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George Clooney's maxims: Work only with people you respect (like his Ocean's Eleven director, Steven Soderbergh).. And make sure you pullroff at least one killer prank on every film set. By Christine Spines "I'VE BROUGHT YOU HERE TO KILL you," George Clooney mutters as he pilots his car through a stretch of un-paved, unmarked California terrain. There is no hint of menace in his voice, just an echo of the barren moonscape of boulders and low-lying hills we're navigating, the kind of place where people are taken to die anonymously. Spotting a cluster of ramshackle adobe buildings, Clooney slams on the brakes, hops out of the car, and shouts, "This is it!" As he stands on a patch of hillside, surveying what looks to be a hardluck Mexican homestead, his eyes brighten; a grin sweeps over his face that seems to say, It just doesn't get any better than this. This is not a pretty place. More important, this place is neither poor nor Mexican-it's an abandoned movie set, But it's perfect for a bit of cinematic mayhem, and that makes the 4o-year-oldClooney exceedingly happy. He has just driven an hour and got lost six times en route to this sun-blistered edge of L.A.'s suburban sprawl to scout locations for a murder scene in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, his directorial debut. Written by Hollywood's resident absurdist, Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich), the black comedy is based on The Gong Show impresario Chuck Barris's real-or-imagined auto-biography, about his secret life as a CIA hit man.
"Look, Don King came here to die! " Clooney shouts, picking up a spiky tumbleweed. "Bring me the head of Don Kingl" Big laughs all around from .the producer, production designer.. and cinematographer,who have showed up to meet with him. Clooney can't wait to tell them that he just got commitments from Drew Barrymore and Julia Roberts to star in the movie. "Which role is Julia doing?" asks Newton Thomas Sigel, the cinematographer. "Hell. I'll let her have my role if she wants it," Clooney shoots back. Pause. "And I do mean let her have it." Clooney is an entertainer, one of a rare species who takes the job seriously without taking himself too seriously. He'll make an off color joke in front of a journalist. He'll fire off one that lands with a resounding thud. It doesn't really matter. What he won't do is drop the ball when the opportunity presents itself. As he stomps around in his black T~shirt, baggy khakis, and the grease-stained boots he stole from his wardrobe for The Perfect Storm, it's easy to forget that he's the movie star who drove up in thegun metal-gray BMW. With the build of a carpenter, Clooney looks like a guy who came here to do some hard work. An idea hits, and he sprints off toward the arches of the town hall. "We could go Sergio Leone on him," he says, sticking his head through a window, only to realize that the place is a two-dimensional facade. He spins around wearing his best dunce face. "It looked so nice from over there," he groans. ('Hollywood is always fooling me." The truth is, he's got it backward. Over the past three years, Clooney has quietly shed his image as ER's resident rake and established himself as a shrewd businessman and a dependable tastemaker among the ranks of the world's most sought- after leading men. Subverting Hollywood's culture of excess, he has become a bigger star by taking less money and smaller roles in a string of critically and commercially successful movies: Out o Sight, Three Kings, The Perfect Storm, and O Brother, WhereArt Thou? "The goal was to recognize how much money you need to live art incredibly comfortable life," he says. "1 don't want to stockpile money and have this list of really bad films at the end of it. You want to be at that charity retrospective when you're 70 and have it not be filled with crap movies." For a while there, when he was making such middlebrow star vehicles as The Peacemaker and Batman & Robin, he had good reason to be worried. When Clooney flogged himself mercilessly for derailing the Batman franchise, it seemed a bit self-indulgent. (In fact, he admits he was employing a strategy he learned from JFK's response to the Bay of Pigs debacle: A hasty mea culpa always gets the sympathy vote. ) But it was that brush with humiliating failure that freed him to approach his work like a guy diagnosed with a terminal disease; he now relishes each day on a movie set and tries not to let the little stuff bother him. "George is a unique human being,ln that he's happy with his life," says Lorenzo di Bonaventura, Warner Bros.' president of worldwide production. He's at peace with who he is and doesn't need more to validate it." A throwback to the golden era of Hollywood bon vivants, Clooney rails agaiRst the modern model of the self-serious mega-celebrity who fends off the outside world with a secret service of handlers and professional friends. What seems to thrill him most-perhaps more than the acting itself-is that he's finally in a position to get projects green-lighted and to reinsert a little enjoyment into the collective endeavor of moviemaking.
OCEAN'S ELEVEN PROVIDED THE PERFECT PLAYground in which to re-create that mythic sense of one- for-all-and-all-for-fun revelry. In this,story of an audacious Vegas casino helst, Clooney joins a Milky Way of stars, including Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Julia Roberts, Don Cheadle, and Andy Garcia. The 1960 caper picture on which it's loosely based epitomized the fantasy of freewheeling showbiz decadence, and there is no denying the voyeuristic delight in watching Rat Packers Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop pal around in their natural habitat. But the movie is riddled with plot holes and hamstrung by stiff acting and a cast of characters who seem to lose interest in their own scheme. Because the original was so blatantly flawed, director Steven Soderbergh (Erin Brockovich, Traffic) took on the project feeling that there was plenty of room for improvement, without trampIing on sacred ground. The story had undergone a radical reconception by Ted Griffin (Best Laid Plans), and Soderbergh was intrigued by the challenge of depicting the intricacies of male friendship within the context ofa glossy studio release. "It was the opportunity to combine my interest in character and story with an aesthetic that is traditionally associated with guy movies," Soderbergh says. "It's what I consider to be the masculine and feminine aesthetic. But if I had said that to Warners, 1,don't think they would have allowed me to do it." Clooney at first hated reinforcing the notion of himself as some kind of Rat Pack revivalist, an association that has stuck to him because of his own band of lifelong buddies, known as "the boys." But the actor, who had recently formed a production company, SectionEight, with Soderbergh on the Warners lot, was looking for a chance to work with his Out of Sight director again. "Steven passes on so many movies, so when he says, '1 know how to do it,' you pay attention," Clooney says. "And we also have a much better script than the original." Griffin's adaptation reimagines the lost genre of '60S men-on-a-mission star spectacles, like The Dirty Dozen and The Great Escape. "There is a certain ease and generosity and lack of posturing in the DNA of the movie that most windup-toy studio movies lack," Soderbergh says. "The tes-tosterone level is very low, and the men in this movie were not threatened by one another ." Problem is, that kind of egolessness is tough to come by in today's Hollywood.
The make-or-break moment came long before production began, when the prospect of multiple stars with $20 million price tags threatened to break the bank. In typical fashion, Clooney gamely cut his salary in half, which set the precedent for the rest of the cast to follow suit. "There was a feeling of participation, because you'll have some percentage of .the film in the back end, and we'll put it into a pot and split it up," Clooneysays. By democratizing the pay scale, the filmmakers also hold to weed out any potential divas or troublemakers. "We only wanted to have people who play nice and want to have fun," Clooney adds. "We're way into the life's-too-short theory." Finding takers did not turn out to be a problem. Tlie first call made was to Pitt, whQ had recently expressed interest in working with Soderbergh. When Pittsigned on immediately, Clooney briefly considered giving up the lead role of heist mastermind Danny Ocean. "Brad's a bigger star, and I was cognizant of being delicate with the egos involved,"Clooney says "But it seemed to me that I was really made to play Danny, because I look too old to play the other part. I'm only a couple of years older than that , fker, by the way, but Brad looks 25 and I look 45." Clooney enticed Roberts to play Ocean's estranged wife by issuing her a charming challenge: Resent a script with $20 attached to a note that read, "I hear you're making 20 a film now." Damon accepted I an offer to play the pickpocket without even reading the script. I Soderbergh recalls, "Matt just said, 'Tell me when to show up.' " The rest of the gang, which includes Cheadle, Carl Reiner,Casey Affleck, Scott Caan,Elliott Gould,Bernie Mac, and Edward Jemison, showed up in Las Vegas last February for six weeks of work, accompanied by a grueling around-the-clock bacchanal. Clooney set the camaraderie in motion by showing up with a set of 11 fire-engine red bicycles stenciled with the names of each gang member. And veteran producer Jerry Weintraub (Diner, The Karate Kid) used his deep Vegas connections, dating back to when he booked Sinatra's shows there, to set up the entire cast and crew at the Bellagio hotel and give the production unlimited access to the gambling pits for shooting. "It was the best time I ever had in my life," Clooney says. "We were only working about six hours a day. So that left a lot of time to drink or play golf or gamble and hang out with friends." The side-by-side villas at the Bellagio, where Clooney , Damon, Roberts, Pitt, and Weintraub stayed, became a kind of staging area for nightly bouts of bedroom-farce pranksterism. Weintraub, a jovial 64-Year-old who earned his partying credentials while skulking around Vegas with the original Rat Pack,became Clooney's target of choice. Some of the greatest hits include Saran-wrap-ping Weintraub's toilet ("When I came in to pee one night," the producer recalls, "it went allover!"); calling the hotel front desk, impersonating Weintraub, and ordering 5 A.M. wake-up calls ("Hello? I didn't leave any goddarnn fkingwake-up calls! Clooneyl") and covering the napping producer in M&M's. next page