People: Apr. 3, 2006

Q&A LILY TOMLIN

This spring Lily Tomlin appears in the 25th anniversary DVD of Nine to Five, the West Wing finale and Robert Altman's A Prairie Home Companion.

Doesn't a 9-to-5 workday sound quaint? It's true. The world is just so pressured. Look at the generation we're creating, with Survivor and all that stuff. You're supposed to outwit everybody and double-deal. Nine to Five was trying to bring a female sensibility to the corporate world, which can really grind you down to nothing.

What do you make of modern feminism? One of the failings of the old feminist movement was that it didn't make room for homemakers. And it should have. We've swung back another way now. There's the whole biology-is-destiny thing. This is where you say to me, "Rap on, sister."

Will you miss West Wing? I hate to see it go. When I first saw it on the air, I was just crestfallen. I thought, "How can I not be on this great show?" I was just hoping to get a guest spot.

You and Meryl Streep seemed to enjoy giving Altman his Oscar. All we wanted to do was not humiliate ourselves. And to make Bob laugh. My partner, Jane, wrote most of that text.

How did Lindsay Lohan fit in with you and Meryl on the Prairie Home Companion set? Meryl mothered her. If she came late, Meryl told her, "This is Bob Altman. You have to give him the respect he deserves." When Meryl and I would walk to the set, there would be teenagers prostrate on the sidewalk chanting "Lindsay! Lindsay!" We would have to kick them to the side. I'd point to Meryl and say, "Do you know who this is?"

FIRST LOOK JEEPERS, SHE LOOKS FAMILIAR

EMMA ROBERTS is on the case. The star of Nickelodeon's Unfabulous and the new movie Aquamarine--who shares the broad, screen-ready smile of her aunt Julia (yes, that Julia)--plays the preppy, resourceful teen sleuth in next year's movie Nancy Drew. The plot has Nancy joining her dad on a business trip to Los Angeles and finding herself (by golly!) probing the death of a movie star. Roberts, 15, calls her character, first introduced in novels in the 1930s, "the Barbie of her time," meaning, we suppose, an icon. Either that or a well-dressed gal with lots of cool gadgets.

AND NOW, CASHBACK MOUNTAIN

Now that Brokeback Mountain has been outed as a well-marketed, Oscar-winning love story that has earned $158 million at the box office--instead of a controversial, low-budget, art-house flick--one of the film's supporting players says he wants his due. RANDY QUAID, apparently not living large on his Pluto Nash salary, is suing Focus Features for $10 million, alleging that it tricked him into accepting low pay for his role as a rancher by downplaying the movie's moneymaking potential. Neither his lawyers nor Focus would comment. But in his complaint, Quaid is described as an "instantly recognizable household name." The film's sheep must feel duped too. All those glamour shots, and they didn't even get the guild minimum.

GET YOUR LIGHTERS! First there was Dave Chappelle's Block Party. Now a bunch of other new movies try to reinvent the concert film. Why? For fun, mostly. Says Beastie Mike D.: "We didn't think of [the film] as an important historical document."