| By Fred Topel
In Theaters October 7
|
Good Night and Good Luck asks many important historical and political questions. Was the media vital in ending Senator Joe McCarthy’s anti-communist hearings? Does the same environment exist today? But most importantly, does George Clooney still look fabulous in black and white?
Actually, director/costar Clooney shot the film monochromatically for practical reasons. He was using actual footage of Joe McCarthy, and the rest of the film had to match. Also, he simply did not know how to stage the news room in color.
“I’ve never seen Joe McCarthy or Ed Murrow in color in my life,” Clooney said. “I’ve only seen them in black and white and I’ve seen a lot of them. I think it would throw me off to do it [in color].”
Clooney sought to be authentic as possible in chronicling five significant broadcasts by Edward R. Murrow. The son of anchor Nick Clooney, he knew he couldn’t fudge the facts for the sake of drama.
“The trick was to be very, very, very careful with the facts and to treat the facts like a journalism. I talked to my dad about it and he says, ‘Get ‘em all right, because if you get one wrong, you get marginalized and you get beat up nowadays. You get swift voted.’ So I double sourced everything. Every scene in this movie that we did, every scene. And the basic substance of the scenes happened. We’d either go through Joe and Shirley Wershba who we taped and were on the set almost every day. Or Milo Radulovich who we taped and we had on the set. Or, from Fred Friendly’s book or Ruth [Friendly] would come to the set and Andy and Dave would come to the set, his sons. Casey Murrow gave us a lot of stuff. We used all of the pieces that we could use to make sure. Even the things like Friendly laying on the ground and tapping him on the leg was how he would cue Murrow. We didn’t make that up.”
Clooney himself took the role of Fred Friendly because he had to appear in the movie to secure financing. Though he’d never met Friendly through his news industry family, he knew his work.
“I grew up under the sort of world of Fred Friendly because I always loved the Columbia School, the Ethics in America seminars were just fantastic. I’d become such a fan of his. I read his book where he talks about he would always walk around with a mini version of the constitution. So I got one that’s about 25 years old and I stuck it in my bag and I still have it. I carry it around with me all the time because I always found that that was sort of a funny thing whenever you get in trouble with any sort of questions, it’s a pretty great bible for governmental questions anytime. Now listen, a lot is wrong about stuff early on. They don’t address slavery for instance. But the beauty of the constitution was they kept saying we know things are going to change, so we leave it movable so you can fix it. That’s where I thought it was such a great thing to have. So Fred was a hero of mine growing up because he was a hero of my father’s, for the same reason that Murrow was a hero of mine.”
Getting kids to see a movie about Edward R. Murrow and Joe McCarthy may be a tough sell today. Indeed, Clooney has tried to bring social commentary to the masses and found the reactions colored by modern times.
“I showed a bunch of 25-year-olds the movie Network which I think is a masterpiece. I think Paddy Chayefsky is a genius. I showed it to them, I said, ‘You’ve got to see this. It’s one of the great dark comedies you’ll ever see in your life.’ And they saw and they liked the movie a lot, and they said, ‘But it’s not a comedy.’ And I was looking at them, I go, ‘What do you mean it’s not a comedy?’ And you realize that so much of the things that he wrote about in 1973/74 happened. The idea that the anchorman could be as big a news story as the news itself, those kind of elements actually happened so it’s not funny anymore. It’s just sort of like oh yeah, that happens. That actually exists.”
Regardless, Clooney is not worried that young audiences won’t know the story he’s telling. “When we did ER, we did the pilot and the network was like, ‘Nobody’s going to understand it. They’re not going to understand what superventricular tachearythmea is. It’s never going to work.’ And Les Moonves who was the head of Warner Brothers at the time said, ‘But do you like the show?’ They’re like, ‘It doesn’t matter whether we like it. The audience is never going to get it. They’re not going to get it.’ Well, you play to their lowest common denominator and you’ll get that. Or maybe you raise the bar and you say, ‘Hey, watch this.’ I don't think it’s a civics lesson. I think it’s actually a sort of entertaining film and if they don’t think so, we’ll go away pretty quickly and if not, we’ll be around.”
See for yourself when Good Night and Good Luck opens this Friday. |
