Nick Clooney is very proud of his son George's latest film, "Good Night and Good
Luck." 

By JEFF SIMON 
Arts Editor

George Clooney, director of "Good Night and Good Luck," has spoken about his father Nick
and his experiences as a newsman in public discussions of the film, which opens in local
theaters Friday. 
 
"That's quite a remarkable and courageous film up there," says Nick Clooney about his son
George's "Good Night and Good Luck," the much-acclaimed black and white film about the
epochal conflict between Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy. 

One might expect a proud father to say that. What one wouldn't expect is for the entire
movie and media world to agree with him. Whatever the final five films nominated for a Best
Picture Oscar turn out to be, "Good Night and Good Luck" is, by unanimous acclaim, one of
the truly remarkable films of 2005. (It opens in Buffalo on Friday.) 

And everywhere its creator and co-star has gone to talk up the film, he has freely
admitted that the film's genesis is being a TV journalist's son. 

Along with Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" then - whose creator said he wanted to
make a World War II film his father and other veterans could recognize - "Good Night and
Good Luck" may be one of American movies' great expressions of filial devotion to a
father. 

Even so, his father - who confesses that neither father nor son are good at bestowing
compliments on one another - says: "It's been difficult for me to tell him how important a
film I think this is. All I can tell him is "George, I finally recognize a newsroom on the
screen.' " 

The constant battles of all TV newsrooms - with their career-ending probabilities and
all-too-predictable content (news vs. entertainment) - are, says Nick Clooney, "what make
this film important. If nothing else, what the film does is this: those guys who are going
to get fired and end up selling insurance and used cars because they can't do what they
want to do, those people are going to be able to go to this and say, "You know what? I was
right to do this. I was right. It IS important. It really matters.' " 

Despite his son's constant allusions in all media to growing up in the home of a TV anchor
and news director, Nick Clooney has not exactly had much of a chance to talk before about
the great American movie he grandfathered. Nor, since its release, has he been tapped to
talk about the son who has - somewhat astonishingly - transformed himself from heartthrob
actor into a massive force for cinematic idealism and quality in America. 

So, as Nick Clooney finished a lunch of some of his wife Nina's homemade vegetable soup,
he virtually exploded on the phone with exceptional eloquence about his son's film and what
the rest of us are privileged to see as Clooney family values. What the world sees in
"Good Night and Good Luck" is, it seems, what nourished a young George Clooney at dinner
with his family. 

We, in Buffalo, have a special relationship with Nick Clooney. For a mere three months and
change in 1994, Nick Clooney - as a result of a fluke of finance and a dispute in Channel 2
ownership - anchored Channel 2 news and proved to be the last, best hope of local TV news,
an apparition of genuine "class" in a profession that doesn't know that the mere use of
the word is a virtual confession of its absence. (It is not a word that Nick Clooney uses.)


We had never seen his like before. Nor have we seen it since. Clooney - who will be 72
this winter - has had a bumpy and varied career since. He has introduced movies on AMC,
written a book and launched an unsuccessful bid for Congress. (Asked if the family's
interest in politics is over, he pointedly says only that he is; he refuses to speak for
his son.) 

With homemade vegetable soup in his belly on a nippy fall day, he was immensely articulate
about his son's superb movie, the values it advocates, and the family life it sprang from.

On George Clooney's constant mention of his father and his father's experiences in every
public discussion of "Good Night and Good Luck." 

"He's saying that because he likes me. I appreciate that. I must demure somewhat here.
Certainly he was around journalism all his life. We talked about Murrow and Elmer Davis and
William Shirer. We did that just as much as we talked about sports and movies and all
the other things we do around the dinner table. But I must tell you that there are a lot
of filmmakers and people in other professions who also were the sons and daughters of
people in this (the news) business. Something clicked with him; something about that
seemed to matter. I sense - although I've never asked him this - that he looked around and
had the deep concerns that I have had about the direction in which news seems to be
following the line of least resistance regularly. 

"I think he was very put off by that - angered, even outraged I think. If something that
happened when he was young sparked the kind of thing that would lead to what this film is,
I'm very glad. But that's one-tenth of the passion that went into it and that I saw on that
screen." 

On his son's contention that his father was fighting in 1974 the same battles Murrow
fought in 1954. 

"The fights I was having were tiny fights compared to the pressure that was on Murrow. Or
was on (Walter) Cronkite when he came back from the Tet Offensive in 1968 and stood up -
when we didn't even know he had legs - against the war. I can't even imagine the pressure
that was on those two men at those two moments. 

"What would happen to us is what happened in your newsroom, what would happen in every
newsroom around the country. I would find myself battling the encroachment of entertainment
on news, the complete muddying of the lie. It's a bright line. It's not at
all hard to make that line. "(As an example) I was out in Los Angeles. I mention this
because it became a final moment in my separation from KNBC News (in 1986). I had gotten a
shooter (photographer) and gone down and covered a drive-by shooting in South Central L.A.

It was one of those collateral damage things where a 12-year-old girl had gotten pumped in
the stomach twice and died the hard way just a few minutes before we got there. It was a
very tough story. And very tough to get any information. You go up to the door and it feels
dangerous, whether it is or not. 

"We got the story. We came back. And the executive producer called and said "I understand
you got something down in South Central. And it was gang-related.' I said "yeah.' He said
"Ah perfect. I've called the fellows on "Hill Street Blues." You know the actor - he's
done a lot of research. He's done a lot of gang stories on "Hill Street Blues." You'll
bring him in and you'll do a piece on what the gang mentality is.' 

"I'd finally had it. So I said "well, you can do that but you're going to have to get
somebody else to do the interview and you're going to have to get somebody else to
introduce it. What you don't understand about the little girl I just saw put in the
ambulance down there is that that wasn't make up. She's not going to get up. She's not
going to do another part. This is not entertainment. Entertainment is great but it has
nothing to do with what we do for a living. If you want me to call a real psychologist -
someone who's really been down there and gotten his hands dirty dealing with gangs - great,
I'll go find you one.' 

"That became a cause celebre in the second and third floor above me - that I was just too
much of a pain in the ass to be tolerated. We had had these kinds of things regularly . . .
You'd fight these battles every day. It's happening in your newsroom. It's happening in
thousands of newsrooms every day - 12, 15 hundred newsrooms all over the country every
day." 

On the effect such battles and his frequent migrations around the country had on his
family. 

"I went to 13 schools growing up. It was the Depression. Like they used to say, you moved
when the rent came due. 

"I always felt support from my family (when he moved or his job was threatened). Before
there were big changes, we would have family meetings and talk about it. We would talk
about the ups and downs . . . It could not have been very easy for the kids. Every time
there would be something in the paper about what a lame anchor this guy is - they were
very young then - it would hurt them. Because they would be going to school and they would
be beaten up in the hall. 

"I hope they found it an interesting childhood. I know it was painful. George and (his
sister) Ada are so grounded, both of them (growing up in a small Kentucky town). We wanted
them to know there were really good people - people just as smart as they and just as
honest and all the rest of it." 

On his unique situation as a journalist in having two immediate family members - his
sister Rosemary (whose "50's success was gigantic) and his son George - both experience
immense fame and the love of a nationwide audience. And the influence of Rosemary's
experience on his son's. 

"Rosemary was sort of our basic training for that meteoric kind of fame. It was Rosemary
slaying all the dragons for us. Nobody in the family had ever had anything like that before
Rosemary. We were all perfectly nice people and hard-working. We had our usual quotient of
drunks and horse thieves and successful people and great people - like every other family
in the world - but we never had worldwide or even nationwide or even statewide renown. The
most famous person in our family was Papa Clooney, who was the mayor of Maysville, Ky. That
was hot stuff . . . 

"This enormous thing happened to Rosemary and it left us totally bewildered. We had people
knocking on our doors, people we'd known all our lives looking at us differently. And
relatives looking at us as if something odd had happened to us . . . Then there was the
other side, the darker side which was the kind of people who would just make things
up(about her). And we didn't handle it well. None of us - Rosemary didn't and none of the
rest of us did either. "It was a fascinating and bumpy road. All of a sudden she was
searing across the firmament. Our way of dealing with it was to think of her -
Rosemaryclooney, all one word - as a separate person from our sister. We got through it
well, eventually. 

What he might know about fame that the rest of us don't. 

"You know it. You know what is anomalous about fame. What you don't is feel it. (Huge
fame) takes all of the things you always believed and always felt and takes them to the
rawest moment, to the worst and most pressurized moment they could be, and then you see
how they function. Can you hold on to the thing you believed when the pressure is on you?
I'm talking about friends, honesty, truth-telling. Can you do that when the pressure is
really on - not just the pressure of Aunt Jean but the pressure of a million bucks? It is
very, very difficult for us outside that cocoon to understand what that pressure is. I got
close to it but even I don't understand how Rosemary was dealing with that - or how George
deals with that at this moment. 

"I look at the result and say "gee, they did all right. They stayed centered. They stayed
the person that they were.' " 

About the revelations of his universally revered sister's drug addictions in her
autobiography and how the family handled it. 

"We'd talk about it, of course. Rosemary would come to our house and be in the throes of
some of these problems. (My wife) Nina would sleep on the floor one night beside her to
make sure she would continue to breathe through the night. The next night I'd sleep on the
floor beside her . . . We'd try to find the stash (of drugs) wherever it was. And flush it
down the john. Our father had been an alcoholic so we recognized some of the things in that
syndrome." 

On his all-too-brief stay in Buffalo. 

"When I was walking around town talking to people, I fell in love with the town. I fell in
love with those folks. These were the survivors. All the folks who, for whatever reason,
couldn't handle the fact that the good old days were gone, they had left. They were
somewhere else. They were in Florida. Or they were in California. The ones who were left
were the raw-boned real people . . . It was like New York City without the accent. They
would tell you the truth. You asked them a question. And they would come back at you with
a declarative sentence. It was great stuff. 

"It really became home in a big hurry to the point where we missed it very much when we
left."