Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Hollywood's favorite leading man talks to Salon about the corruption of Joe McCarthy, the courage of Edward R. Murrow, and the idiocy of Ann Coulter and his nemesis Bill O'Reilly.
Sep 16, 2005 | Who would have expected the most compelling argument for a smarter, more aggressive news media to come from one of our few true movie stars, a man who could stay secluded from the press -- the world really -- in his Italian villa for as long as he liked, only to reappear for the occasional prestige project or "Ocean's Eleven" sequel?
But George Clooney's "Good Night, and Good Luck," a stirring examination of CBS News legend Edward R. Murrow's historic showdown with Sen. Joseph McCarthy, is a passionate argument for a revitalized press, one that's willing to operate in pursuit of larger truths, and not just larger profits. Clooney's second turn as a director (after the underrated "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind") is a tribute to Murrow (played by a pitch-perfect David Strathairn), a man of moral certitude and great elegance. But it also memorializes a time when the media kept a higher purpose, and maintained a higher tone. Who won't rue the whiplash crudeness of TV news when watching Murrow, during the scathing report on McCarthy that helped finally make him vulnerable to public opinion, turn a clumsy Shakespearean allusion by the Wisconsin Republican against him with agility:
Earlier, the senator asked, "Upon what meat does this, our Caesar, feed?" Had he looked three lines earlier in Shakespeare's 'Caesar,' he would have found this line, which is not altogether inappropriate: "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves."
While an audience used to the Fox News/"Fahrenheit 9/11" decibel level of political debate might not immediately grasp the political subtext of "Good Night, and Good Luck," Clooney (who appears in a decidedly unglamorous supporting role as Murrow's producer and CBS legend Fred Friendly) has made no secret that the movie was inspired by current events -- "We use fear to attack civil liberties," he has said -- and his intentions are likely to be discussed and debated by the pundits in the evenings to come. Clooney is himself a student of journalism; his father was a TV anchor who frequently ran up against management (he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in 2004), and the younger Clooney studied the profession at Northern Kentucky University before turning his attention to acting. He co-wrote the script for "Good Night" with Grant Heslov, and approached it "as a reporter would," with his own reporting and research. He also splices actual footage into the film -- McCarthy's rebuttal to Murrow's report on his "See It Now," as well as fluff interviews (with Liberace, among others) that Murrow performed on his "Person to Person" show, which was meant to keep him in good standing with CBS.
Clooney, though, discusses "Good Night, and Good Luck" and another upcoming film -- "Syriana," a film based on Robert Baer's memoir as a CIA agent battling terrorists in the Middle East after the end of the Cold War -- like a man on a mission, determined to make the movies he thinks are important while he can, given the fleeting influence of even Hollywood's biggest stars. "You only get it for a little bit," he says.
Clooney spoke to Salon recently from his home in Lake Como, Italy, shortly after Hurricane Katrina hit, and after "Good Night, and Good Luck" premiered at the Venice Film Festival to raves, and a best-actor award for Strathairn. He discussed his general optimism about media -- despite Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter and a handcuffed White House press corps.
I don't know how much of the American media you've been able to catch ...
Oh, you see it all the time. And you know, I'm looking at one dot-org, dot-com, another one on United Way, for places to focus money. You know, I'm the most computer-illiterate human being of the 21st century, so it's me typing one finger at a time on my computer, but ...
I've actually been thinking about the movie because there have been moments [since Hurricane Katrina hit] where TV anchors, who are usually so timid ...
... have actually stepped up.
Yeah, have you noticed that?
I've really noticed it in places, even Fox, actually. I saw Shepard Smith out there sort of chastising Bill O'Reilly -- "You're not here! You don't see this" --
Yes!
-- and I thought that that was sort of astonishing, really, to break ranks like that. I've seen it happening in the Senate as well, and I think that that's an interesting thing, you know. We're [hearing] "Don't politicize this." And you go, no, but by politicizing things you're holding people responsible.
In "Good Night" one of the things I think you capture really well is this sort of timidity, the unwillingness to break ranks in any way.
It's a funny thing. I mean, look, I grew up with it. My father was an anchorman, though he wrote his own news; he was the news director. So his fights were with the general management always, and news always lost money then. You were supposed to lose money. You were a loss leader but, you know, you owed the citizenry information and that's why you got your [Federal Communications Commission] license. So it was a constant battle for my dad about just getting any story out, because they'd want him to do a [segment on ] "Thursday's Child," and he said, "Well, there's a story about this and there's a story ..."
So it was always a battle between entertainment pushing the news off the air -- and, by the way, when you see Murrow talking about it, you're reminded that it has constantly been a fight. It's more complicated than bad guys just trying to make money. You know, you watch [CBS President] Bill Paley -- I hope we treated him fairly.
I went back through, like, a bunch of journalism professors' notes and I went through George Seldes' books about McCarthy, because he wasn't very complimentary about the Murrow moments. I was trying to find the arguments against Murrow because that seems to be the right way to do it, to treat it as a reporter would. I wanted to be able to graze those arguments along the way, just so that it couldn't be marginalized and somebody would say, "Well this is just a slanted piece," you know?
Aren't you worried about that, though?
Sure.
Because everything is politicized today, and there's a lot that people can read into your movie.
Sure -- and I love it when they do. But I would also say that, first of all, it is a historical event and we treated it as such. You know, every scene in that movie we double- and triple-sourced; either it was [CBS news employees] Joe and Shirley Wershba or it was [David] Halberstam's book or it was [Fred] Friendly's book or it was [Michael Ranville's] "To Strike at a King." We really talked to everybody. We went through the videotape of Milo Radulovich [a reserve lieutenant the Air Force discharged because his father and sister were accused of being Communists, whose case Murrow took up], and Joe and Shirley, because I wanted to make sure that it couldn't be marginalized. Because there is a rather interesting sort of phenomenon going on out there where people are trying to now convince themselves that McCarthy ... Well, they go, "Since the Freedom of Information Act, we find out that Alger Hiss really was a spy!" And you go, "Whoops, that's one."
And, of course, the bigger argument is, forgetting if you got one of them right, that's not the important part. The question was never whether or not these people were spies; the question was whether they were allowed to face their accuser or not. And I find those to be extraordinarily relevant today, those issues. It wasn't just about broadcast journalism -- which I'm actually, obviously, having grown up in it, a huge fan of.
