The Daily Beast (or rather me directly) obtained a production draft of Lifetime’s Elizabeth Taylor biopic starring Lindsay Lohan. I pick out eight especially salacious bits from the script.Over at The Daily Beast, you can read my latest feature, "Liz & Dick: 8 Crazy Scenes from Lindsay Lohan’s Elizabeth Taylor Biopic," in which I read Christopher Monger's script and pick out the eight craziest, oddest, most salacious bits of Lifetime's upcoming Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton biopic, Liz & Dick, starring Lindsay Lohan.
When considering actresses to play the late, beloved Academy Award–winner Elizabeth Taylor, the first name that comes to most people’s minds likely isn’t Lindsay Lohan.
And yet the troubled, talented 25-year-old actress is currently playing Taylor in Lifetime’s made-for-TV movie Liz & Dick, about the tumultuous romance between Taylor and her costar/husband Richard Burton (played here by True Blood’s Grant Bowler).
Lohan is once again making headlines with her off-screen behavior—so perhaps she’s perfect as Taylor, after all. Just last week, Lohan allegedly crashed a rented Porsche into an 18-wheeler on Malibu’s Pacific Coast Highway. Lohan’s accident occurred as she was filming Liz & Dick, which hails from writer Christopher Monger (Temple Grandin) and director Lloyd Kramer (The Five People You Meet in Heaven) and depicts Burton and Taylor’s brief encounter at a 1954 pool party, their first full-fledged meeting on the set of 1963’s Cleopatra, their headlines-grabbing romance, and Burton’s death in 1984.
The Daily Beast obtained a production draft of Monger’s script for the project, dated April 3, 2012. Unlike most of the schlocky Lifetime telepics (to wit: the fast-tracked William & Kate movie), Monger’s script isn’t terrible; however, a production draft can change significantly during the shooting of a film and the success or failure of Lifetime’s take on Taylor and Burton will rely a great deal on how well Lohan and Bowler can inhabit the Hollywood icons’ personas.
Monger, however, has a good grasp on the alchemy between Taylor and Burton, as well as their rowdy romance and their low points, though he speeds through their relationship at a sometimes alarming pace, particularly at the end of the script, when the two remarry in Botswana after their divorce. Their reunion is brought about after Taylor’s colon-cancer scare and he rushes to her hospital where she is upside-down in traction; the two remarry, but then suddenly they’re not together, time has passed, Burton is himself remarried (to Sally Hay) and Burton dies after writing Liz a letter from his deathbed. (And then there’s the “ethereal sound-stage” framework that Monger repeatedly returns to throughout the script. But I’ll get to that in a bit.)
What follows are eight of the most shocking moments in the script for Liz & Dick.
Continue reading at The Daily Beast...
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