(continued)

Clooney's penchant for practical jokes crossed the line, according to numerous sources, when he responded to a savage review of his directorial debut, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, by egging the house of the writer, Los Angeles Times movie critic Kenneth Turan. "He and a bunch of guys who were all in black tie got in a limo, and they each took a dozen eggs," recalls a studio suit who heard the tale from the actor himself. "They went by Turan's house and they egged it." (While a spokesperson for the newspaper confirms the egging, Clooney insists it never happened.)

"I think George is super-invested in making himself look like a good guy all the time." says director David O. Russell. "I think George will be president."When Turan began telling the story, the exec continues, "George then used that to his advantage. He contacted the editor of the Los Angeles Times and basically said, 'It's bad enough that Kenny Turan has lambasted all my movies, and particularly the one I directed, but now he's going around saying I've egged his house. For God's sake, I'm a 43-year-old man! I mean, will he stop at nothing?'"

Clooney, who studied journalism at Northern Kentucky University before dropping out, requested that Turan be banned from reviewing his movies due to personal bias. (Turan appears to have passed on Clooney's next flick, Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over, but was back with a vengeance for Intolerable Cruelty, writing that even the "Coen brothers fail to help the audience warm to George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones.")

In any case, Clooney wasn't quite through, according to what he told the exec, which another anonymous source confirms. "He wrote Kenny this letter in which he said, you know, 'I just wanted to let you know that I'm willing to let bygones be bygones. I really don't hold it against you, and frankly, as my mother used to say, if you want to make an omelet, you gotta break a few eggs.' Cute, although strong-arming a critic might not have sat well with Clooney's hero Edward R. Murrow (nor, one imagines, his newsman pop).

The list of Clooney's sparring partners also includes the paparazzi, a battle that started with the boycott he organized against Entertainment Tonight in 1996 in retaliation for what he considered the aggressive tactics of another Paramount show, Hard Copy. The boycott—which gained momentum with Princess Diana's death and was joined by Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, and Madonna—exemplified Clooney's knack for simultaneously taking a moral stand and seizing the spotlight. (It worked, too, forcing Hard Copy to reform.)

Perhaps Clooney's biggest scrap was with director David O. Russell on the set of Three Kings. Russell and Clooney reportedly had a tense relationship from the start because Clooney was not Russell's first choice for the role. According to Sharon Waxman's Hollywood tell-all, Rebels on the Backlot, the director even went so far as to make Clooney do yogic breathing exercises to curb the actor's tendency to squint when he delivered his lines. Depending on which version you believe, the two either almost came to blows or Russell wound up on the receiving end of a Clooney headlock. One thing that cannot be disputed is that Clooney kicked Russell's ass in the PR spin war that followed.

"I would not stand for him humiliating and yelling and screaming at crew members, who weren't allowed to defend themselves," the actor told Vanity Fair in October 2003. "I don't believe in it, and it makes me crazy. So my job was to humiliate the people who were doing the humiliating."

"George Clooney can suck my dick," Russell responded, adding, "He's a really good person, and I'm a really bad person, right? He's a super-political, extremely manipulative guy, and he's not an artist. I think George is super-invested in making himself look like a good guy all the time. I think George will be president."

Anyone inclined to take Russell's side was likely persuaded otherwise when a clip of the director verbally abusing Lily Tomlin on the set of I Heart Huckabees was leaked to YouTube last year. Speculation as to its origins immediately pointed to Clooney.

"Clooney paid the [cameraman] to release it," insists the well-placed agent. "It was all him."

When Radar originally reported the incident in March 2007, Clooney denied leaking the footage and offered $1 million to anyone who could prove he had. So far, the money remains unclaimed.

Egos, it should be noted, aren't exactly in short supply in Hollywood. "At the end of day, compared to other movie stars, Clooney is a dream," acknowledges the studio executive. George Clooney is as entitled to his occasional missteps as anyone—that is, he would be, say his critics, if his movies earned money. Unfortunately, they rarely do. "Look at his box office!" says the power agent. "The bottom line is, the only movies he's made money on are either movies costarring Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, and Mark Wahlberg, or one starring a giant wave. Everything else: nothing."

Even Michael Clayton, for which Clooney was tipped as a likely Oscar nominee, has been fairly flat, bringing in just $39 million on an estimated $25 million budget—a payday that wouldn't make up even half the losses on last year's ill-fated Clooney vehicle, a black-and-white World War II noir called The Good German, which earned just $1.3 million of its estimated $32 million budget. One prominent screenwriter sees that film as a rare case in which Clooney eagerly spread the credit around: "It was always promoted as starring George Clooney, Tobey Maguire, and Cate Blanchett—though clearly it was George's movie."

"When that thing completely cratered, no stink got attached," notes the screenwriter with annoyance.

Actually, Clooney's big-screen career has generated quite a lot of stink for such a major celebrity. Excluding the star-studded Ocean's Eleven and its sequels, which have made a fortune for Warner Bros., most of Clooney's films have actually lost money at the domestic box office. Even the critically acclaimed Steven Soderbergh film Out of Sight, costarring Jennifer Lopez, failed to make back the $48 million it cost.

Interestingly, some of Clooney's biggest failures have been films produced by Section Eight, the production shingle he founded in 2000 with director and friend Steven Soderbergh in a deal with Warner Bros. While the company's mandate was always about making art rather than money—and several of its films (including Todd Haynes' Far From Heaven and Richard Linklater's A Scanner Darkly) were critical hits—numerous sources say the partners were less interested in supporting directors' work than in putting their own imprint on it, sometimes to the detriment of the completed films. Of his experience working with Section Eight, the screenwriter says wryly, "When George and Steven have your back, you never need to worry about what's in front of you."

The fact that Soderbergh and Clooney had final cut on the films they produced was intended as a buffer against studio interference. But some directors soon found that they had more to worry about from the partners themselves. "They didn't always stand up for the artist," recalls the studio exec, "which was the thing that they were promising. Sometimes it was just ego-driven stuff, and then there were other occasions where it was like, 'Well, yeah, but we see it differently and we're going to get what we want.'"

The exec reports that during the production company's six-year run, numerous talent felt they'd been undercut by the duo—among them writer/director Ted Griffin, who was signed to helm his script Rumor Has It, but was sacked after 10 days of filming. "Famously, the biggest fight was with Syriana director Steve Gaghan," recalls the exec, who had direct knowledge of the day-to-day production. "Syriana is the most regretful case, because they wound up cutting a lot of the heart out of the movie," he continued, noting that at least four scenes were deleted "that [Gaghan] was very dedicated to keeping in."

In an interview with the Financial Times, Gaghan said Soderbergh "ruined my movie" by shaving off 24 critical minutes. "It's ego and power," Gaghan told interviewer Nigel Andrews. "End of story." At which point, Andrews notes, the writer/director, who received no mention in Clooney's Oscar acceptance speech, unleashed an off-the-record "blistering attack on another significant player in Syriana who insisted on cutting the film just where, for Gaghan, its major veins and arteries were." Clooney was the only other person with final-cut approval.

Clooney responded to Radar's request for comment in an e-mail, saying, "We cut several scenes from Syriana that didn't jibe with what the director wanted." (Asked to clarify, Clooney said he meant the scene didn't jibe with what Soderbergh, the producer, wanted.) "I'll stand with Soderbergh when push comes to shove," he added. "I'm sure you can watch [the scenes] on the director's cut." Unfortunately, a director's cut of Syriana has not been released.

Section Eight was quietly shuttered in October 2006 (few in Hollywood mourned its demise), and Clooney immediately cofounded a new company, Smoke House Productions, with longtime friend Grant Heslov, who cowrote and produced Good Night, and Good Luck. Their upcoming feature, White Jazz, about the L.A. Police Department in the 1950s, has been delayed after unexpectedly losing its star actor—Clooney. He dumped the project in December, just weeks before filming was set to begin. (In response to rumors that he did so without informing director Joe Carnahan, Clooney writes, "I didn't tell him directly. [I] had a meeting with him the week before.")

Whatever the fate of White Jazz or any of the films on Clooney's slate, he will undoubtedly be around for the long haul. He is, after all, the Last Great Movie Star, and despite the grumbling, remains Hollywood's favorite son. At press time, Oscar nominations had yet to be announced, though Clooney had nabbed a handful of critics' awards. If the Academy does see fit to hand him another golden man this year, you can be sure his acceptance speech will be both glib and politically conscious, and his grin will be dazzling.







This article is from the March issue of Radar Magazine. For a risk-free issue, click here

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