Showbiz411

Robin Williams, one of my favorite people and a comic genius, is getting back to doing good films. The Oscar winner (“Good Will Hunting”) is joining two excellent projects. First he’s playing former president Dwight D. Eisenhower in Lee Daniels’ “The Butler” with an all star cast that includes Forest Whitaker, Oprah Winfrey, Jane Fonda, John Cusack and another Oscar winner, Melissa Leo, as Mamie Eisenhower. If “The Butler” isn’t an Oscar nominee in 2014, something will be terribly wrong. Then Williams goes into Phil Alden Robinson’s “The Angriest Man in Brooklyn.” He stars in it again with Melissa Leo (let’s hope they get along), Peter Dinklage, and James Earl Jones. Robinson, of course, made “Field of Dreams,” and wrote Carl Reiner’s brilliant “All of Me” with Lily Tomlin and Steve Martin, so we love him. Robin Williams has a crazy movie career and a crazier personal life, but we love him, too, and hope these two films bring him back with a vengeance. If he’s good as Eisenhower, we can all wear “I Like Ike” buttons again.

Roger Friedman

Roger Friedman began his Showbiz411 column in April 2009 after 10 years with Fox News. Friedman previously wrote the Intelligencer column at New York Magazine, He writes for Parade magazine and has written for Details, Vogue, the New York Times, Post, and Daily News and many other publications. He is the writer and co-producer of a film about R&B Music called “Only the Strong Survive,” which was released by Miramax in 2003 and was a selection of the Cannes, Sundance, and Telluride Film festivals.