Esquire (UK) June 2007

by Katiedot Fri 23 Mar 2012, 22:42

Hope this comes up big enough to read.

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by it's me Fri 23 Mar 2012, 22:57

images
are fantastic!
thanks

by Lakin460 Fri 23 Mar 2012, 23:00

Katie, I could read the article just fine, but what happened to the beginning of the opening paragraph? The article seems to start mid-sentence?

by Katiedot Fri 23 Mar 2012, 23:07

Not sure - think there's a page missing, but that's all I've got. Sad

by it's me Fri 23 Mar 2012, 23:07

man
with a plan

is this the title?

by melbert Sat 24 Mar 2012, 16:04

Love. Him.

by Nicky80 Sun 23 Mar 2014, 11:43

Here is another pic from that interview and again the interview below as I believe parts are missing form above (I highlighted below the part which is missing above) found by sevens. Thank you.

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Yesterday, George Clooney was at work filming Ocean's Thirteen, which is his penance for wasting studio money on smaller, smarter films that not as many people will pay to see. The day before, he was at a crowded, elaborate photo shoot where he obeyed orders to stand on a soapbox and study a pencil. This morning, he was on the phone with Ren�f©e Zellweger, who was calling to announce that she would like a part in his next big project, Leatherheads, for which he will receive writing, directing, and starring credits. On Thursday, he will be in New York, talking to the Security Council at the United Nations, trying to convince them to save the lost people of Darfur.
This afternoon, though, is his.
Golf is on the TV in his Studio City living room. Through one of its open windows, sunlight bounces off the unbroken surface of his stone-lined pool. It is peaceful here, away seeming, like there should be parrots in the trees.
He puts his bare feet up on his coffee table, where they are protected from view by stacks of videotapes, or at least nearly so; it's as though his toes are the archers looking over the castle walls. He leans back into his overstuffed leather couch, fishes a pill out of his pants pocket to quiet his perpetually aching back, and runs his hands through his hair, which he cuts and styles himself but which has not seen a comb today. That's the surest sign he is off duty. Without his parting, he is invisible.
And yet so much of him is so familiar, the blanks could be filled in from memory. The perfect nose, the perfect teeth, the perfect chin, these tools of his fame but also the products of it, they are instantly recognizable, even when they are incognito. Through a gut, a broken neck, and a beard, he was still George Clooney in Syriana. When he tried to write and direct himself into the shadows in Good Night, and Good Luck--in a gray suit with his gray lid set against a gray background--he was George Clooney. Even on the set of Ocean's Thirteen, even surrounded by the likes of Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, and Al Pacino, George Clooney is George Clooney is George Clooney.
"But I won't be George Clooney forever," he says.
He wants to tell a story. He is a good storyteller, conscious of detail and pace, each tale unfolding in three quick, clean acts. Every story he tells sounds like a pitch.
When Rosemary Clooney found herself old instead of young, when she could rarely hit the high notes and she could no longer hold those notes for long, she was forced to abandon pop for jazz. Despite her lungs having failed her in some ways, she was suddenly given a new esteem, as though the insults of age had made her a better singer. Her nephew George, a struggling actor determined to build a future for himself, asked her how she had pulled off such a good trick. She told him she had found pride in embracing the down notes. "I don't have to show off anymore," she said. "I can just serve the music."
He didn't quite grasp it. He would try out for a part on Hill Street Blues,because every young actor wanted to nail a part on Hill Street Blues, and he would cry and scream and splutter his lines like Pacino, like Gene Hackman, tearing every last shred of meat from the bone. He did that ten times, for ten different parts, and he never came close to winning one of them.
But in the sometimes lean years that followed--Sunset Beat, anyone?--George Clooney learned the gift of restraint, the power of black and white. At forty-five, he has finally mastered the hard, sometimes beautiful art of the down note. "I came back for you," he hushed over the lump in his throat in the underappreciated Solaris, and in that moment, which was so much bigger for being so small, he demonstrated that he'd got the trick.
Along the way, he also happened to build for himself an empire. The future turned into a present as dreamlike as he might have imagined. He is no longer an actor, or just an actor, at least. He has evolved into something more. Now he has reach. Now he is important.
Clooney makes movies, and while he's risked his neck trying, men who make movies will never save the world. But he may be our best hope to rescue Hollywood from its bloat, to return it to a time before Rocky won the Oscar for Best Picture. (Last Christmas, he gave family and friends a collection of his hundred favorite flicks from the sixties and seventies, the likes of Network and Carnal Knowledge and Dr. Strangelove and All the President's Men, the sort of movies that aren't being made much in Hollywood anymore.) He's our best hope partly because he can name a hundred films from the sixties and seventies and partly because he's a good thief--you've no doubt seen some of his best scenes before, lifts from Mike Nichols and Sidney Lumet--but mostly because his ass has hung out the backs of hospital gowns, and he knows that his time as a leading man is coming to an end and that he will be forced to withdraw and regroup, rededicating his smirky energy into his writing, directing, and producing. And when he writes, directs, and produces, Clooney is capable of better than pop. He can be Rosemary.
George Clooney knows this, knows how everything will play out, because he is nothing if not self-aware, but he also knows that, for the moment--for perhaps three, four, five more years at the outside--he is limitless. Only now, at this particular apex of his life and career, can he do all things for all people. He has been granted the temporary superpowers that we afford only our biggest celebrities, the knife-sharp part in his hair a kind of cape.
After he won his Oscar for Syriana, and after he had given a good speech ("I'm proud to be out of touch"), he called up his former-Kentucky-newsman father, Nick--they had been talking about Darfur, Sudan, wondering aloud why such a catastrophe was also a nonstory--and said, "I'll never have more juice than I have right now. Why don't we go over there?"
There was already a rally scheduled for April 30 on the Washington Mall. Organizers hoped for a crowd of five thousand. The Clooneys decided it was in them to boost those numbers. Together, they dodged a military coup in Chad and official resistance from Khartoum to gather proof of a tragedy. They videotaped children in the backs of pickup trucks, brandishing AK-47's. In one camp, they found a few hundred Darfuris huddled under trees, begging for plastic sheeting to protect them from the coming rains. In another, outside a village called Bahai, they photographed tens of thousands of refugees scratching out life from the dust. There, a little girl, six years old, came up and tugged on George's shirt. "Why haven't you fixed this?" she asked.
"We'll take care of it," George said. "We'll fix it. You'll be okay."
"They told the kinds of stories that give you nightmares," Nick Clooney says. "Wells filled with chopped-up bodies," says his more specific son.
From that desperate place, Clooney called Oprah Winfrey and asked to appear on her show. She agreed before he had finished his question. Father and son flew to New York, and George spent thirty hours editing their footage before appearing on Oprah. He also went on CNN andToday. In the end, a crowd of thirty thousand showed up at the rally, President Bush was given the political cover to wade into an ungodly mess, and Clooney continued to solicit growing support from both the Left and Right, bookended by Senators Obama and Brownback.
And next week, on a Thursday in September, he will speak to the Security Council.
There, seated next to the American ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, and dressed in a dark, beautifully tailored suit and impeccably knotted tie, and, notably, without a hair out of place, Clooney will look and sound the way presidents look and sound in the movies. He will be brief without being glib, impassioned without being shrill, pointed without being disrespectful. ("You can't act like you're the smartest kid in school," he says, barefoot, thinking about what he will say.) He will speak of the legacies of powerful men, and he will raise the specters of failures past, uttering each haunted place name as though they were sacred: Rwanda. Cambodia. Auschwitz. And then he will close with a question that has no answer: "If not the UN, then who?"
This is not Daryl Hannah climbing a tree. Darfuris will still die, but Clooney will make a determined, meaningful, articulate, orchestrated effort to help save them. This will be what, given the distance of time, they will come to call vintage Clooney.
Back in Studio City, his next film is coming together by the hour, rapid-fire, in the way that only a man of George Clooney's power and charm can hope for. The town is gun-shy these days; money is tight, and the decision makers are skittish. But Clooney has taken Leatherheads, a script that bounced around for more than a decade, and seen it green-lit in a finger snap. After Ren�f©e Zellweger called this morning to claim her part, he let it slip that he had sent her the script only last night.
The first few words of it were written fourteen years ago by a pair of friends, Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly and screenwriter Duncan Brantley. It is the story of a love triangle, two guys and a girl, set in the sepia-tinted world of early professional football. Back then, Brantley's sister was married to Steven Soderbergh, who tapped out a rewrite and agreed to direct. He also tapped his friend George Clooney to star and helped sell the script to Universal.
Soderbergh first directed Clooney in Out of Sight, which, despite its poor box-office returns, remains one of Clooney's favorite lines on his r�f©sum�f©. That's probably because it was his first decent turn, in what was perhaps his last stab at making the perilous transition from ERto film. Back-to-back pop dogs The Peacemaker and Batman & Robin had made 1997 Clooney's annus horribilis. It was worse than a stumbling start; it was as if the starter's pistol had been packed with bullets instead of blanks, and Clooney had taken one to the chest.
"I call it the Jack Kennedy syndrome," he says. "The first thing he did was the Bay of Pigs. A complete failure. But he never tried to hide from it. He admitted his mistake, and he moved on. Batman & Robin was terrible, and I was terrible in it. Out of Sight came out the next year, and I think it's the best film I've been in."
So began the hot streak that Clooney's still on. So, too, began his affixment to Soderbergh. In addition to assuming the director's obscene work ethic and studying his experimental style, Clooney joined him in creating their own production company, Section Eight, where the pair began spinning risky fare out of their more commercial successes.Ocean's Eleven begat Solaris and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,Clooney's first effort at self-direction; Ocean's Twelve begat Syriana andGood Night, and Good Luck;Ocean's Thirteen has already spawned this month's The Good German and next year's Michael Clayton. (The former will mark Clooney's return to smoky, silky black and white, a dark-hearted murder mystery in the ruins of postwar Berlin. "And if Cate Blanchett doesn't win the Oscar for it . . ." he says.)
But try as they might, the duo could not crack Leatherheads. The script began its long hopscotch around town, including an epic, serious-minded rewrite by Jon Favreau, whose version was going to be directed by Jonathan Mostow. But that, too, fell short. Clooney and Soderbergh hired another screenwriter, Stephen Schiff, to go over their own going-over of Reilly and Brantley. Still no love.
"Then I did the best thing I've ever done," Clooney says, entering the next act of this particular story. "I bought real estate in Italy."
After the 2000 elections, Clooney played a hunch that the stock market was going to crash. He sold his portfolio and began looking for the safe harbor of property, which he found in Lake Como, in a house called Villa Oleandra. "Originally, I just bought it as an investment. Then I started spending time there, escaping. God, they do everything better than we do. And then I realized I could probably do some good work there. It's changed my life."
Surrounded by so much beauty, riding his vintage motorcycle through mountains, ears and eyes opened up like his engine, Clooney was released. With longtime pal Grant Heslov, he wrote Good Night, and Good Luck between bottomless cups of coffee and hours in his gym. And one night this past summer, he woke up with a start and also, at last, the fix for Leatherheads: "It needed to be The Philadelphia Story, only with football."
Feverish, he banged out forty-one fresh pages, including a new ending, in three days. He wanted to direct it. The executives at Universal announced their affection for it and for him within twenty-four hours, and in return, they asked only that Clooney also play one of the guys. Zellweger was even more quick to take the part of the girl. George Clooney is George Clooney is George Clooney.
"I've had a good year," he says. "But if I come out with another Batman & Robin, they'll take my toys away pretty fast."
The down note, at least, he really does have cold.
This is another story like the one George told about Rosemary--foretelling the future by remembering the past--only this one is told by a man named Jeff Skoll (see Best & Brightest, December 2005). As the first paid employee of a company called eBay, he became very rich, and recently he took some of his riches to form a company called Participant Productions, with the mandate of financing passionate, socially relevant films. One of the first films it financed was Syriana.
During filming, Skoll flew to Dubai to have breakfast with Clooney, who had already suffered an injury to the spinal dura in his neck in the course of shooting a particularly vigorous scene, and who was already taking pills for the pain, but who had not yet undergone several surgeries to try to ?x it. Still, his mind was occupied with his dreams of an expanding empire and his carving out a new role in it. "It's more fun to be the painter than the paint," is how Clooney explained it to Skoll. It's how he explained it to anyone who would listen.
Clooney then began talking about a script he had written in tribute to his father, Good Night, and Good Luck. He had been trying for two years to get it made, but, because he was still seen by some as another oversize pop idol asking to direct the orchestra, he hadn't been able to cobble together enough money. It wouldn't take much, Clooney said. Hell, he'd pay himself just a dollar for starters.
And then, over breakfast in Dubai, Clooney served the music, walking Skoll through his small, flawless movie, scene by scene, imagination become memory, all the while paying his usual attention to detail and pace. It was so clear, so precisely, lovingly laid out, that Skoll could close his eyes and see the final cut, down to the frame.
Clooney had his money.
Months later, Skoll sat down in a dark screening room, nervous. "Usually, when you see a director's first cut, you want to tear your hair out," he says. They're invariably too long, ramshackle, and rough, as though held together by staples and rubber bands. But this time, Skoll saw on the screen exactly what he had seen in his head during breakfast in Dubai. "It gave me goosebumps."
The fact is, Clooney--on the quiet--has thought out the rest of his life as clearly and precisely (and perhaps as lovingly) as he did Good Night, and Good Luck. "I'm trying to put myself into a position where I can be creative for as long as I can," he says. He is obsessive in the care he takes, determined, he says, "to be able to die my own death." He talks often of "next moves" and "smart plays." Before he makes a big one, he calls up his father, and together they plot out its consequences as far into the future as their minds can reach: If x, then y, and if y, then z. In its methodology, his is an almost political life.
Not surprisingly, he acknowledges having given serious thought to running for office--and others have encouraged him to make those thoughts more real, salivating Democrats especially. But after watching his father's failed run for Congress in 2004, he has shelved those ambitions, probably permanently.
"I saw what it did to him," Clooney says. "I watched him getting the crap beaten out of him, and I realized how incompatible my personality is with the job. There are so many concessions you have to make, even with your own side of the fight, and I don't like to compromise. I think it's better for me to do what I can from the outside."
"He started to wonder with what devils he would find himself sleeping," Nick Clooney says of his son. "Coming at things from another direction, he can focus more directly on what he wants to accomplish. He can be more laserlike."
He can be the man who will speak next Thursday at the UN.
But there is also something else behind his reticence. "The Oscar andGood Night, and Good Luck have opened up a lot of new doors for me," he says. "You know, one day I might be allowed to direct a film without being forced to act in it, which would be nice." Earlier this year, he and Soderbergh shuttered Section Eight, which was always designed to spoil like milk. Now he and Heslov have partnered to create Smoke House Productions, a clean slate and a fresh spring of optimism and material, named for one of Clooney's favorite restaurants, across the street from the Warner Bros. lot.
Years ago, when ER was just another pilot being shot--and long before George Clooney became the George Clooney who's become George Clooney--the cast wandered over to the Smoke House for lunch. They sat around a table, still dressed in their hospital scrubs, eating and laughing and hopeful, when Anthony Edwards's son briefly gagged on a fry. None of the actors knew how to help him, and they each stood up and raised a commotion, yelling for a doctor. And everyone else in the restaurant turned to look at this gang of crazy doctors yelling for a doctor, unaware that they were only actors playing parts.
One of them, the good-looking guy with his hair cut like Caesar's, was about to become famous for playing Dr. Ross--and also Batman and Jack Foley and Major Archie Gates and Captain Billy Tyne and Ulysses Everett McGill and Danny Ocean (three times so far) and Fred Friendly and Bob Barnes and Jake Geismar and Michael Clayton.
But sometime soon, the day will come when he will be none of them. This all-things-to-all-people time in his life will have passed. His nose and teeth and chin will no longer make demands on him. He won't be asked to play the lead or whether he wants to be a politician, and he won't be responsible for using his superpowers to try to save the world. He will just be a man who makes movies, some of them in black and white. And on this barefoot afternoon, sunk deep in his couch, running his hands through his hair, he looks ready--ready for his jazz years to start, ready to be the guy who used to be George Clooney.

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