George Clooney knows his news. From growing up as the son of the respected broadcast journalist Nick Clooney to calling out the irresponsible actions of the paparazzi following the death of Britain’s Princess Diana to locking horns with conservative commentators like Ann Coulter and Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, Clooney has never shied away from exploring the issues surrounding the Fourth Estate.
In his second directorial effort Good Night, and Good Luck, he not only explores a watershed moment in the history of broadcast journalism, when pioneering newsman Edward R. Murrow took on the Anti-Communist witch-hunt tactics of the notorious Senator Joseph McCarthy, the film also puts many current media ethics issues in sharp relief, in gloriously photographed black and white.
You won’t find chatter about his Italian villa or his Ocean’s Eleven buddies in Hollywood.com’s no-nonsense interview with Clooney, but you will find plenty of food for thought.
What was it about Edward R. Murrow that fascinated you and made you want to make a movie about him?
Clooney: “He was a big part of my growing up. My father was an anchorman, doing news his whole life, and Murrow was always the high water mark for broadcast journalists. Growing up that’s always what my father would refer to as sort of what the standard was set at that no one could ever reach again–[although Walter] Cronkite did pretty well. He did pretty well in Vietnam. So anyway, that was a big part of my growing up, first of all. Then I revisited some of those speeches that I was pretty familiar with. I knew the ‘Box of lights and wires’ speech really well. Most people who studied any journalism at all always heard thatI hadn’t heard all of the television shows. I hadn’t heard his rebuttals to McCarthy. But I started watching those speeches again, and I thought that they were incredibly inspiring. I miss that kind of clarity at times. It’s sort of like when was the last time you were watching network television and you heard Paddy Chayefsky’s words? And you go, ‘Wow.’ So they sort of represented us at our best, and I’m always the guy in the car going, ‘You know what I should have said?’ So I really enjoyed the idea of talking about Murrow again.”
Did the recent attempted rehabilitation of McCarthy’s reputation, particularly by Ann Coulter in her book Treason, play any part in your decision to work with this material?
Clooney: “Yeah. Did you read that book? It’s interesting with her. The problem with her is that she’s a bad journalist. She sort of has her own market and does her own thing, but you can’t get the facts wrong, and the facts were wrong. She can say that Murrow got it wrong because there weren’t three ‘Annie Lee Mosses’ in the phone book. [NOTE: Clooney is referring to the low-level Pentagon code clerk McCarthy subpoenaed and accused of being a dues-paying Communist, whom Murrow in part defended by pointing out that that there were multiple women with the same name in the Washington, D.C., phone book] ‘So Murrow is wrong and she was a communist and we can prove it!’ That’s not the point, and if you watch the broadcast and if you watch what Murrow says in that specific broadcast, he says specifically, ‘You will note that neither the prosecutor nor this reporter know or claim that she is or is not a communist. We simply demand that she have the right to face her accuser.’ That was always the point. That was Murrow’s point. It was never about defending communists. We can always argue about the fact whether that was something to talk about because it was certainly using fear to attack civil liberties, but the question was much more and always was with him constitutional and Fred Friendly too. When I was kid in school I was a big fan of Fred Friendly’s. Some might remember the ‘Ethics in America’ that Fred Friendly did. So I read a lot stuff about Fred Friendly. He always carried a copy of the constitution, a little copy of the constitution in his bag. I have one here too and I always kind of keep it in my bag with me. It’s kind of a great foundation to go back and look at. So it was always constitutional issues.”
Are you prepared for the attacks that are sure to come from those on the other side of the issue?
Clooney: “Page Six ran a story a few months ago, ran a story that I’m going to do a big liberal piece about McCarthy, and attacking McCarthy when we know that McCarthy was right about some of the people that he named. Look, he may end up at the end of the day being right about two of the thousands that he named–that might end up happening. An infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters…He might end up getting a couple right, but that’s not the point. The point was that he was wrong about the technique and that was a concern that I also saw happening in other issues. And for us, what the question was, and what [co-screenwriter] Grant [Heslov] I started talking about when we started doing it was is that it’s not easy, democracy, and that it requires constant diligence. It also requires an understanding of the complexities. And the complexities are that it’s not black and white, really. Murrow talks about protecting, the problems of protecting, the individual and the state at the same time, and they seem to all be present things to talk about again. To me it was an interesting to talk about again. I worry about polarizing issues. I mean, we all know what the world is like out there right now and we also know that there are a couple of ways to do this. I had to be very careful about how I campaigned for my father which I couldn’t do because it was Hollywood versus the heartland. Somehow we sort of lose the moral argument lately. Fair enough. We’ll take those hits. It’s all cyclical, but I didn’t want this to be a polarizing piece.”
What were you going for, exactly, and how did you get there?
Clooney: “I wanted it to be a factual piece. I tried to treat this as my father did and he talked to me about it for a long time. We double sourced every scene in the movie. Every scene in the film is double sourced. It was infinite numbers of things. It might’ve been other documentaries that we used. Everything that we could to source each of the scenes and basically the content in each of the scenes because we wanted to be able to say, and that’s why we used McCarthy playing himself, for the same reason – wanted to say, ‘Look, you tell us what we did wrong.’ I know that there are people out there who are going to try and marginalize it because all you have to do is find one thing wrong and go, ‘Well, it’s all horseshit. It’s all crap.’ So then I thought that I had to be very careful with the facts. That’s important and so that was my job. So what I found to do was to go and look at all of the other arguments, the arguments against Murrow. We just felt that it was important to constantly balance all the other arguments and say, ‘Fair enough. Lets have those discussions.’ And not say that we’re right or that we’re wrong, but that we can have discussions.”
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With people like Bill O’Reilly and Larry King among the best known journalists today, who do you think is the successor to Murrow?
Clooney: “Bill would think that it’s him, because he takes a side and takes a stand. So I would imagine that Bill probably thinks that it’s him. I would suggest that, first of all, I don’t think there is a lack of journalism. There isn’t a reporter that I know–and I grew up with them–that doesn’t want to break a big story. I mean, there really isn’t. That’s the fun of it. The problem is that sometimes when you ask a tough question you get sent to the back of the press conference room and you lose access and then you’ve traded away one story for the entire network’s access. So that’s how it’s censored. It’s not that you can’t ask the question. It’s just that you might get, ‘Okay, you’re done. Go to the back of the room.’ So I’ve seen and talked to network news anchors who have told me stories of how ‘I’d like to say this, but if I do I’m gone.’ I thought that was too bad. And look there are kids getting killed in Afghanistan and Iraq everyday getting stories. I think that there is a great amount of beautiful journalism going on. I think that there is a lot of crap out there and it’s a different world now. It’s a twenty four hour news cycle. It’s a hundred fifty channels. It’s all of that, and it’s going and looking for it. 90 percent of the news that America gets is from television now, I think. People don’t read anymore.”
Tell us about the choice to shoot it in black and white.
Clooney: “Really, the first and only thing to define it was that we were going to use the archival footage [from Murrow’s broadcasts], and it would just stand out so badly if we did it any other way. But then Grant and I started talking about knowing that it was going to make it very hard to sell. It made it very hard to sell. It made it shockingly hard to sell. You’d think that at this point in my career, if I’m going to write it for a dollar and direct it for a dollar and act in it for scale as the second biggest part of the film that I could get $7.5 million raised to do the movie, but it took us forever. We did it piece by piece by piece to get it. But I only know Murrow and McCarthy in black and white. I’ve never seen them in color and I don’t know anything about them in color. So I think that you have to film things in the way that you remember them. So I started going through some art films in the beginning, because I thought that maybe I’d shoot it on Super 16 and try to get those lenses and something like that, and I realized that that was a dumb way to do it. Then I started going back to the documentaries, and then I looked at the documentaries like Crisis and Primary and ones like that. I thought that was a better way to do it, so that I could make it more of a fly on the wall kind of look. But black and white was the only option. It’s funny, we shot it on color film because you can use so much less light. I mean, if you’re shooting in black and white, it would take us twice as long to light it. So we have a color print of it that we’ve seen and it is freaky-looking. I mean, it looks like a sitcom. It looks so wrong.”
You don’t use an external score in the film at all. Talk about your choice to have the only music come from Diane Reeves singing within various scenes.
Clooney: “We did that for a couple of reasons. I’m a fan of the film Failsafe, the original one, and then we did a live version of it. I always found that we’re at a time right now where everyone is afraid that you’re not going to be able to hold people’s attention unless you have bells and things going off all of the time. And if you watch Failsafe there is this stunning silence. And silence is really important. And I found that the tension in the film–I think of it as an action film–but the tension in the film is all in the silence of it, and what is said in the moments when you are counting down and waiting and watching. I mean, I love it. So the only music that I put in was about three songs. I went to the guy who did all the producing for Aunt Rosemary [Clooney]‘s music, and all the musicians are guys that played with my Aunt Rosemary. I knew that I was going to frame [CBS broadcaster] Don Hollenbeck’s suicide around the song ‘How High the Moon’ from the very beginning. So Diane Reeves actually sent me a tape singing ‘How High The Moon’ and it was great…I like that era of music, and I wanted her to be sort of the Joel Grey in Cabaret. I wanted her to be this sort of moral point of view that you could constantly go back to.”
The footage of McCarthy and Lt. Milo Radulovich, even the Liberace and that great cigarette commercial added to the feel of the movie.
Clooney: “The smoking commercial I put in because we’re smoking so much in the film. It’s accurate. Two thirds of those guys died of lung cancer, but it’s real. There is this sort of white-washing now that wants you to take out cigarettes from movies. In fact, there are policies at the studio. You’ll get a memo that will say ‘Absolutely no smoking in these films.’ Look, I’m a non-smoker and I had nine great aunts and uncles die from lung cancer, including my Aunt Rosemary. I think that it’s dangerous to glamorize it, and we make it look pretty good. So I thought that it was important to at least make a point in there about it because it’s a pretty manipulative thing. I mean, you don’t know it’s a smoking commercial when it comes up. I thought that was at least a way to comment again, like we were talking about taking an argument away to go, ‘Yeah, we get it. We know that what we’re doing is making it look good, like Casablanca.’ Everyone smoked, and you can’t change the rules. And you had the doctor even checking your heart with a cigarette in his mouth.”
Did you talk to Murrow’s family?
Clooney: “Sure. [Murrow’s son] Casey was on the set a lot. [Murrow’s wife] Janet is long gone, but Casey was on the set a lot. In fact, we shot this sort of piece to go along with the film. It’s a documentary. We see Joe and Shirley [Wershba, two of Murrow’s See It Now team, played by Robert Downey, Jr., and Patricia Clarkson] there everyday and you see Ruth Friendly and Andy and Dave Friendly there. Casey was a young boy at the time. Ruth was married to Fred. But the rest of the guys were around and saw it, and I wanted to be able to go, ‘Joe and Shirley were standing there when this happened.’ So that when people try to marginalize it and say that it’s horseshit and that it didn’t happen, you can go, ‘Well, they were there, and they said we were right.’ And we wanted to have that on film somewhere. To me, the biggest thing was that it was important to recalibrate this historical thing. We tested this film, and literally 25 percent of the people didn’t know who Joe McCarthy was. They asked us who the actor playing Joe McCarthy was. We wanted to take out one of those ads in the trades that says ‘For your consideration for best supporting actor,’ which I think might be great. We might even get him a nomination, because no one could do him better.”
David Strathairn gives an astounding performance as Murrow–tell us about how he got there.
Clooney: “This movie doesn’t work unless David Strathairn is in the film. He’s so good. When he’s looking in the camera and about to go at McCarthy and it’s silent, you just see him as like this warrior. I love that…The truth is that I’m really happy for David. You can take a camera on some guy’s face for five minutes and not move it–that’s the actor. Now he’s got great words, Murrow is a good writer, but David just knocked this thing out of the park. He did that in two takes–He did it in one take. I did a second take because I felt bad. We did the first take and I go, ‘Okay. There we go.’ I see him–and remember, it’s like a ten page monologue—and we finish the thing and we’re kind of looking around, and we’re like, ‘That was pretty good.’ I knew that we had it, and I go, ‘Well, we should do another one, because we’d look like schmucks if we just did one take.’ So we did another one with him, but he’s great.”
Given the affinity you’ve shown for the biopic genre, have you ever considered telling the story of your aunt, Rosemary Clooney? She had a pretty dramatic life.
Clooney: “They did a movie of the week–I can’t remember what it was called now–based on her. Sandra Locke played my Aunt Rosemary, and it was all about her sort of meltdown after Bobby Kennedy was killed. No. I didn’t really think about this as a biopic. We didn’t go home with Murrow. I really thought of this as a section of time. And the first film, I didn’t really think was a biopic because I felt like it was an acid trip. I think that I’d have to leave that to someone who wants to do the history of some really good jazz singers.”
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David Strathairn
This movie is so timely, the way everything today is divided between the reds and the blues.
David Strathairn: “It’s kind of relevant to a lot of things. You could just change the names and it’d be the same. And the Patriot Act in the House or Senate right now, being voted on. Maybe your medical records will give you up or your library card. There’s a phrase in the film: ‘There’s a fine line between investigation and persecution.'”
Is that why George Clooney is doing this now?
Strathairn: “I think [Good Night, and Good Luck] is primarily a tribute to his dad [newsman Nick Clooney]. And, thereby, a tribute to Edward R. Murrow and the Fourth Estate, as you may say. His love for it, his respect, his hope for it. It’s a bit of a gauntlet that’s always been thrown down by events. [The] gauntlet thrown down to journalists to say, ‘OK, let’s put our running shoes on and not run away, put on our pads and let’s go to work here.’ [Clooney] also loves that time in history. The ’50s was a romantic time, the Great Society, as it were. It was also a very smoky, Scotch-ridden time. The ashtrays were full by the end of the day.”
I had read that Clooney was considering playing Murrow at first. How did it fall into your lap?
Strathairn: “Yeah, maybe for a moment or two until he realized he’d have to smoke all those cigarettes. About two-and-a-half months before they started shooting, [Clooney and producing partner Grant Heslov] gave me a call, just out of the blue. Sent me the script and resource materials and then called me about a month later and said, ‘Wanna do it?’ So then we are out there in L.A. and George is showing me the set, looking around at all the incredible ’50s gadgets, and then we did a screen test for the camera, to check the film stock, and stuff like that. I thought it was probably a ruse since I still hadn’t said a word as Edward R. Murrow. So a day before we were suppose to start shooting, George and Grant probably looked at it and went, ‘Whew.'”
Were you nervous? How did you prepare for the role?
Strathairn: “Oh God, was I. I read a lot. Couple of biographies, and a book called To Strike at a King, which followed the Milo Radulovich story. There’s a lot of Kinescopes of the Person to Person and See It Now stuff too. Just really locked on and watched, watched, watched, and listened.”
And working with Clooney as a director?
Strathairn: “Well, he had injured himself making Syriana and shouldn’t have been working. But it didn’t stop us from hurtling along for six weeks. That was courageous. He was the Fred Friendly. Fred could take over a room and tell people to do this and that, and that was George. His preparation and experience in the newsroom, growing up in one with his dad, every step of the way was crafted from his finger tips. He knows what is the best environment to work in. It’s got to be fun. A lot of it was improvised, but I didn’t get to do that. I just had to sit in the back of the room, smoke cigarettes and say something pithy and terse at the end of the scene.”
The cast camaraderie was also great. Would you have in-depth discussions about it all in between takes?
Strathairn: “All the issues were in the air. But George didn’t want to make a movie that would indict. He didn’t want to make a movie that would polarize people. We actually wanted to find some common ground here. And the common ground being the bedrock Constitutional issues that apply to everybody…We knew we were making something relevant, but [Clooney] wanted to stick to the facts of the story. He wanted to tell it like a journalist. Everything was doubled sourced, not only the biographies and all the source material, but the communiqués between the government and [William] Paley [head of CBS at the time], Murrow, [Fred] Friendly and all that stuff. And we were also verified by Joe and Shirley Wershba, who were on the set with us. It was great to have them there. Milo Radulovich was also there. All of them very much alive.”
How do you feel about the Oscar talk buzzing around your performance? [Strathairn recently won the Venice Film Festival award for best actor.]
Strathairn: “I don’t know. It’s funny, I have a very–and it’s not an original–feeling about awards. If the film is acknowledged, either for its cinematography or performance or direction or script, that’s great. Then it gives it another boost, a little more life out there in theaters, for people who need that kind of validation to go see it. Then there’s the difference between the affectation of someone like Murrow, who was such a mountain of a man but there’s so much information available to use as sort of an appliqué. It’s not as if I’m creating someone out of the blue, where every one of those choices and decisions are mine, in collaboration with the director. Much more of a slippery slope. It’s a different kind of performance, a different animal altogether. But [Good Night] is much more of an ensemble movie. It’s a sort of suspense with all these people, inside the suspense.”
The speech Murrow gives at the beginning–and finishes at the end–of the film about the battle between news and entertainment was powerful. He zeroed in on that problem even back in 1958. I take it that was word for word?
Strathairn: “Word for word. It’s a much, much longer speech, about a 45-minute riot act he reads to the industry. It’s a warning bell, it’s a forecast. Prophetic in a way, it’s also a challenge, also a plea to the people out there. It shows the flint edge between entertainment and news. And in Murrow’s mind, never the twain should meet. He once said, ‘It’ll be a dangerous day in American broadcasting when those who have the most money will dictate the discussion in the marketplace of ideas.”
What kind of man was he really, do you think? Was he intimidating?
Strathairn: “Well, he was a man’s man. People said he was ladies man. I think ladies found him attractive, but I don’t think he was out there chasing women. He was chasing the story, chasing the news. Murrow was a giant and yet very down to earth, [a] very human guy. His passion was to witness the everyman. I think his feet were firmly planted in the soil of human interaction. But at this particular time, there was a lot on his shoulders. They could have saddle the country with McCarthy if they were wrong. So how to do it and when to do it–not why to do it, there was no question about that–but to do it the right way weighed on him. They say he walked around the room, like the prince of doom or wearing a crown of thorns. Not necessarily a religious reference, but a man who was just constantly editing and assessing and distilling and watching and processing and applying his journalistic standards and his own emotions. He had a lot on his head. The image of the smoke, coming up elegantly as he’d sit there, I think he was on fire inside.”
In your opinion, is there anyone out there like Murrow today?
Strathairn: “Oh yeah, Jim Lehrer is trying to hold to that. The people covering the Katrina disaster, they were down there asking insightful questions. Christiane Amanpour is great in the field; she tells a wonderful story. She sort of crosses over between entertainment and news because she is so captivating and engaging, but she really tells a good story. There are a lot of them out there, trying to speak the truth. But I think [Murrow] would be discouraged. He’d say, ‘It’s more than what I said it was going to be.’ The corporate side of it would particularly have him despairing. I think they are fragments of Murrow, thousands of them out there, but to find the access. He was speaking to 40-60 million people in one fell swoop. It was such a simple time. Television was such a new thing. We were like the first men on the moon in this particular way, in using TV as a forensic. Now how many voices can one network speak to? And usually, they are talking to their own choir. A lot of debate out there’s about the sea change that’s happening, in broadcast journalism, television’s power. You can talk it about forever.”
Scott Huver and Kit Bowen contributed to this story.
Good Night, and Good Luck opened limitedly in theaters Oct. 7.
