TERRY GROSS, HOST:
This is FRESH AIR. George Clooney was just nominated for a Tony. He's making his Broadway debut in "Good Night, And Good Luck." It's adapted from the 2005 film of the same name, which he directed, cowrote and costarred in. In the Broadway production, he stars as journalist Edward R. Murrow, a different role than the one he played in the film. The story is about how Murrow challenged Senator Joe McCarthy's tactic of smearing people by accusing them of being communists or associating with communists. At the time, Murrow was hosting the CBS TV news program "See It Now." Murrow and his crew decided to do a program about Lieutenant Milo Radulovich, a U.S. Air Force reservist who was kicked out for being a security risk without being told what the charges were after he refused to denounce his father and sister who were accused of being communists. In this scene from the movie, two Air Force colonels are pressuring Murrow's producer, Fred Friendly, to cancel the broadcast. Friendly is played by George Clooney.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK")
GEORGE CLOONEY: (As Fred Friendly) We are going with a story that says that the U.S. Air Force tried Milo Radulovich without one shred of evidence and found him guilty of being a security risk without his constitutional rights...
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) And you, who also have not seen the evidence, are claiming he's not a security risk. Wouldn't you guess that the people who have seen the contents of that envelope might...
CLOONEY: (As Fred Friendly) Who?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) ...Have better idea of what makes someone a danger to his country...
CLOONEY: (As Fred Friendly) Who?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) ...Or do you think...
CLOONEY: (As Fred Friendly) Who are these people, Sir?
UNIDENTIFIED ACTOR #1: (As character) ...It should just be you who decides?
CLOONEY: (As Fred Friendly) Who are the people? Are they elected? Are they appointed? Do they have an axe to grind? Is it you, Sir?
GROSS: George Clooney in a scene from his 2005 film "Good Night, And Good Luck." The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor for David Strathairn who played Murrow, the role now played by Clooney on Broadway. Clooney has starred in such films as "Oceans 11," Syriana," "Michael Clayton," "The Descendants," "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" and "Hail, Caesar!" He first became famous for his role on the medical series "ER." His father is the broadcast journalist Nick Clooney, who's also a former movie host on the cable channel AMC. Here's the interview I recorded with Clooney in 2005 when the film "Good Night, And Good Luck" was released.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: George Clooney, welcome to FRESH AIR. What did Edward R. Murrow mean to you when you were growing up?
CLOONEY: My father was an anchor man, and broadcast journalism was a big part of our lives growing up. I spent most of my life as a small child on the floor of WKRC newsroom watching my father put news shows together. He was the news director. He wrote the news. And Murrow and Cronkite were heroes of his because of the two probably great moments in broadcast journalism, which was Cronkite coming back from Vietnam and saying it doesn't work and Murrow taking on McCarthy because they changed policy overnight. And for that alone, he was a hero of my father's and therefore a hero of mine.
GROSS: Now, in the movie, you don't have an actor playing McCarthy. The only time we see McCarthy is through his actual videotapes - through his television appearances...
CLOONEY: Right.
GROSS: ...Such as, you know, the hearings and the video tape that was made for the Edward R. Murrow "See It Now" broadcast. Why did you choose to have him play himself instead of having an actor portray him?
CLOONEY: In the actual story - and we were - we researched everything. I had to treat this like a journalist. I talked to my father about this, and he said, look, if you get anything wrong, you'll be marginalized, now. So we did it the old-fashioned way, which is every scene we double sourced either through books or through the real people, Joe and Shirley Wershba, Milo Radulovich or Don Hewitt, so that we were very careful with the facts. Then, we decided to do exactly what Murrow did in his show, which is use McCarthy in his own words so that, again, you couldn't have someone say, oh, we were making him look too much like a buffoon or too arch. We thought best to let him hang himself.
GROSS: Now, as an actor and director, talk a little bit about how Murrow looks on TV compared to how McCarthy looks on TV.
CLOONEY: Well, that's sort of the beauty of it. It's - in a way, the other one of those versions would be Kennedy/Nixon debate...
GROSS: Yeah. Yeah.
CLOONEY: ...You know, where the simple truth was McCarthy was pretty good at a 30-second soundbite where he could yell and scare people and talk about death and bombs and things like that. But he wasn't handsome, and he certainly wasn't proficient at the new art of television, and Murrow was the best. So that when he demanded equal time - which was 28 minutes and 28 seconds - to do his rebuttal, he holds up for about a minute, and then - he's also pretty drunk. He slurs and drags on and is - it's one of - if you see the whole half an hour...
GROSS: He's drunk?
CLOONEY: ...Rebuttal - oh, yeah, very drunk. When you see the rebuttal, it's embarrassing. I mean, it's the most unprofessional thing you've ever seen. So, it was an interesting - the moment that that happened was when they first knew they had him because the simple truth is, and the funniest thing is, Murrow going after McCarthy is not what hurt McCarthy. McCarthy turning around and accusing Murrow of being a traitor is what hurt McCarthy because everyone knew that Murrow was the guy at the top of those buildings during the London Blitz. We knew he was a hero. And so the minute you saw those methods, when he turns around and calls Murrow the cleverest of the jackal pack of communists, everybody knew that wasn't true.
GROSS: The film is so much about faces. You know, the film is shot in pretty high contrast, black and white, and there's so many close-ups of faces because it all takes place, basically, in the office and in the studio. And the faces are so interesting to look at. They're mostly - you know, mostly middle-aged and slightly younger than that and slightly older than that men, who are kind of creased and who've lived and who haven't had plastic surgery...
CLOONEY: Yeah.
GROSS: ...And it's just really wonderful to see these faces.
CLOONEY: I think the interesting thing to me was, even in the film, the score I wanted to be silence. Silence was how I would score the film. And the way you do that is by spending time on people's faces because that's how you can understand suspense. I know when you'd see films like "Fail Safe" or "12 Angry Men," there would be - tension came out of these close-ups of people's faces and watching - putting them in a difficult situation and watching them deal with it and watching it play on their face as opposed to hearing them talk about it. Now we talk about everything. Then guys didn't talk about anything. So when - so there was that sort of bravery of, you know, lighting a cigarette and looking at each other and going, alright, Butch, see you later Sundance, kind of feeling. And I love that. It's a very masculine, probably not great thing to do, but it is very romantic in a way, you know, to watch a couple of people. Watching Patty Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr. just looking at each other when they know they've got McCarthy. There's something beautiful about that. It's simple.
GROSS: You are one of the, quote, "Hollywood liberals" who is sometimes attacked by the right. Do you find it amusing when you are targeted by the right and singled out for criticism because you're a, quote, "Hollywood liberal," or is it disturbing to you?
CLOONEY: Well, no, you know, look, if you're going to stick your head out and stick your neck out, you're going to have to take some hits. I don't think anybody in their life has ever accomplished anything that they would be proud of later if they didn't take some criticism for it. Sometimes that criticism is right. I would be disturbed if I wasn't, 20 years from now, able to point back at a point in time and say, this is where I stood and what I believed in, which I think will end up proving to be pretty correct.
You know, the strangest thing to me is that the word liberal is a bad word. I'm going to keep saying it and saying it and saying it as often as I can. I don't know where we've stood on the wrong side of social issues. Now, I have many friends who are conservative, so I'm not knocking conservatives. I have a lot of very good friends who are conservatives.
But to have us losing the moral argument when we were the ones who said that women should be allowed to vote and that, you know, Blacks should be allowed to vote and sit in the front of the bus - we're the ones who said Vietnam was a mistake. You go down the list of the social issues over a long period of time, we haven't stood on the wrong side of those issues, and so I don't understand how we lose the moral argument. I think we're bad at it, us liberals. I think we're pretty weak at it right now.
GROSS: When you were growing up, your father was on TV. He had his own show. He was a news anchor. Did your father seem like a different person on camera and off?
CLOONEY: No, no, no, not really. My father's - I think one of his great qualities is that integrity has been sort of the thing that has always lasted and has lasted into his - well into his 70s. He's been the same guy. It's an interesting thing. It's more difficult being the child of someone with that kind of integrity than - I'm now thrilled, but, you know, when you're a kid and you're in a state that's still dealing with its own problems with bigotry - we'd be out at dinner, and you'd hear someone say, you know, well, that's - about those people, knowing that they were talking about Blacks, you know? And my sister and I knew that my dad was going to make a scene and walk out, so we would eat as fast as we could. We'd start to eat quick 'cause my father was going to make a scene. And I remember as a kid always wishing that maybe there was just one time he just pretended not to hear it.
GROSS: What would he do when he made a scene?
CLOONEY: Oh, he'd get up and say, you know, you're an idiot, and, how could you say something like that, and, you know, are you from the 1500s, and, you know, he would make a big scene. And I, at times, wished that he hadn't. Now I couldn't be more proud that he did. And he taught me those same lessons, which are that every time you let that go, every time you don't hear that or you purposefully ignore it just to make things easier for yourself, you are doing a disservice. And so that's why you have to fight those fights.
GROSS: We'll hear more of my 2005 interview with George Clooney after a break. He's now on Broadway, portraying Edward R. Murrow in his stage adaptation of his 2005 movie "Good Night, And Good Luck." We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR.
(SOUNDBITE OF BILL EVANS' "YOU'RE GONNA HEAR FROM ME")
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with George Clooney. He's now on Broadway, starring as Edward R. Murrow in his stage adaptation of his 2005 film "Good Night, And Good Luck." Murrow was the CBS TV news journalist who challenged Senator Joe McCarthy's tactic of smearing people by accusing them of being communists or associating with communists. We recorded this interview in 2005, when the film was released.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED NPR BROADCAST)
GROSS: You grew up on a - well, your grandparents had a tobacco farm.
CLOONEY: Sure.
GROSS: So were you near that?
CLOONEY: I worked it for years. That's how you made your money in the summer when you were a kid. You know, you start by - you're topping it, and then you're chopping it and cutting it and housing it and stripping it later. You can make, you know, 3 1/2 bucks an hour, so you can make some pretty decent money. But, you know, you don't think of those consequences of tobacco at that point.
I had nine great aunts and uncles, all brothers and sisters. Six of them died of lung cancer or emphysema. Both my grandparents died of it. I'm not a smoker. I don't - you know, I was concerned with how romantic we made smoking look in the film. And so I put that commercial in just to show how - some of the lies that were perpetrated back then about how smoking was actually good for you.
GROSS: There's a lot of cigarette smoke in your movie.
CLOONEY: Yeah.
GROSS: And Edward R. Murrow died of lung cancer. He was quite a smoker. It's just amazing to see him smoking on camera or even smoking in the hallway of the office. You just can't - you can't do that anymore.
CLOONEY: You couldn't - yeah, we were the only set that had people outside the sound stage not smoking.
GROSS: (Laughter) Did you have to work hard to get the actors to inhale?
CLOONEY: No, we - every actor that we hired, I talked to, and literally, we brought them in and said, smoke. Because if you can't smoke, you can't smoke. It doesn't look right if you're faking it. And we needed people who could smoke because all these guys died of lung cancer, you know? Most of them did. It was a pretty brutal time.
GROSS: One of the many things I really like about your film is the performance by Dianne Reeves, the singer in it. And the music director for your film is Allen Sviridoff, who had been the music director for your aunt, Rosemary Clooney...
CLOONEY: Right.
GROSS: ...Who I'm an enormous fan of. I love her recordings. What did her music mean to you when you were growing up? It was not your generation.
CLOONEY: No, but I was one of those weird kids. You know, I was listening to...
GROSS: It wasn't my generation, either (laughter).
CLOONEY: No, that's right. Well, I was listening to Led Zeppelin, and I was listening to Nat Cole. You know, I had a very varied growing-up because I was on the road with, you know, them a lot, or I was always exposed to...
GROSS: Were you? You were on the road with Rosemary Clooney?
CLOONEY: When I was 20, I was Rosemary's driver and...
GROSS: Oh, you were - oh, right. I see. Yeah. Yeah.
CLOONEY: So I spent - I was around that kind of music a lot.
GROSS: Yeah.
CLOONEY: So I got to appreciate Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer.
GROSS: I see. Yeah.
CLOONEY: And I had a real appreciation of those guys - Sinatra and, you know, Nat King Cole especially, and Rosemary. And Rosemary was having - she was having her comeback at that point. And her comeback was something rather spectacular because she became the singer's singer. Singers adored her and would show up. So there was a great pride in being around her. So I was really exposed to that kind of music.
The fun part for me was, in putting this band together, Peter Martin, the pianist, is Dianne's - works with Dianne, but the rest of the guys all played on Rosemary's albums, you know? And it was fun because I got to pick the music, and we wrote one of the scenes around "How High The Moon." But the rest of the stuff, you know, the rest of the music was fun because we - I got to sit down with Allen and go, let's talk about music that we really loved and how to play it and how to do it. And so it was about simplifying things 'cause now everybody likes to show off.
I remember asking Rosemary why she's a better singer at 70 than she was at 21. 'Cause she couldn't hold the notes the way she could. She couldn't hit the notes the way - and she said, 'cause I don't have to prove I can sing anymore. And I thought that was a good acting lesson, you know, was not having to show off anymore.
GROSS: And I know exactly what she was talking about, too, because her voice was basically shot in the last couple of recordings she made, but her phrasing was so beautiful, and the emotion was so beautifully conveyed in it.
CLOONEY: When you see her taking songs that are normally sort of up-tempoed, like "Don't Fence Me In" or - and bringing it down to, like, a quarter of the speed and singing, you know, "Straighten Up And Fly Right," it's amazing.
GROSS: You stayed with your aunt when you first got to Hollywood. Did you think you were talented when you started working? Did you think you actually had something?
CLOONEY: I didn't really know whether I had any talent or not. I knew that I was, for the first time in my life, engaged, and I hadn't been. I was one of those guys who was pretty good at almost anything I tried right away, you know? Anything I wanted to do, I could pick it up pretty quickly - sports, almost any sport - but never great at anything. And then I found acting, and I thought, well, this is something that, at the very least, I'm not going to be bored by. And I know that there is no moment that you go, wow, I've finally done it. You know, you're never going to be satisfied by it because it's a constant growing process. And I got into an acting class pretty quickly, and I started working with working actors. And what you realized was - you'd be doing a scene, and you'd be holding your own with someone who's making a very good living acting - you'd realize that there's a possibility that you can actually do this for a living.
GROSS: Well, "ER" - when you got "ER," that certainly must have changed your life a lot.
CLOONEY: Sure.
GROSS: I mean, suddenly you were a star. And people become so close to you when you're on TV every week...
CLOONEY: Yeah.
GROSS: ...That there's this kind of bonding that I think people go through.
CLOONEY: It's an unusual experience because it's not like being a movie star. You haven't paid 10 bucks and you're 30 feet high and you've made it a date. You know, you've been in their homes every Thursday. So, you know, the truth is, I am a product of a great amount of luck. I create some of that luck because, you know, I did 13 pilots, and I did eight television series before that. But the simple truth is, had I done that exact same show and that exact same role and we were on Friday night instead of Thursday night at 10, I don't have a film career and I'm not sitting here with you. It requires that kind of luck. The show would never have been as popular on a Friday night as it was on a Thursday night.
GROSS: You knew something about fame. You know, your father was on TV. Rosemary Clooney, your aunt, was incredibly famous. But what surprised you most when it happened to you? What were you unprepared for?
CLOONEY: Well, it's a funny thing. There isn't a real fame school that you can go to and learn, you know? I had probably - if there's - haven't met many people better prepared for it. Because I had the great vision of watching, especially with Rosemary, how big you can get and how quickly it can be taken away. And it's not like Rosemary became less of a singer in that period of time, which showed me that it has very little to do with you. And that was an important thing to learn, an important thing to understand, which I did. But the things that you aren't prepared for are the trade-offs. No one wants to hear you complain about them, so you don't complain about them. But I would say that the significant loss of privacy is interesting.
GROSS: I want to thank you very much for talking with us.
CLOONEY: Oh, it's fun.
GROSS: My interview with George Clooney was recorded in 2005, after the release of his movie "Good Night, And Good Luck." He's now on Broadway in the stage adaptation of the film. He cowrote it and stars as Edward R. Murrow. His performance has just been nominated for a Tony.
If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like this week's interviews about the pronatalist movement, Project 2025 and how trauma shapes us, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews.
(SOUNDBITE OF CHARLIE HADEN'S "BACK HOME BLUES (INSTRUMENTAL)")
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FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our managing producer is Sam Briger. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Monique Nazareth, Susan Nyakundi and Anna Bauman. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our cohost is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross.
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