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Friday, March 14, 2014

Retraction From Parallel Social-Media Me

So.... I messed up. Not here. Here I am perfect and sweet and gumdrop lollipops except when I am not. Over on my Facebook account is where I messed up.

This morning on Facebook, I shared this account of a taping of the sitcom 2 Broke Girls, given by someone claiming to have been in the audience that night. In the account, the taping happened to be the one in which Lindsay Lohan was guest-starring. The story tells of a complete and utter trainwreck, as just about anyone who's followed Lohan's career trajectory since Mean Girls would fully expect to hear about, me included. There are tales of 45 minutes to get one scene done, a take aborted because Lindsay's phone went off, lines being shortened until Lindsay could spit them out, her being unable to speak properly because of a combination of smoking and Botox, people leaving the taping to the point where not only cupcakes but also money was being offered to those willing to remain, and silence meeting Lindsay at the end while all the other actors got applause. All things that you'd generally expect to see in a Lindsay Lohan story these days.

The story's so detailed, all in all, and of the type where you wouldn't expect any bigger-name source to give a firsthand account anyway (the major outlets would usually be too concerned with spoilers and probably under NDA's in any case), that I ended up taking it at face value and passed it along. Then I went to work and more or less forgot about it.

Come the end of work, I go on Twitter, and what should greet me but a tweet from Kat Dennings, one of the lead actresses on 2 Broke Girls. The horse's mouth. The tweet read, "This article is complete bullshit. Lindsay was prepared, sweet to everyone, & professional. Not nice to spread lies." It was followed by a link to an article whose thread led back to the aforementioned story. (UPDATE: Five minutes later, costar Beth Behrs concurred with Dennings.)

I was until this point unfamiliar with the blogger, going by "Entertainment Lawyer", Enty for short, or his blog, Crazy Days And Nights. If I had been familiar, I would have known not to pass it along. Because the blog was exposed back in 2012- on April Fools Day, ironically- as a complete and total pile of crap by, and I'm not proud to admit I got outjournoed by them, the New York Post, which proceeded to pick apart some of Enty's recent claims of the day with tweezers after a (false) claim that one of the commenters on the blog was Robert Downey Jr. writing under a pseudonym, and added that Enty, while he is a lawyer in Los Angeles, is not an entertainment lawyer but rather one that deals with wills and probate.

Not hard to tell whose word is more trustworthy here. I wish I'd have known that sooner. I'd essentially passed along a story from a lesser-known journalistic equivalent of the National Enquirer. And I cannot let that blunder go unfixed.

As a side note, I probably should also have seen a red flag go up when the story got around to the part about people leaving the taping early, and throughout the taping. You are generally not allowed to leave a taping of a TV show early unless there's an emergency, as, among other factors, leaving can disrupt the taping.

So, my apologies to Kat, Beth and, more importantly, Lindsay Lohan. If the taping went well, maybe that's a sign that this latest of 'last chances' Lohan's working on is finally the one that's actually taking, in which case, the best of luck.

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