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Is Lindsay Lohan Uninsurable--or Just Impossible?

Lindsay Lohan has been fired from this Linda Lovelace biopic Inferno because she's "uninsurable." Is that true or just an excuse to fire her? --J.I., via the inbox
/ Source: E!online

Lindsay Lohan has been fired from this Linda Lovelace biopic Inferno because she's "uninsurable." Is that true or just an excuse to fire her? --J.I., via the inbox

As if anybody needed an excuse to fire Lohan, she's in rehab. If she's in rehab, she cannot, as Eddie Murphy once put it, be where I'm at. And if she cannot be where I'm at, then she cannot participate in my exciting business venture, now can she?

Anyway. The truth is, yes, this was an excuse to fire her--technically. And I can prove it:

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Listen to a man who would know, Douglas Turk, CEO of leading entertainment insurance broker Aon/Albert G. Ruben.

The last time I checked in with Mr. Turk, he essentially told me that uninsurability is B.S. Any actor can be insured, he told us. It's just a matter of how much money you want to spend.

The case of Robert Downey Jr. comes to mind. He was once dubbed "uninsurable," but that's not really true. His insurance was just too expensive. Mel Gibson stepped in to assume the balance of Downey's risk, and the future star of Iron Man began his rise once again.

So, what does all this mean in the case of Lohan?

It means she can be insured. It's probably just too expensive, and that she isn't worth the trouble, and that she has no rich friends with giant piles of cash lying around gathering dust.

"If you really wanted to get insurance on someone like Lindsay Lohan, you might end up paying 90 cents on the dollar, so there's very little exposure on the part of the insurer," Turk muses to me. "[Director] Matthew Wilder has done a very good job standing by her for as long as he could, but I think it's probably at the point where the producers are saying, 'Let's go'.

"There's too much risk associated with her, so the cost of insurance is probably going to outweigh the benefit."

How much money are we talking about?

Well, depending on the production, insurance premium costs are as little as two or three percent of a budget--but if an actor is risky, an insurance company may try to charge a double-digit percentage, which most filmmakers cannot afford.

Now, if Lohan could just make a call to Mel Gibson, maybe the two of them could work something out?

MORE: So who's replacing Lindsay in Inferno? E! News has the scoop