December 22, 2002
NEW YORK TIMES
Man With a Mission: Get the Film Made
By Anne Thompson
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For four years, George Clooney waited to play Jim Byrd, the Zen-cool agent who recruits a fast-living television producer for the C.I.A. in the film version of Chuck Barris's bizarre 1984 memoir, "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind: An Unauthorized Biography."

With its claim that his high-profile career as the instigator of television tripe like "The Gong Show" and "The Dating Game" had masked an undercover job as a government assassin, Mr. Barris's wacky, James-Bond-in-Hollywood account of sex, murder and intrigue seemed ripe for the movies. Mr. Clooney had fallen in love with a script written by Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich," "Adaptation"), and he clung to the role of Byrd as the project passed from hand to hand.

"It was as good an acting part as I'd had," he said recently. "The drag was, I watched the script change with different actors and directors attached."
Bryan Singer, Sam Mendes and Curtis Hanson were among the would-be directors; Sean Penn, Mike Myers and Johnny Depp were among the possible Chucks. "Five times it had the green light, five times it fell apart," Mr. Barris said.

He had been awaiting a movie version of his story even longer than Mr. Clooney had - since the 1980's, when Columbia Pictures was ready to film the book with Jim McBride ("The Big Easy") as director. But the project never got off the ground, Mr. McBride said, because he couldn't find a star willing to play Barris. "His reputation on TV was outrageous and vulgar," Mr. McBride said. The very idea of playing him "so offended Richard Dreyfuss that he wouldn't even read the script."

"Confessions of a Dangerous Mind," the film version of Mr. Barris's book, finally opens on Dec. 31 in New York and Los Angeles. And it isn't because a big star was persuaded to play the leading role. It isn't because the current popularity of "reality" television has burnished Mr. Barris's reputation. It's because Mr. Clooney decided to direct it, and to stock it with enough other big names to make its quirky story viable in the marketplace. Julia Roberts, as a bad-to-the-bone Mata Hari, and Drew Barrymore, as a marijuana-smoking hippie, play the two women sparring for Barris's affection, and Matt Damon and Brad Pitt appear in cameos as "Dating Game" contestants.

Even with such stars, and with the admired but little-known Sam Rockwell playing Barris, the movie's box-office appeal is far from assured. A mixture of noir thriller, dark comedy and raucous satire, "Confessions" would be a risky undertaking for any director. Mr. Clooney was a first-timer. But he dived into the enterprise with characteristic brio, creating an exuberant tour through the frenzied mind of Chuck Barris and through three decades of American show business.

Recounting the history of his involvement in an interview at his Laurel Canyon home, a low-slung mock-Tudor tucked into a hillside, Mr. Clooney explained how he had ended up directing: "I didn't wake up and say I wanted to be a director. I wanted to be involved in getting the movie made, because I thought the script was that good. And it was starting to look as though it wasn't going to happen. I also felt, if I was ever going to direct, it had better be with the best screenplay I'd ever read."

Like a kid with a new train set, Mr. Clooney was bursting with enthusiasm as he described his work on the movie. "I knew I could create shots, steal from my favorite directors and work with actors," he said. He bounded upstairs to fetch evidence: a fat loose-leaf binder of black-and-white cartoon storyboards for every shot in the movie, which is jammed with complex cinematic feats. "The knock on me will be that it's over-directed," he said.

Ms. Barrymore and Mr. Rockwell had no such knocks. Ms. Barrymore was interested in being in the film even before Mr. Clooney became the director, she said in a telephone interview last week. "When George got involved, I knew it would get made the way it was supposed to get made, and I wanted to be a part of it more than ever. George is an amazing actors' director."

Mr. Rockwell compared Mr. Clooney on the set to the captain of a ship. "You jump off the bridge for George," he said. An actor's actor whose supporting performances in "Charlie's Angels," "The Heist" and "The Green Mile" won him a fair amount of attention, Mr. Rockwell said he was still recovering from the emotional and physical toll of playing Barris. "You have to do comedy and drama and mimic the person," he said. "There was a lot of pressure on me and George."

The first shot on the first day, Mr. Clooney said, was one in which Mr. Rockwell had to stand naked in front of a television set in a hotel room. "It would be my worst nightmare," Mr. Clooney said, to spend his first day of work standing naked in front of strangers. But Mr. Rockwell was fine; it was Mr. Clooney who felt awkward. "I was really self-conscious," he said. "I was nervous about just saying things like `Action!' and `Cut!' But also, I was overly prepared. This movie required leadership, standing up in the trenches and saying, `We can do this thing!' and not ever allowing a word of doubt to come in."

Doubts, of course, are what Mr. Barris, 70, had to contend with from the moment his book was published. Now writing a sequel, "Bad Grass Never Dies," he deflected the inevitable questions about the accuracy of his memoirs by saying, "There are areas of the C.I.A. that I just won't talk about." Mr. McBride's take on the material he had hoped to direct in the 80's is that "the book never made his spying so outrageous that it wasn't half-plausible."

He added, "You kept asking yourself, `Could this possibly have happened?' "

In acting the role, Mr. Rockwell said, "I had to do it as if it were real." But he has his doubts: "I think the main thing about Chuck is, he wants respect. Being an assassin, having an alter ego, is about him finding a way to respect himself."

For his part, Mr. Clooney said he didn't care whether Mr. Barris's book is true. "Chuck is a gentle soul who is exorcising demons," he said. "I don't want to know the facts, I just want to tell the story."

It was Harvey Weinstein, the co-chairman of Miramax Films, who allowed him to do so. At the 11th hour, Mr. Weinstein agreed to back the producer Andrew Lazar, who had optioned the film rights in 1997. Mr. Weinstein flew to Las Vegas for a four-hour meeting with Mr. Clooney at the Bellagio Hotel. "He talked about his vision for the movie," Mr. Weinstein said. "He's untested, but he knows how to surround himself. We went on gut instinct." Gut instinct and shrewd bargaining. "What distinguishes George," said Mr. Weinstein, "is that he understands the economics of moviemaking. He's the first guy to cut his salary."

In fact, Mr. Clooney has made salary reform something of a mission: as he did on "Ocean's Eleven," he persuaded co-stars like Ms. Roberts to lower their asking price as well. It's about being able to gamble on riskier productions by casting several stars rather than one. With his producing partner, Steven Soderbergh, Mr. Clooney made "Ocean's Eleven" and "Solaris"; their company, Section Eight, also helped make "Insomnia," "Far From Heaven" and "Welcome to Collinwood." The theory is that it's smarter to finance and market a $30 million movie with three stars than a $40 million movie with only one. "If you do that," Mr. Clooney said, "you're free to try and pick the best films possible. When you're a star who green-lights a picture, you start having responsibility for what kind of pictures get made. I want to be in movies I'm proud of."

Mr. Lazar, the producer, said that Mr. Clooney had to do more than drop his salary before the final deal was struck, particularly since Mr. Weinstein was holding out for a big star to play Barris and Mr. Clooney's choice was Mr. Rockwell, with whom he had acted in "Welcome to Collinwood." "George jumped through a lot of hoops for Harvey," Mr. Lazar said. To get to cast Mr. Rockwell, Mr. Clooney had to promise to make another movie for Mr. Weinstein and do a cameo in the next "Spy Kids" sequel - until he landed Ms. Roberts and Ms. Barrymore.

Two days after he wrapped "Confessions," in April, he started shooting "Solaris." He worked with the editor of "Confessions" during his breaks and into the night (he gets by on four or five hours of sleep). The day after "Solaris" wrapped, he began his second film for the Coen brothers, the black comedy "Intolerable Cruelty." "You just get through it and focus on the one day ahead," he said. "If you think about a week, it'll kill you."
So will he direct again? "I'm hooked," he said. "I'm having the time of my life."

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