Posted by Mr. Beaks

In an interesting bit of turnabout, I think it’s completely arguable that George Clooney is currently a better filmmaker than his Section 8 cohort Steven Soderbergh.  Exhibit A in support of this thesis would be 2002’s goofy Chuck Barris (unreliable) biopic Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, while Exhibit B is called Good Night, and Good Luck, and will be arriving in theaters starting this Friday.  (The exhibits against Soderbergh are every movie after Out of Sight.)

Dramatizing that pivotal moment in the 1950’s when Edward R. Murrow, the nation’s steady broadcast voice throughout World War II, stood up to the HUAC antics of Senator Joseph McCarthy through the CBS news show, See It Now, Good Night, and Good Luck joins the ranks of Apollo 13 or the underrated Thirteen Days wherein an historical event to which the outcome is known somehow manages to make for compelling cinema.  Clooney accomplishes this, as he explains in the press conference transcript below, by his masterful use of silence, a device audiences (particularly in America) are sadly unaccustomed to nowadays.  Along with pulling off some impressively composed long takes, Clooney also wrings tremendous performances out of his cast, most notably David Strathairn, an underrated actor who’s as good as he’s ever been as the impassive Murrow. 

Clooney also appears in the film as Murrow’s legendary producer, Fred Friendly, an unglamorous part that speaks well of the actor’s humility (after all, the point could easily be made that Clooney more resembles Murrow than Strathairn), but his real accomplishment is behind the camera, where I think I’d like to see him hanging out on a regular basis (even though I still maintain that Clooney is the most effortlessly magnetic movie star of our generation).  It would’ve been nice to get Clooney in a more intimate setting, but the Los Angeles press day for Good Night, and Good Luck was all about the press conference.  Fortunately, Clooney gave us a dependably eloquent interview, which I hope you’ll enjoy.  If not, keep it to yourself.

What was it about Edward R. Murrow that fascinated you, and made you want to make a movie about him?

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 watermark for broadcast journalists growing up.  My father would refer to [Murrow’s work] as the standard that was set and no one could never be reached again.  Kronkite did pretty well in Vietnam.  That was a big part of my growing up.  Then I revisited some of those speeches that I was familiar with.  I knew the “box of lights and wires” speech really well – most people who studied any journalism at all heard that.  I had heard a lot of the shows.  I hadn’t heard all of the television shows; I hadn’t heard the Annie Lee Moss show before, and I hadn’t heard his rebuttal to McCarthy.  But I started watching those speeches again, and I thought they were incredibly inspiring.  I miss that kind of clarity at times.  It’s sort of like, y’know, when was the last time you saw Network, and listened to Paddy Chayefsky’s words?  They sort of represented us at our best, and I’m always the guy in the car driving home going, “Oh, you know what I should have said?”  So, I really enjoyed the idea of talking about Murrow again.

Did the recent attempt to rehabilitate the image of McCarthy play any part in getting you interested in making this movie?  Ann Coulter was one who tried to make a case for him [in her book Treason]. 

Yeah, did you read that book?

I read that portion of it.

It’s an interesting thing.  The problem with her is that she’s a bad journalist.  She’s sort of got her own market.  But you can’t get facts wrong, and the facts were wrong.  She can say, “Murrow got it wrong because there weren’t three Annie Lee Mosses in the phone book.  There was an Annie May Moss.  So, Murrow was wrong, she’s a communist, and we can prove it.”  That’s not the point.  If you watch the broadcast, and 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 always Murrow’s point.  It was never about defending communists.  The question was much more, and always was with him, constitutional.  And Fred Friendly, too.  When I was a kid in school, I was a big fan of Fred Friendly.  (To the gathered journalists:)  Some of you will remember the “Ethics in America” things that Fred Friendly did at Columbia University.  I read a lot of the stuff about Fred Friendly.  He always carried a little copy of the Constitution in his bag, which I always – I have one here.  I always 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, and I found that… you know, “Page Six” [The New York Post’s gossip section] ran a story a few months ago that I was going to do a liberal piece about McCarthy – attacking McCarthy when we know that McCarthy was right about certain people he named.  He may end up, at the end of the day, being right about two of the thousands that he named.  (Laughter)  That may end up happening: infinite number of monkeys, infinite number of typewriters.  He may end up getting a couple right, but that’s not the point.  The point was that you’re wrong about the technique.  And that was a concern that I saw happening in other issues.  Padilla may end up being a terrorist – might be.  We don’t know.  But either you’re a prisoner of war, and you have Geneva Convention rights, or you’re a criminal, and you have writ of habeas corpus and you have the right to face your accuser, the right to an attorney, the right to a speedy trial – all of the things that are the foundation of our government.  What Grant and I talked about when we started doing [this film] was that it’s not easy, a democracy, and that it requires constant diligence.  And that that diligence requires the fourth estate to be diligent, and it requires also an understanding of the complexities.  And the complexities are:  it’s not black and white.  It isn’t, “Oh, let’s set that guy free if we can’t try him”.  When Murrow talks the problems of protecting the individual and the state at the same time, we found that these seemed to be prescient things to talk about.

But what you’re talking about, in terms of writ of habeas corpus, has pretty much been scotched by the Patriot Act. 

They have been.  And the new one coming up, I’ve read both the Senate and the House versions.  The House version – that they’re going to vote on in October – is frightening. 

They could arrest you right now.

They could.  The interesting thing is that they also could go to my doctor and find out anything they want to find out, and not tell me about it.  And tell the doctor that he’s not allowed to tell me about it.  And not go to a judge ahead of time to get a subpoena to have a reason to do it.  So if some FBI guy who’s dating the same girl that I am decides that he’s pissed off at me, I could have a very bad time of it right now.  (Laughter)  That’s why I never date FBI girls.

But it is an issue, and, to me, it was an interesting thing 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 with how I campaigned for my father [Nick Clooney, who ran for Congress in Kentucky last year], which I couldn’t do because it’s “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; 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.  Literally, it was either Joe and Shirley [Wershba] or Milo Radulovich himself or Fred Friendly’s book – it was infinite numbers.  We used everything we could to source each of the scenes, and, basically, the content in each of the scenes.  That’s why we used McCarthy playing himself.  We wanted to say, “Look, you tell us what we did wrong.”  I had Joe and Shirley on the set every day.  “Tell me what we’re getting wrong.  Tell me where we’re missing it.”  Because I know that there are going to be people out there that are going to try and marginalize it.  All they have to do is find one thing wrong, and they’ll go, “Aw, it’s all horseshit!  It’s all crap!”  And you go, “Okay, well then I have to be very careful with the facts.”  It’s important.  That was my job, so what I vowed to do was to go and look at all of the other arguments against Murrow.  George Seldes wrote a book that talked about it; he thought Murrow taking sides was a mistake.  So we went through the idea of taking sides, and how dangerous that might have been, and if it was a step in the wrong direction.  We brought that into the story.  We read conversations about the Alger Hiss piece:  [Murrow] didn’t correct the Alger Hiss piece because he didn’t want to be known as [his defender].  So, we put that in with [William] Paley.  Paley didn’t say that in real life, but we felt it was important to constantly balance all of the other arguments and say, “Fair enough!  Let’s have this discussion.”

Could you compare this to your previous film [Confessions of a Dangerous Mind] where your subject was so mired in fact?

(Laughing)  I sort of worked the wrong way, didn’t I?  I started with the downfall of television, and now I go back to the golden great moment in television.  I’m working my way backwards.  I’m going into radio next.  (Laughter)  And then just smoke signals.  (More laughter) 

The telegraph.

The telegraph.  That would be a fun movie, wouldn’t it?  (Mimes working a telegraph machine on the table.)

But there’s also a pointed attack in this movie, though you’re showing both sides, which is basically a way of neutralizing the argument.

But that’s how you have to do it.  The best way to neutralize an argument is to accept the arguments immediately.  For instance, Kennedy’s first act as President was the Bay of Pigs – the dumbest first act any President has ever done in their lives.  And if you’ve ever watched that press conference, which is one of the greatest moments I’ve ever seen from a President – I’ve watched it a dozen times.  He walks out and before anyone can even ask a question, he says, “What happened yesterday was my fault.  I take responsibility.  I did it.  I took some bad advice, and it was a dumb thing to do.  First question.”  And they’re like, “Well, wasn’t that a dumb thing to do?”  And he says, “I just said that.”  And then it’s, “What’s Jackie going to wear to the [Inauguration]”.  It was over.  And you realize that the truth is not to be afraid to ask the questions that should be asked.

That’s the problem today.

It is a problem.  And that’s another part of this film, which is growing up as a son of an anchorman who wrote his own news, who was the news director, who was in a constant fight with… in local news it’s the general manager, I guess – it’s not so much the network – who was always trying to find a way to survive.  News never made money; it always lost money.  It was a constant battle.  You felt for these guys because they were trying to keep the station alive.  It wasn’t easy.  Paley isn’t wrong.  We made sure that he was well-rounded in the idea that he’s going, “I’m doing everything I can to keep this thing afloat, and you’re killing me.”  But that’s what happens when you make a deal with someone who’s unwavering.

Can you discuss the decision to shoot the film in black-and-white?

Really, the first and only thing to define it was that we were going to use archival footage, and it would just stand out so badly if we did it any other way.  But then Grant [Heslov] and I started talking about, knowing that it was going to make it very hard to sell – it made it very hard to sell, like shockingly hard to sell.  You’d think at this point in my career, if I’m going to write it for a dollar, direct it for a dollar, and act in it for scale in the second biggest part of the film, that I could get $7 ½ million bucks raised to do the movie.  It took us forever.

But I only know Murrow and McCarthy in black-and-white.  I’ve never seen them in color.  I don’t know anything about them in color.  I think you have to film things the way you remember them, so I started going through some Godard films in the beginning because I thought maybe I’ll shoot it on Super 16mm and try to get those lenses like in Breathless.  I realized that was a dumb way to do it.  And then I started going back into D.A. Pennebaker documentaries.  And then I looked at documentaries like Crisis and Primary, and I thought that was a better way to do it – to make it more of a fly on the wall.  But black-and-white was the only option.  We shot it on color film because you can use so much less light – if we were shooting on black-and-white it would take us twice as long to light it – so we have a color print of it.  And it is freaky looking.  It looks like a sitcom.

Do you think there’s a lack of journalism today, what with the likes of Bill O’Reilly or Larry King?  Who do you think is closer to Murrow?  (Lots of laughter in the room.  I still can’t figure out why the guy chose Larry King.  Olbermann clearly the left’s answer to O’Reilly.)

That’s an interesting question.  Bill would probably say it’s him because he takes a side and takes a stand.  I would suggest that, first of all, I don’t think there’s a lack of journalism.  There isn’t a reporter I know – and I grew up with them – that doesn’t want to break a big story.  There really isn’t; that’s the fun of it.  The problem is sometimes when you ask a tough question you get sent to the back of the press conference room, and you lose access, and you’ve traded away one story for the entire network’s access.  That’s how it’s censored.  It’s not saying you can’t ask a question; it’s just saying, “Okay, you’re done.  Go back there, and you’re not getting called on again.”  I’ve seen and talked to network news anchors who told these stories of how, “I’d like to say this, but if I do I’m done.”

Look, there are kids getting killed in Afghanistan and Iraq every day getting stories.  I think there’s a great amount of beautiful journalism going on.  (Changing his tone)  I think there’s a lot of crap out there, and it’s a different world now.   There aren’t three networks – that’s the difference.  It’s a twenty-four hour news cycle; it’s 150 channels.  I think it is literally 90% of the news America gets is from the television now.  People don’t read anymore.

Can you talk about the absence of an external score?

It came from a couple of reasons.  I’m a fan of the film Fail Safe… and I always found that we’re in a time right now – we’re the MTV Generation – where everyone’s afraid you’re not going to be able to hold people’s attention unless you have bells and things going off all the time.  There’s this stunning silence, and silence is really important.  And I found that the tension in [Fail Safe] is all in the silence, what isn’t said in the moments when you’re counting down and watching.  And I love David – the movie doesn’t work unless David Strathairn is in this film, he’s so good – when he’s looking in the camera about to go directly at McCarthy, and it’s silent.  You just see him [roughly clearing his throat], and you get this feeling like he’s a warrior, which I love. 

The only music I put in was about three songs.  I had gone to the guy who did all the producing for my Aunt Rosemary’s music, and all of the musicians are guys who played with my Aunt Rosemary.  And I knew that I was going to frame [Don] Hollenbeck’s suicide around the song “How High the Moon” from the very beginning.  Dianne Reeves actually sent me a tape of her singing “How High the Moon”, and it was great.  We picked some songs, arranged them, and then shot them all on camera, so everything you see is sort of like in Nashville in the sense that nothing’s done to playback.  Everything’s shot live.  To me, it was easy.  First of all, I hate the look of playback.  But there’s also this different kind of energy that comes out.  I watched my Aunt Rosemary sing live, and it’s a very different thing than watching a video of someone singing.  Even that complex scene in the very beginning, where you see her singing “T.V. Is the Thing This Year” when they come out of the elevator.  She’s in there singing, and that’s the score of the song that we actually used.  Since we were on one very small soundstage, we built an elevator that would rotate instead of go up or down.  The camera would be behind it, we’d close the doors, rotate the elevator while everybody was in there, throw it open and you’d be in another room and walk out.  And when we came all the way down the hallway, she’s in the other room singing.  And we had another camera on her.

I like that era of music.  I wanted her to be the sort of Joel Grey in Cabaret.  I wanted her to be this sort of moral point of view that you could constantly go back to as a sort of touchstone.

How helpful was CBS with the production?  And what about the cigarette commercial?

Those are actually two issues.  CBS was very helpful with the archival stuff.  Les [Moonves] is an old friend of mine.  It’s funny because I was literally under contract to Les personally when he was at Lorimar and then at Warner Brothers.  It’s funny because he did this interview where he was getting a lot of crap for saying that they were going to change the news to a sort of MTV style, and they’re using me as a sort of battering ram against him.  So, I called him up and said, “Sorry….”  But he was instrumental at helping us get the archival footage.  It’s expensive for a $7 ½ million film.

The smoking commercial I put in because we’re smoking so much in the film.  I’m not going to not smoke in the film.  It’s accurate.  Two-thirds of those guys died of lung cancer.  There’s this sort of whitewashing now saying take cigarettes out of movies; in fact, there are policies at the studio.  You’ll get a memo where it says, “Absolutely no smoking in these films.”  Look, I’m a non-smoker, and I had nine aunts and uncles die from lung cancer, including my Aunt Rosemary.  I think it’s dangerous to glamorize it, and we make it look pretty good, so I thought it was important to at least make a point in there.  And [the commercial] is a pretty manipulative thing.  You don’t even know it’s a smoking commercial when it comes up. 

You’ve been involved in two biopics now.  Have you thought about doing something on your aunt’s life?

They did a movie of the week – I can’t even remember what it’s called now [Rosie: The Rosemary Clooney Story] – based on one of her books.  Sondra Locke played my Aunt Rosemary, and it was all about her meltdown after Bobby Kennedy was killed.  No.  I didn’t really think of this as a biopic.  We didn’t go home with Murrow.  I really thought of this as a section of time.  And [Confessions of a Dangerous Mind] I didn’t think of as a biopic because I felt like it was an acid trip.  I think I’d have to leave that to someone who wants to do a history of some really good jazz singers.

Did you talk to Murrow’s family?

Sure.  Casey was on the set a lot.  Janet’s long gone, but Casey was on the set a lot.  In fact, we shot this sort of piece to go along with the film that’s a documentary where you see Joe and Shirley there everyday, and you see Ruth Friendly and Andy and Dave Friendly, and you see Milo Radulovich on the set.  This guy you won’t believe; he’s amazing, this guy.  And Casey.  We shot the piece because I also wanted to be able to say… Casey was a young boy at the time, and Ruth wasn’t married to Fred, but the rest of the guys were around and saw it.  Joe and Shirley were standing there when this happened, so that when people try to marginalize it and say, “This is horseshit, it didn’t happen”, you can go, “Well, they were there, and they said we got it right.”  We wanted to have it on film somewhere.  You know, we tested this film, and, literally, 25% of the people didn’t know who Joe McCarthy was.  They asked us who the actor playing Joe McCarthy was.  We need to take out one of those ads in the trades that say, “For Your Consideration, Best Supporting Actor.”  (Laughter)  Who knows?  Maybe we’ll get him a nomination.  No one could do him better.