Precious Precious director Lee Daniels continues to assemble an interesting, distracting cast for his next movie about race relations and feeling bad, The Butler, in which Forest Whitaker plays the servant to eight different White House families. Already on board are Oprah Winfrey as Whitaker's wife, John Cusack as Richard Nixon, Minka Kelly as Jacqueline Kennedy, and Alan Rickman and Jane Fonda as Ronald and Nancy Reagan, and therefore Dwight D. Eisenhower may as well be played by Robin Williams, because there are clearly stranger things. Williams—who played Teddy Roosevelt in the Night At The Museum films and can now shout that he's also played two presidents outside the front door of Anthony Hopkins' house, perhaps while peeing on it—will assume a role previously essayed by diverse actors such as Henry Grace, Robert Duvall, and Tom Selleck. Though of course, none of them have really captured the specific personality quirks of Eisenhower, such as the time he gave his famous farewell speech warning America about the growing influence of the military-industrial complex in the voice of a flamboyantly gay hairdresser. As of press time, Williams was three hours into a list of all the hilarious things the "D." stands for.
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