Taylor, long before she became a Dame of the (now-moribund) British Empire, long before her AIDS Foundation, and not that long before her two Oscar wins, was considered by many to be a selfish, reckless "whore." True, Taylor received four back-to-back Oscar nominations in...