Posted on 02/22/2006 2:15:19 PM PST by presidio9
His handshake belongs to what I believe is known as the Bill Clinton school; firm grip, level gaze and that "special" touch, a discreet squeeze under the elbow that implies, "If you think it's exciting meeting me, just imagine how exciting it is being me."
Actually, I imagine that a lot of the time it's kind of embarrassing being George Clooney. The path to his door is littered with the corpses of female journalists, who, after spending half an hour in his company - smart, funny, so suave as to practically curve at the edges - simply expired on the way out and were left to petrify where they fell.
Clooney remains unimpressed. It is part of his regular-guy charm that, at 44, he has lived for more years in obscurity than fame and regards the excesses of the entertainment world with a sort of good-humoured condescension. His image as a rebel has as much to do with his manner as his politics; when he attacks US President George Bush it's with a heavy irony that takes into account the fact that people don't, generally, like being preached to by actors. It is what separates him from other, politically outspoken celebrities whose laudable views are undermined somewhat by the exceptional self-regard that holding them seems to inspire.
Clooney is as vain and materialistic as the next guy in Hollywood - "F--- it, I love my house in Italy. It's big and audacious and ridiculous, and nicer than any human being has the right to have" - but he is also one of the few really grown-up movie stars. "I have Irish Catholic guilt," he says, smiling, "and want to make up for [my successes]."
The way Clooney atones is by making, alongside the romantic comedies and heist numbers, a range of films that bring him a different kind of attention altogether. Good Night, And Good Luck, which is screening now and which he co-wrote and directed, and Syriana, which opened on Thursday and which he says makes Good Night look like "a Disney film", both tackle corruption in the US Government. Good Night tells the story of Edward R. Murrow, the CBS journalist who took on Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s; the second is an adaptation of former CIA man Robert Baer's memoir, in which al-Qaeda-type terrorism is alleged to be partly the result of corrupt US policies in the Middle East.
Clooney relishes the battle. "I'm pretty good at the fight. Which is to say I've learned, over the years, how to fight these things . . . My father is a journalist who went directly at Jimmy Carter when the OPEC nations raised the price of gas, directly at Gerald Ford when he pardoned Nixon . . . "
Clooney's father is a silent presence throughout Good Night, And Good Luck, which was inspired partly by the memories Clooney has of hanging around as a child at the TV studio where he worked, in Kentucky. Clooney snr believed, as Murrow did, that McCarthy's anti-communist hearings compromised basic civil liberties in the US, in a way that his son parallels with Bush's anti-terrorism laws. It is a very good film, shot in black and white and romantic about the golden age of TV, when everyone smoked and drank Scotch ("and died of emphysema" drawls Clooney) and a news show such as Murrow's could collar a 40-million-strong audience.
Clooney's methods as a director had an almost Mike Leigh-ish tinge to them. Each morning before shooting he would gather the actors, including Robert Downey jnr and Jeff Daniels, and give them copies of the newspapers of that day in 1953. They'd spend an hour and a half on old manual typewriters, copying stories from the paper. He was extremely nervous showing it to his father for the first time. "I mean dad and I, neither of us are good at taking compliments. And [after watching it] he got up and just patted me on the shoulder and said, 'You got it right'."
Not everybody thought so. When Good Night, And Good Luck came out in the US, Clooney braced himself for the right-wing backlash. His visible attendance at early peace demonstrations against the current war in Iraq made him a target. "Oh yeah," he says, "they put me on the cover of a magazine with a banner across my chest that said 'traitor'. And they organised a picket for the movie I was in."
His response to the traitor incident was to put together a montage of prominent people on the anti-war side, including the Pope, Jimmy Carter, Nelson Mandela and Pat Buchanan (a hard-right commentator in the US) and drape the word "traitors" across them, too. "Then I made 800 flyers anonymously and sent them to everyone in the media. And I waited. And Dan Rather [CBS news anchor] called me and said, have you seen this flyer that's going around? And I said, 'My quote would be, the Pope and I can take it, but don't pick on Pat Buchanan.' " He grins. "You know, the truth is . . . it is not merely your right but your duty to question your government. You can't demand freedom of speech and then say, but don't say bad things about me. You gotta be a grown-up and take your hits."
Still, when the pro-war lobby fought back, he was initially unnerved. "I remember when they were picketing the movie theatre for me and I called my dad and said, 'Er, so, am I in trouble?' I mean, you know. And he's like, 'Shut up. Mohammad Ali went to prison for protesting against Vietnam, and you're worried about making a little bit less money? Grow up. Be a man.' And he was right." Inevitably, he says, his dad has become a little "more Catholic" as he's grown older and they fight now about different things. "Like gay marriage to him is not OK. We've had some knock-down drag-outs about those kind of things."
In his 20s and early 30s, Clooney just wanted to get on in his career. After moving from Kentucky to his Aunt Rosemary's house (as in Rosemary Clooney, the singer) in LA, he got a few low-profile TV parts and for the next 10 years made a good living on the outer shores of fame. He seemed always to be on the brink of a breakthrough. When the big time finally arrived, with a part in ER that exposed him for five years to an audience the size of Ed Murrow's, he wasn't devoured by it. He was 33. "I was very lucky to get well known much later in life," he says. "You need to have flopped quite a few times to get a sense of how little any of it has to do with you."
Clooney handled working on ER cannily. By the time he left, in 1999, he was by choice the lowest-paid star on the show. "If I have a five-year contract and make $30,000 an episode, and I want to make half a million an episode, I have to give them two years more. Well, to me that doesn't make sense, because I'm getting offered much bigger deals than that in film." On days off from the show, instead of relaxing, Clooney would line up more work.
And so Clooney became a big star. He dated beautiful women and hung out with other big stars. One thing the non-famous don't realise about the famous, he says, is that they can themselves be star-struck. On the set of Ocean's Twelve he would sit around the table with Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and Don Cheadle, playing poker and thinking how cool his life was. Then his Catholic guilt kicked in and he made Syriana.
He hopes that both it and Good Night, And Good Luck will nudge him into the tradition of the great campaigning filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s - "Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Hal Ashby, Kubrick."
He is having the time of his life now; everything that came before was just prologue.
"I've taken on my dad's battles. I'm fighting the fights that he fought. Oh, it's trouble," he grins. "Trouble big time."
The Guardian
That's liberal guilt. Not Catholic guilt.
Catholic guilt might compel him to make a movie about the 45million children murdered in America by abortion. Have to do quite a bit of searching to find as big a bloody slaughter under an oppressive government or unjust war.
Please, you must add the tagline:
SUPER MEGA BARF ALERT!
For the children, you must. Now, if you'll excuse me
(Gag! Barf! Hurl! Rowf!)
"He hopes that both it and Good Night, And Good Luck will nudge him into the tradition of the great campaigning filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s - "Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Hal Ashby, Kubrick."
Oh brother. George doesn't have a high opinion of himself, does he? You wish, Looney.
How perceptive!!! You nailed it.
I heard Clooney is a little light in the loafers.
"Catholics" who actually practice Catholicism don't feel guilty.
He's perfectly balanced.......
light between the ears also.
Was Emma masturbating when she wrote this garbage?
If he had Catholic guilt, he would make a movie such as The Passion of the Christ.
If he had liberal guilt, he would make a movie such as goodnight, goodluck or Syriana.
Clooney remembers 1954 pretty well for a 44 year-old.
No kidding! "His regular-guy charm"?
What a pathetic excuse for a human being.
A sore spot, I'm sure, in the Clooney household.
OH, Pulllleeeaasseee.....someone post the BARFER!!!
Clooney purchased his house in the Lake Como, IT area FROM JOHN KERRY.
Just a factoid of interest, particularly as to how Clooney describes the place.
Well, since he seems to have realized that the better educated don't appreciate getting political advice from college drop-outs, maybe he should drop the other shoe and shut the heck up.
"... in which al-Qaeda-type terrorism is alleged to be partly the result of corrupt US policies in the Middle East."
That was not really the thrust of Robert Baer's book, but guess which administration's policies Baer criticized when he did write on the subject: BUBBA'S!
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