The Parent Trap

This was Nancy Meyers’s first feature as a director. The twins carry the names of her and Charles Shyer’s two daughters, Hallie and Annie, both of whom turn up in small parts, and the film is dedicated to Hallie Meyers-Shyer. Mara Wilson, Scarlett Johansson and Michelle Trachtenberg were considered before Lohan. Lindsay Lohan playing both girls in one frame was solved with motion control photography. Meyers has said it was complicated and that she really did not know how to do it: everything had to be shot twice, and inside children’s working hours. Erin Mackey stood opposite Lohan as her double, while separate doubles handled the fencing. The lineage runs deeper than a remake. The 1998 version redoes the 1961 Disney film, which came from Erich Kästner’s 1949 novel Das doppelte Lottchen and pulled off the same trick with split screen. There is one more link: Joanna Barnes, the gold digger Vicki Robinson in 1961, returns here as Vicki Blake, mother of the gold digger Meredith Blake. A good fit if you accept that the swap is solved around the middle and the rest belongs to the parents rather than the girls. Not for anyone waiting for Meredith to be given a single human moment, since the camping stretch exists purely to remove her.