The Goods
George Clooney Discusses Making Good Night, and Good Luck
By Cole Smithey
George Clooney knocks the ball out of the park with his second directorial effort ("Confessions Of A Dangerous Mind" was his first) about newscaster Edward R. Murrow’s public confrontation with Senator Joseph McCarthy when the diabolical Senator was ruining lives and careers under a banner of an anti-Communist ideology. In rich black and white, Clooney uses a limited number of strictly indoor locations to convey Murrow’s insular world of newsroom television from which the highly revered newsman spoke directly to 40 million Americans every night. David Strathairn gives a flawless performance as the stoic Edward R. Murrow, while the late Joseph McCarthy plays himself via television monitors that exhibit his visually documented antagonism in the same way that Americans apprehend George Bush’s incessantly sneering delivery on television. Clooney’s rigorous attention to detail presents the audience with a consummate depiction of the media speaking truth to power via one honest man with more integrity than any single person working in media or politics today.
The ever affable and handsome Mr. Clooney was on hand recently in Manhattan to talk about "Good Night, and Good Luck."
Q: Is the closest we’ll come to an Edward R. Murrow today someone like Jon Stewart?
George Clooney: Could be. I think Brian Williams is really articulate and really smart. I think he’s the best of the guys I’ve seen so far lately. I saw him especially on Jon Stewart and I thought he was smart because he answered some funny questions and then he avoided answering the ones that would get him in Dutch. There’s still Bill Moyers; there’s still great reporting going on by a bunch of people. The problem is that I don’t think anybody’s ever going to have 40 million people watching them again. I think that’s the difference. It might be good that there won’t ever be "the most trusted man in America" again – depending on who that man is – but I just don’t think anyone will be able to get that many people to watch it.
There were the two great moments, Murrow taking on McCarthy and Cronkite coming back from Viet Nam and saying, "It’s a stalemate; we can’t win the war." Ultimately Johnson didn’t run again because he said, "I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country."
We had a really great night last night [at a private dinner after the New York Film Festival premiere of the film] – it was really something. Walter [Cronkite] got up and gave a great speech. It was really fun to be around a lot of old newsmen. It was interesting because Bill O’Reilly was there and Jeff Zucker, so there was enough electricity in the room that people were looking around for who to talk to and what to talk about. 
Q: Did your choice to make this movie have anything to do with how much your father revered Murrow?
GC: It started, obviously, because I grew up on a newsroom floor watching my dad work with reporters like Deborah Dixon in Cincinnati, Ohio, and watching them piece a news show together. Murrow was always the high water mark that everyone aimed for. So it was my love of that and it was certainly a tip of the hat to my dad and the sacrifices that he made over the years.
Q: What do you think journalists aim for now?
GC: I think there a lot of great journalists out there. I don’t find much fault in the journalists. In general, I think everybody would like to break a good story. I think the problem is the same problem that Murrow fought in 1954, and that my father fought in 1974; that is a continuous and diligent fight. It’s not a simple answer. I understand the problems of delivering to shareholders, and the market is getting smaller, and the money is getting less. But it has always been, and it will always be, the battle between corporate and information. It’s complicated, and I don’t know great answers to it.
Q: How much did you seek out your dad’s input into making the movie?
GC: He just said the one thing to me constantly that was important, which is, "Treat it like a journalist and double source every scene."
We wanted each scene to be accurate. It’s important to say that because there’s a revisionist history going on that McCarthy was right and Murrow was a traitor. Ann Coulter certainly has a lovely book about Murrow getting the story wrong. So it was important to recalibrate facts.
So my dad said, "Get the facts right."
Q: The film doesn’t end with some rousing note of confrontation. Was there a point where you thought maybe you had to go big at the end and have something large happen?
GC: Yeah, we had an alternative ending; it was a musical number (laughs). We had an alternative ending, but it wasn’t big for big sake. It had meaning to us, but at the end of the day, after we saw it, we felt that the film up to that point did exactly what we wanted it to do. We didn’t want to push it.
We had basically made a montage of the greatest hits of television moments, and then as they rapidly decline it was down to the O.J. chase and then the piece, done in L.A., where there was a car chase and the guy sets his truck on fire, and he takes off all of his clothes, and he blows his head off on live television. And you could hear the people in the background, in the newsroom, laughing and the guy says, "There’s your lead news story."
We freeze-framed just before he did it [killed himself], and it was really a compelling ending, and sort of interesting, but it was editorializing on my part. In order to get your facts straight and do it fair or be fair with the piece, and not stand on a soap box, we decided that we had to keep it in historical context and not do that. It’s very tempting to do it because it’s pretty explosive stuff to watch.
Grant Heslov (co-screenwriter) and I looked at it a bunch and we really liked it, and ultimately we sat in a room for a day and said, "We’re going to cut our favorite scene." It was the right thing to stay away from because we’re not trying to tell people how to think; we’re just bringing up a factual piece and raising a debate.
Q: As one of Hollywood’s most outspoken liberals, is it plausible to think that George Clooney will one day be running for elected office?
GC: (laughs) That’s a ridiculous. I think I should run on the, "Yes I did it ticket."
Q: "Yes, I was the sexiest man alive?"
GC: No, worse than that. It starts with, "And I drank the bong water."
Q: Do you think that the movie is also about the state of television today?
GC: We thought it was twofold in a way. It’s not just the state of television today, because it’s a been fight that’s gone on forever. It was about the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to constantly question power no matter who was in power. My father went after Jimmy Carter with the OPEC nations raising the price of gas and he went after Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon. It was his job. He believed that authority, or government, unchallenged and unquestioned corrupts. And we’ve proven over a long period of time that it’s not unpatriotic to ask questions.
The other thing we thought was important was to talk about the dangers of allowing fear to erode away civil liberties because that’s always a dangerous step. We [America} do it every 30 years or so and we panic. We get bombed in Pearl Harbor and we grab up all of the Japanese Americans and throw them in detention camps. The good news about it, and why it’s an optimistic film, is we fix it. We’re good at that. We loose our minds, we get a little crazy and we get a little scared. Usually someone capitalizes on that for their own gains, and then we fix it because of newsmen. Without them, we don’t have a civil rights movement or we don’t have a women’s rights movement or an anti-Viet Nam movement. It’s newsmen; so that’s why it’s important to talk about.
