George Clooney

by Mark Browning

  Using two long lenses (as he also does in Confessions), Clooney often racks focus, so that our attention is very much directed by what is sharp on screen, no matter where it is in the frame. Hence, in Murrow’s own counterrebuttal we shift attention from a side-on shot of him in the studio to his image behind on the monitor, looking head-on at the camera. In the newsroom meeting, the slow zoom into Murrow sitting in shadow, thinking, as others argue around him about the legality of McCarthy’s tactics, underlines his greater vision of the situation. He cuts through their focus on small details with the wider picture (that McCarthy will come after him personally). Correspondingly, in the following scene there is a slow zoom-out from Murrow, a lone figure at a typewriter, working at his all-important closing argument, like a lawyer in a high-profile court case.

  The flip side, which is not completely ignored here, is whether Murrow’s campaign (and therefore Clooney’s film in dramatizing this) becomes something of a personal crusade, losing sight of wider pressures. The scene between Joe and Shirley in bed together, with Joe wondering “What if we’re wrong?,” does show the presence of doubt, even among those who suffered the most detrimental consequences for themselves personally. The fact that Murrow shows some surprise at the revelation of the secret marriage suggests that he is perhaps too focused on his battle of principle to notice more personal things around him. In the bar, he is framed in sharp focus, biting his nails in apparent worry, looking up at Hollenbeck, blurred in the foreground, but if he senses the strain the other man is under, he does not say or do anything to try and prevent the other man’s suicide. The film does not duck opposing views, such as the military’s faith in the judgement of superior officers, the presence of Bobby Kennedy on the McCarthy panel questioning Moss, and Paley challenging Murrow about whether people really want a “civics lesson” rather than entertainment.

  Clooney’s own performance (hampered by a back injury sustained during Syriana) is relatively low-key, with relatively few close-ups, so that he is a backroom presence, guiding proceedings in the newsroom but doing so in a way that leaves the story as the central character rather than his orchestration of its telling. The iconic exchange with Murrow, when he crouches down at his feet and taps his leg with a pencil just before they go on air, reflects not a subservient relationship, despite the low angles used, but the camera tends to stay on Murrow: it is his show and it is his words that are spoken, supported technically and morally by Friendly. Mickelson derides the cliché of being “all in a big boat together,” undermining Friendly’s position at this point (a brave line for a writer/director to include about his own character). The real Joe Wershba describes the actual relationship being closer to “hero worship” on Friendly’s part and Murrow’s sometimes patronizing disdain.4 Clooney shifts this more into the buddy territory of wise-cracking equals (akin to his own relationship with Heslov). The film would perhaps struggle to hold audience attention if the plot deviated too far from the razor-sharp precision of Murrow’s words on camera. Generally, the scripts were actually coproduced more heavily by Friendly but the film emphasizes the shift in the attacks on McCarthy toward Murrow working alone.

  At the news by phone of Hollenbeck’s suicide, Clooney’s head drops. However, both what he hears and then what he says to Murrow is not audible, so that we focus on the actor’s reactions. We cut to Reeves singing “How High the Moon” (a song present in the film’s conception from the very outset) to establish an elegiac mood, and this bleeds over the following scenes, describing Hollenbeck’s actions and the words of a reporter, the unseen O’Brian, who is hostile even in recording Hollenbeck’s death. Murrow is framed looking at Reeves through glass (specially placed for just this shot), so that her reflection is partly seen superimposed over his face. It is a rare example of quite an artful shot, but here the emotion of the moment justifies it rather than seeming self-indulgent. Murrow’s succinct on-air obituary is contrasted with O’Brian’s tasteless hostility.

  To secure financial backing, Clooney had to add 5 pages to the original script of 85 pages, but probably most of this length is pared back again in production, with a focus on the silences, like the slight awkwardness of Friendly and Paley in the elevator. Cut out or down are Wershba interviewing Radulovich, Murrow talking to Gina Lollobrigida, the second scene between Murrow and Hollenbeck, lengthier questioning of Annie Lee Moss, and some of the banter between Friendly and Murrow before McCarthy’s rebuttal is shown. In all these cases, the substantive details are present elsewhere and anxiety is better conveyed by silence than nervous chatter. Some reaction from Murrow and Friendly during McCarthy’s rebuttal is also cut, which would have had Friendly deliver the line “We’ve got him, Ed,” which might have seemed too premature and triumphalist. Without it, there is more tension as we are unsure exactly how the public reaction will play out. Clooney cuts some of Murrow’s speech where he mentions his coverage of Soviet atrocities during the war, which perhaps would have confused audiences and drawn them away from the focus on an American story in the present.

  The subplot of Joe and Shirley Wershba (Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson, respectively) and their secret marriage (which Heslov suggests he and Clooney did not know about until they actually met them), symbolized by their daily removal of rings, does have the effect of creating a parallel in a personal sphere at a time of growing cultural paranoia, particularly Shirley’s line about looking over her shoulder at work before answering what seems like a perfectly innocent question.5 However, just because something really happened does not make it dramatically compelling in fiction, and such etiquette existed long before McCarthy. There is a repressive element in wider society at work here. Later, Murrow concedes that McCarthy “didn’t create this situation of fear, he merely exploited it.” Perhaps it could be said that the throwing off of McCarthy’s influence allows people to question other subjective codes of behavior, but these scenes act as a hiatus in the main plot, rather than adding a great deal to it. The film does not really explain how their secret is exposed at this precise moment. The suggestion is that everyone knew and it reflects a bowing to extended pressure. The script talks of a “melancholy” at the moment when they are presented with their ultimatum, but the film as shot plays up a quiet relief that they do not need to hide anymore.6 Although in real life, the pair went on to be successful producers, in the world of the film, without this information their future remains uncertain.

  The newsroom scenes are certainly informed by Clooney’s own upbringing, and his love of films from the 1970s like All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) is reflected here in overlapping dialogue (even scripted in parallel columns), panning around a group of passionately committed young men, with only the speaker in clear focus. As part of the preparation process, Clooney had the props department give out stacks of actual newspapers from the period, from which the cast had to pitch stories as in a real newsroom.

  Murrow is initially framed slightly side-on, with the camera he is addressing in the left side of the frame so we have a sense of a program being made, but as the narrative gathers dramatic momentum, Clooney uses more shots straight down the lens of the camera, giving us the experience closer to a TV viewer of the time. There are a large number of shots of Murrow framed against monitors, some showing himself at that moment speaking but also of his supposed guest. For this, Clooney and Heslov need to carefully select and coordinate quite a large amount of real footage that needs to be timed so that it creates the sense of a genuine conversation taking place. At times, this meant using footage of the real Murrow, as in the Liberace interview, but the image is too small (and the match with Straitharn too good) to see any difference. In Murrow’s longer speeches, there is very little camera movement beyond a slow zoom for a closer, more dramatic climax.

  The postshow scene in the Pentagon bar, one of the few location shots in the film, as the group waits for the early editions of the papers, originally carried more dialogue but Clooney cuts nearly two pages of anxious small
-talk, opting for a longer silence, underlining how the initial euphoria (more effusive in the film than the script suggests) and laughter fall away and for several moments they consider more soberly but silently what might be the reaction to what they have done.

  Rather than a montage of moments from television history, which was shot, Clooney and Heslov opt to end the film within the context of the film and return to the frame story. Giving the last words to Murrow himself means the film ends on quite a bleak note with a warning and a simple fade-to-black. In his closing remarks, Murrow encourages his peers and by extension the wider viewing public to “exalt the importance of ideas and information,” arguing for a mix of programming, with some educational content mixed in among the entertainment.

  Part of the difficulty in criticizing Good Night, and Good Luck is similar to a potential response to a film like Schindler’s List (Steven Spielberg, 1993), whose moral authority is such that criticizing its form seems petty. Like Fail Safe, it deals with real events, in portentous black-and-white, and both clearly have a strong remit to educate a younger generation, possibly ignorant of a series of cataclysmic events in mid-twentieth-century history. The film is a nostalgic look back at a time when American culture had figures in the media whose faces and voices represented a sense of informed trust—someone, like Walter Cronkite (actually recruited by Murrow at CBS), who would tell the viewers the truth. There is a sense in which the Academy not only appreciates a film about a closely related industry but that in acknowledging it in award terms, it accepts the truth of Murrow’s words, that is, that it can accept a chastening word from one of its own about the educational function of visual mass media.

  Rather than trying to produce a bio-pic, Clooney and Heslov focus on a specific, career-defining moment in Murrow’s life. The film, like Murrow’s own shows, manages to condemn McCarthy by extended use of footage of the man himself, browbeating witnesses and then later in the Moss case high-handedly excusing himself after only seven minutes, assuming his job is done. Annie Lee Moss may or may not have been a spy, but in a sense this is not the point. Like John McClellan, the Democratic senator from Arkansas who stood up for the principle of not trying individuals “by hearsay evidence,” Clooney suggests that it is the denial of her constitutional right to face her accusers that is at stake. Branding Clooney as unpatriotic is as unconvincing as those accusations leveled at anyone who questioned McCarthy and his methods. Any film adaptation involves editing and selecting material, so the notion that there is a single truth in a situation is specious. However, Clooney does admit that the script radically compresses the time between Murrow’s programs and the Senate investigating McCarthy from a few months to the very next day, thereby exaggerating the immediate power of the protagonist’s broadcast. Similarly, the Murrow/Paley exchange really took place several months later.

  It is also true that McCarthy contributed to his own downfall with his browbeating arrogance, descending into incoherence while ranting at witnesses and particularly in his rebuttal, calling Murrow “the cleverest of the jackal pack” at the point when Murrow’s stock with the American viewer had never been higher, after his war reporting from London during the Blitz (the source of the film’s title and his closing farewell phrase) and his growing audiences for the more mainstream populist content on Person to Person.

  It is ironic that the film should win an Oscar for best original screenplay, when arguably the biggest achievement in Good Night, and Good Luck is its adherence to sources, including extensive film footage of McCarthy hearings. During their research, Clooney and Heslov realized that documentaries such as Point of Order actually edited together testimony from different days, so in a sense they had to act as documentary makers themselves and go back to primary material, often in quite a poor state. Rigid Oscar categories can often seem problematic, and perhaps Best Adapted Screenplay would be a better description, albeit from multiple sources. Murrow’s comments about “If none of us ever read a book that was dangerous … ,” ending with “the terror is right here in this room,” and Wershba’s tongue-in-cheek response all derive directly from Wershba’s own recollection of the exchange. On the other hand, the film should not be criticized for a lack of creativity when it takes great pains to be accurate to a series of specific events in an extremely limited setting, meaning it is really closer to docudrama than an overtly fictional narrative (with male actors instructed not to wear makeup). A film about journalistic integrity needs to be similarly principled in its script and production. Clooney had key personnel available, like Milo Radulovich himself, Friendly’s sons and wife, and members of Murrow’s family, Ruth and Casey, at the initial read-through and even at times on set to advise about accuracy; he also enjoyed the company of individuals who, for him, are unsung personal heroes. Material has been assembled that produces a compelling narrative, despite the script including some fairly meaty content, linguistically, culturally, and politically. It is essentially a film of ideas and juxtaposed speeches to give a sense of the importance of the drama being played out for the hearts and minds of the American people but also perhaps to show the potential power of the emerging medium of television and the tragedy that it is so rarely used to its fullest potential.

  Conclusion

  The success of this film looks forward to other explorations of journalistic integrity, like Frost/Nixon (Ron Howard, 2008), which also starred Frank Langella playing a lugubrious figure of authority and likewise featured a climactic TV interview, which reflected the political life of the nation as well as the power and importance of investigative journalism and asking sufficiently probing questions at the right time.

  For Clooney the prime responsibility of a director is to get the casting right (as much a job of a producer) after which actors should be allowed to get on with their jobs as professionally as possible with minimum disruption from the ego of the director. Clarkson describes Clooney’s comments to actors as “incredibly eloquent and succinct.”7 The notion of a bond between the supporting cast, most of whose parts were not offered up for audition, was also helped by the fact that Reed Diamond (John Aaron), Tate Donovan (Jesse Zousmer), and David Strathairn had already worked together on Memphis Belle (Michael Caton-Jones, 1990). In terms of the dialogue, Clooney tries to give it a sense of a period feel by avoiding unnecessary exposition, effusive outpourings of emotion, and a certain understatement (possibly reflective of the wartime culture). At the same time, Clooney can get away with clichéd description in the shooting script, like “you could cut the tension with a knife,” since he knows he is working among friends and he himself is directing.8

  In terms of Clooney’s career, as an actor it marks a further step in his maturity as an ensemble player, but more significantly, as a cowriter and director it showed that he could embrace an important, complex issue and produce a well-made piece of cinematic art. At the same time, the DVD audio commentary, where he jokes several times about his 1997 award as “The Sexiest Man Alive,” shows that he still finds it hard to watch himself on film or take himself too seriously. As in Confessions, special effects are mostly achieved by theatrical, mechanical means in front of the camera, but planning had to be even tighter as the shooting schedule was only a third as long. The effect of the elevator opening onto different floors is created by production designer Jim Bissell using a relatively simple rotating effect, so that the doors open onto a different environment.

  It is true that Murrow was not the only critic of McCarthy and that the film does focus on his battle alone, ignoring attacks on McCarthy by print journalists (such as Joseph and Stewart Alsop) or the delay that Murrow took in deciding to take on McCarthy (the real Fred Friendly was less patient), and it certainly compresses the effects on McCarthy’s downfall. It makes Murrow’s stand seem slightly more heroic perhaps than it was; but that apart, as a defining moment of what broadcast journalism is capable, it is still a brave film to make. For a budget of only $7 million, an extremely limited setting, in black-and-white, and with languag
e that is dense and unforgiving in its lack of exposition (explanatory, colloquial intertitles, such as “That’s the Evil of it,” were cut from the shooting script), it is an ambitious film, determined to be faithful to its sources. Whereas what was at stake in Fail Safe was literally the survival of the world, here it is ideas about moral truth and integrity, calling people to account, and the potential of the medium of television, which hang in the balance, arguably more difficult issues to make the viewer care about. Like Murrow’s success with See It Now, Clooney’s film effectively uses the personal to bring out wider political concerns without falling headlong into a didactic history lesson. Television, and by extension its big-screen relative, can definitely still be more than “wires and lights in a box.” Clooney’s early work might well fall into the type of programming that is being criticized by Murrow, but post-1997 he has moved toward a more high-minded view of what films to make and most have an aesthetic or political core that mark them as more than just mere entertainment.

  On the audio commentary, Clooney terms Langella’s scenes as “Shakespearean” in their weighty tone and Murrow uses a key quote from Julius Caesar in expressing his view that all of society bears some responsibility for allowing McCarthyism to spread (“the fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”). The text, and the notion of betrayal, anticipates Clooney’s forthcoming political film, The Ides of March (2012), based on Beau Willimon’s 2008 play Farragut North in which Clooney plays presidential hopeful, Governor Mike Morris. Production was delayed after the cultural euphoria surrounding Obama’s election, making a downbeat tale of political infighting and cynical manipulation around a Democratic primary in Ohio seem out of kilter with the public mood. Luckily, for Clooney, if not for Obama, such sentiments quickly evaporated so that the global release of the film in an election year is a timely comment on an unseemly battle for power. The use of a poster glimpsed behind Morris, clearly similar in style to that used in the Obama campaign, links the fictional politician with contemporary Democratic campaigning strategies, and although the implication is that political expediency cuts across all parties, it is the scheming within Democratic ranks that is the film’s subject.