George Clooney
Appearances
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
We are going with a story that says that the U.S.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
My father was an anchorman, and broadcast journalism was a big part of our lives growing up. I spent most of my life as a small child on the floor of WKRC newsroom watching my father put news shows together. He was the news director. He wrote the news.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
And Murrow and Cronkite were heroes of his because of the two probably great moments in broadcast journalism, which was Cronkite coming back from Vietnam and saying it doesn't work and Murrow taking on McCarthy because they changed policy overnight. And for that alone, he was a hero of my father's and therefore a hero of mine.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
In the actual story, and we researched everything. I had to treat this like a journalist. I talked to my father about this, and he said, look, if you get anything wrong, you'll be marginalized now. So we did it the old-fashioned way, which is every scene we double-sourced, either through books or through the real people, Joe and Shirley Worshper, Milo Radulovic, or Don Hewitt.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
so that we were very careful with the facts. Then we decided to do exactly what Moreau did in his show, which is use McCarthy in his own words, so that, again, you couldn't have someone say, oh, we were making him look too much like a buffoon or too arch. We thought best to let him hang himself.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Well, that's sort of the beauty of it. It's, in a way, the other one of those versions would be Kennedy-Nixon debate, you know, where the simple truth was McCarthy was pretty good at a... 30-second sound bite where he could yell and scare people and talk about death and bombs and things like that.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
But he wasn't handsome, and he certainly wasn't proficient at the new art of television, and Murrow was the best. So that when he demanded equal time, which was 28 minutes and 28 seconds to do his rebuttal, Um, he, he holds up for about a minute and then he's also pretty drunk. He slurs and drags on and is, it's one of the, if you see the whole half an hour rebuttal. Oh yeah. Very drunk.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Um, when you see the rebuttal, it's embarrassing. I mean, it's, it's, it's the most unprofessional thing you've ever seen. So it was an interesting, the moment that that happened was when they first knew they had him. They were, because the simple truth is, and the funniest thing is, Murrow going after McCarthy is not what hurt McCarthy.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
McCarthy turning around and accusing Murrow of being a traitor is what hurt McCarthy because everyone knew that Murrow was the guy at the top of those buildings during the London Blitz. We knew he was a hero. And so the minute you saw those methods when he turns around and calls Murrow the cleverest of the jackal pack of communists, everybody knew that wasn't true.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Well, I think The interesting thing to me was even in the film, the score I wanted to be silence. Silence was how I would score the film. And the way you do that is by spending time on people's faces because that's how you can understand suspense.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I know when you'd see films like Fail Safe or 12 Angry Men, there would be tension came out of these close-ups of people's faces and watching, putting them in a difficult situation and watching them deal with it. Uh, and watching it play on their face as opposed to hearing them talk about it. Now we talk about everything. Then guys didn't talk about anything.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Um, so when, so there was that sort of bravery of, you know, lighting a cigarette and looking at each other and going, all right, Butch, see you, see you later, Sundance kind of feeling. Uh, And I love that. It's a very masculine, probably not great thing to do, but it is very romantic in a way, you know, to watch a couple of people watching Patty Clarkson and Robert Downey Jr.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
just looking at each other when they know they've got McCarthy. There's something beautiful about that. It's simple.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Well, no, you know, look, if you're going to stick your head out and stick your neck out, you're going to have to take some hits. I don't think anybody in their life has ever accomplished anything like that they would be proud of later if they didn't take some criticism for it. Sometimes that criticism is right.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I would be disturbed if I wasn't, 20 years from now, able to point back at a point in time and say, this is where I stood and what I believed in, which I think will end up proving to be pretty correct. The strangest thing to me is that the word liberal is a bad word. I'm going to keep saying it and saying it and saying it as often as I can.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I don't know where we've stood on the wrong side of social issues. Now, I have many friends who are conservatives, so I'm not knocking conservatives. I have a lot of very good friends who are conservatives. But to have us losing the moral argument when we were the ones who said that women should be allowed to vote and that blacks should be allowed to vote and sit in the front of the bus –
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
We're the ones who said Vietnam was a mistake. You go down the list of the social issues over a long period of time. We haven't stood on the wrong side of those issues. So I don't understand how we lose the moral argument. I think we're bad at it, us liberals. I think we're pretty weak at it right now.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
No, no, not really. My father's, I think one of his great qualities is that integrity has been sort of the thing that has always lasted and has lasted forever. Well into his 70s. He's been the same guy. It's an interesting thing. It's more difficult being the child of someone with that kind of integrity than – I'm now thrilled.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
But when you're a kid and you're in a state that's still dealing with its own problems with bigotry – we'd be out at dinner and you'd hear someone say, you know, well, that's about those people knowing that they were talking about blacks, you know. And my sister and I knew that my dad was going to make a scene and walk out. So we would eat as fast as we could.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
We'd start to eat quick as my father was going to make a scene. And I remember as a kid always wishing that maybe there was just one time he just pretended not to hear it.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Oh, he'd get up and say, you know, you're an idiot and how could you say something like that? And, you know, are you from the 1500s? And, you know, he would make a big scene. And I at times wished that he hadn't. Now I couldn't be more proud that he did.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
And he taught me those same lessons, which are that every time you let that go, every time you don't hear that or you purposefully ignore it just to make things easier for yourself, you are doing a disservice. And so that's why you have to fight those fights.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I worked it for years. That's how you made your money in the summer when you're a kid. You start by topping it and then you're chopping it and cutting it and housing it and stripping it later. You can make three and a half bucks an hour, so you can make some pretty decent money. But you don't think of those consequences of tobacco at that point.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I had nine great aunts and uncles, all brothers and sisters. Six of them died of lung cancer or emphysema. Both my grandparents died of it. I'm not a smoker. I don't you know, I was concerned with how romantic we made smoking look in the film. And so I put that commercial in just to show how some of the lies that were perpetrated back then about how smoking was actually good for you.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
We were the only set that had people outside the soundstage not smoking.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
No, we, every actor that we hired, I talked to and literally we brought him in and said, smoke, because, uh, if you can't smoke, you can't smoke. It doesn't look right if you, if you're faking it. And, uh, and we needed people who could smoke, um, because all these guys died of lung cancer. You know, most of them did. Uh, it was a, it was a pretty brutal time.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
No, but I was one of those weird kids, you know, I was listening to... It wasn't my generation either. No, that's right. Well, I was listening to Led Zeppelin and I was listening to Nat Cole. You know, I had a very varied growing up because I was on the road with, you know, with them a lot or I was always exposed to... Were you on the road with Rosemary Clinton?
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
When I was 20, I was Rosemary's driver.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
So I was around that kind of music a lot. So I got to appreciate Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer. I had a real appreciation of those guys. Sinatra and Nat King Cole especially and Rosemary. And Rosemary was having her comeback at that point. And her comeback was something rather spectacular because she became the singer's singer. Singers adored her and would show up.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
So there was a great pride in being around her. So I was really exposed to that kind of music. The fun part for me was in putting this band together, Peter Martin, the pianist, works with Diane, but the rest of the guys all played on Rosemary's albums. And it was fun because I got to pick the music and we wrote one of the scenes around How High the Moon.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
But the rest of the stuff, you know, the rest of the music was fun because I got to sit down with Alan and go, let's talk about music that we really loved and how to play it and how to do it. And so it was about simplifying things because now everybody likes to show off. I remember asking Rosemary why she's a better singer at 70 than she was at 21.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Because she couldn't hold the notes the way she could. She couldn't hit the notes the way. And she said, because I don't have to prove I can sing anymore. And I thought that was a good acting lesson, you know, was not having to show off anymore.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
You see her taking songs that are normally sort of up-tempo, like Don't Fence Me In, and bringing it down to like a quarter of the speed and singing Straighten Up and Fly Right. It's amazing.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
I didn't really know whether I had any talent or not. I knew that I was, for the first time in my life, engaged, and I hadn't been. I was one of those guys who was pretty good at almost anything I tried right away, anything I wanted to do. I could pick it up pretty quickly, sports, almost any sport. But never great at anything.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
And then I found acting and I thought, well, this is something that at the very least I'm not going to be bored by. And I know that there is no moment that you go, wow, I've finally done it. You're never going to be satisfied by it because it's a constant growing process. And I got into an acting class pretty quickly and I started working with working actors.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
And what you realized was you'd be doing a scene and you'd be holding your own with someone who's making a very good living acting. You'd realize that there's a possibility that you can actually do this for a living.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
It's an unusual experience because it's not like being a movie star. You haven't paid 10 bucks and you're 30 feet high and you've made it a date. You've been in their homes every Thursday, so... The truth is I'm a product of a great amount of luck. I create some of that luck because I did 13 pilots and I did eight television series before that.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
But the simple truth is had I done that exact same show and that exact same role and we were on Friday night instead of Thursday night at 10, I don't have a film career and I'm not sitting here with you. It requires that kind of luck. The show would never have been as popular on a Friday night as it was on a Thursday night.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
Well, it's a funny thing. There isn't a real fame school that you can go to and learn, you know. I had probably, there's, I've met many people better prepared for it because I had the great vision of watching, especially with Rosemary, how big you can get and how quickly it can be taken away.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
And it's not like Rosemary became less of a singer in that period of time, which showed me that it has very little to do with you. And that was an important thing to learn, an important thing to understand, which I did. But the things that you aren't prepared for are the tradeoffs. No one wants to hear you complain about them, so you don't complain about them.
Fresh Air
Terry Gross Remembers Her Late Husband, Francis Davis
But I would say that the significant loss of privacy is interesting.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy's methods to keep silent.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
The fun part about this is we get to do a play about a subject matter that's very close to our hearts, which is about everything that you guys all do, which is telling the truth and holding truth to power. And so it's a play we're very excited to do. It's not a civics lesson, it's an entertainment.
Global News Podcast
China says it won't bow to pressure from Trump tariffs
The fun part about this is we get to do a play about a subject matter that's very close to our hearts, which is telling the truth and holding truth to power.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Clooney Lectures About Journalism, and Dems Lean on Bernie and AOC, with Ben Shapiro and Stephen A. Smith | Ep. 1033
When the other three estates fail, when the judiciary and the executive and the legislative branches fail us, the fourth estate has to succeed. Has to succeed. As 60 Minutes is here right now on our first day. ABC has just settled a lawsuit with the Trump administration. Journalism and telling truth to power has to be waged like war is waged. It doesn't just happen accidentally.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Clooney Lectures About Journalism, and Dems Lean on Bernie and AOC, with Ben Shapiro and Stephen A. Smith | Ep. 1033
You know, it takes people saying, we're going to do these stories, and you're going to have to come after us. And that's the way it is.
The Megyn Kelly Show
Clooney Lectures About Journalism, and Dems Lean on Bernie and AOC, with Ben Shapiro and Stephen A. Smith | Ep. 1033
Stars and stripes?
The Megyn Kelly Show
Clooney Lectures About Journalism, and Dems Lean on Bernie and AOC, with Ben Shapiro and Stephen A. Smith | Ep. 1033
make it kind of easy i was raised to tell the truth i had seen the president up close for this fundraiser and i was surprised and so i feel as if there was a lot of profiles and cowardice in my party through all of that and i was not proud of that and i also believed i had to tell the truth