HOLLYWOOD is downsizing its assets. Lindsay Lohan, teenage star of the forthcoming Disney movie Herbie: Fully Loaded, has become the latest actress to have her bustline digitally reduced to avoid offending audiences.

Lohan, 18, had finished work on the fourth sequel to the 1968 film The Love Bug, about a sentient Volkswagen Beetle, when reports from test screenings indicated that some parents felt she came across as somewhat sensual for a family-oriented film.

Disney technicians went though scenes showing the actress jumping up and down at a motor racing track and altered them with a computer program — reducing her bust by up to two cup sizes and raising the necklines on her T-shirts.

Lohan is said to have been amused by what technicians call her “digital boob job”.

“I don’t know how Renée Zellweger kept swelling and shrinking for Bridget Jones: it’s no fun,” she said recently. “Bring on the computer guys.”

Lohan is not the only actress to have had her body shape altered by Hollywood’s computer wizards. Angelina Jolie was “trimmed” in a scene from the forthcoming film, Mr and Mrs Smith, in which she slides down a rope.

“She did her own stunts, but that meant there was a bit of loose bosomry we had to tidy up and flatten down,” said a technician on the film, which opens next month. “Maybe the original shot will turn up on the DVD.”

Paul Dergarabedian of Exhibitor Relations, which gauges audience reactions to movies, said such cuts reflect growing uncertainty about the place of breasts in Hollywood, dating back to Janet Jackson’s “nipplegate” incident during last year’s American football Super Bowl.

“Breasts are fine in PG films providing they are discreet and no larger than a C-cup,” he said.

“Anything more formidable is reserved for films aimed at teenage boys, unless they are action heroines like Carrie-Anne Moss of The Matrix, in which case the women are supposed to be slim and athletic. There are a lot of mixed messages now.”

It is a dilemma facing Eva Mendes, who is filming the comic book adaptation Ghost Rider with Nicolas Cage. Both have faced “body challenges”, said an insider.

Cage had a Ghost Rider tattoo removed from his arm before he played his hero, while the buxom actress has been asked to “strap down” for action scenes. Mendes is said to have told the film-makers to “fix it in post-production”.

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