Just Another Manic ‘Day’

George Clooney has a young woman clinging to his thigh and she won’t let go.

So what else is new?

This time, however, instead of an adoring fan, she’s his up-and-coming co-star in Michael Hoffman’s new movie, “One Fine Day.”

Yes, 8-year-old Mae Whitman, who plays the only daughter to Clooney’s single parent, has a bit of a crush on the dreamy TV actor who’s quickly crossing over to the big screen, having starred in Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn” and soon to fill Val Kilmer’s vacated Batsuit.

“Some people call him George Clooney, but I call him an ugly disgusting blob,” says Whitman, perhaps protesting too much. “Those girls who scream at him are so weird.”

Today, there are hundreds of those screaming girls crowding the Fifth Avenue sidewalk and steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to glimpse Clooney shooing Whitman into Rockefeller Center on a cold, wet weekend.

Of course, half of the eager onlookers craning their necks and pushing against the yellow police tape are men, out to catch a glimpse of Michelle Pfeiffer, who co-stars with Clooney as a career mom juggling work and family. The single parents, both strapped for this hectic day with their children, are forced to help each other out, and in the process they fall in love.

“The modern definition of heroism is simply surviving the day as a working mother,” says producer Lynda Obst (“Sleepless in Seattle”). She came up with “One Fine Day’s” premise several years ago during a particularly stressful day that included a PTA meeting for her son (now 17) in addition to critical meetings at work. “We’re all living this enormous conflict, being the parents we want to be and the professionals we want to be. And it’s not just the psychological and emotional conflict--it’s physically accomplishing the logistics of what has to be done today that’s impossible.”

It was a long way, however, from Obst’s nightmare day to movie magic. Between the scheduling conflicts (Clooney crammed production of this movie and DreamWorks’ first film, “Peacemaker,” into a hiatus from his role as “ER” pediatrician Doug Ross; Pfeiffer’s on-screen son, 7-year-old Alex Linz, had to work around a grueling McDonald’s contract), the weather (which had to remain overcast for continuity), Clooney’s allergies and a broken eye socket (suffered during a pickup basketball game), disgruntled Upper West Side residents and the vast challenge of shooting at 44 Manhattan locations (complete with bomb threats), production mirrored the harried heart of the movie.

Coming off his well-reviewed “Restoration,” along with the impending birth of his second child, Hoffman, the movie’s director, was immediately attracted to the script. “I’ve read lots of romantic comedies, and the trap most fall into is that they feel sort of soft and mushy,” he says. “I like this movie because these people don’t get along most of the time. They’re tough on each other and by the end you somehow respect and identify with them. You don’t feel you’ve been manipulated into it.”

Hoffman watched “Adam’s Rib,” “Pat and Mike,” “Bringing Up Baby” and “The Front Page” before filming. He and his director of photography, Oliver Stapleton (“Restoration”), even tried to replicate the feel of the old black-and-white studio films with theatrical lighting. “The goal was to subtract the modern world,” Hoffman says.

Over the course of one day, Pfeiffer’s character, Mel, has an important architecture presentation and a crucial peewee soccer game to get to. Clooney’s character, Jack Taylor, a Daily News columnist who is breaking a story about corruption in the mayor’s office, has to get to a skittish source. A crazy day gets crazier when Jack’s bungling forces the kids to miss their field trip on the Circle Line cruise around Manhattan.

In the script’s original draft (by Terrel Seltzer, titled “Momma Said”), however, Clooney’s character didn’t even exist. Obst hooked up with Michelle Pfeiffer’s development company, Via Rosa, and Kate Guinzburg, Pfeiffer’s producing partner, brought in Ellen Simon (“Moonlight and Valentino”) to do a complete rewrite.

“By the second draft, we realized there are men in the world and that we were being incredible sexists,” says Obst of the film, due in theaters on Valentine’s Day. “In fact, there are plenty of divorced, single working fathers going through the exact same thing.”

When Tom Cruise and Kevin Costner passed on the project, no one could agree on a male lead to play opposite Pfeiffer--until they met Clooney (who, incidentally, dated Dedee Pfeiffer, the actress’ sister, more than a decade ago). “He’s got a great comic sense and he’s sexy,” Hoffman says. “For some reason, that’s a very, very rare combination. But he’s also got a lonely quality I really thought was important in the character. His boyishness is critical to irritate and loosen up Michelle’s character over the course of the movie.”

Between scenes on location at the Natural History Museum, Clooney relaxes, feet up, in his trailer nearby. Dressed in his reporter’s khakis and brown Hush Puppies, he pops green grapes into his mouth as he speaks in laid-back, just-between-you-and-me tones. He likes Jack, even though the every-other-weekend dad feeds his daughter s’mores for breakfast and brings her to his therapy appointment.

“Jack’s a bit of an idiot. He’s a very good reporter,” says Clooney, whose father, television personality Nick Clooney, also writes a syndicated column for the Cincinnati Post. “I grew up with those guys, I know them. They always have some sort of food stains on their coats--they’re great at one thing and lousy at everything else.”

And though he isn’t too good at being a father, Jack is good with kids--just like Clooney. “I get along with kids really well,” says the small-screen pediatrician. “I always talk to them as adults, so they gravitate toward me. My hero growing up was Brian Keith on ‘Family Affair’--Uncle Bill--he was always going, ‘Oh hell. Don’t do that.’ There’s some of that in Jack.”

Nonetheless, Clooney has a natural protective instinct where kids are concerned. In one scene, Whitman’s character breaks into tears in an antique store where she finds kittens she wants to keep. As Whitman worked herself into the right emotional state, Clooney shielded her from the camera, then signaled the director when she was ready.

“The first time Mae did the scene, tears were pouring down her face,” Clooney marvels. “I’m going, ‘Jesus, she’s great.’ And then the director says it might be a little too much. So her coach says, ‘Mae, you want to cry, but you want to cry about 30% less.’ She goes, ‘30%? OK.’ And by God, she cried 30% less--which made me sob.”

In keeping with the theme of the movie, children of the cast and crew were welcomed on the set. On big “baby days” as many as 20 babies would show up, each with his or her own nanny. But the day-care atmosphere didn’t sway Clooney, once divorced and an avowed bachelor, toward wanting kids.

“It had just the opposite effect,” he says, with an easy Doug Ross laugh. “It makes me think, ‘Thank God I don’t have kids.’ I’m a fun uncle. I get all the fun because they only see me once in a while. Then I come into the trailer, sit down here and their parents have to take them home and discipline them and do all the things I don’t want to be responsible for.”

Though Clooney was drawn to the material despite the fact he would be working yet again withchildren, for Pfeiffer the familiar subject matter was the appeal. “The movie came from a place I could completely relate to,” says the actress, who in an uncharacteristic turn, agreed to make the movie immediately upon reading the script.

“Ninety percent of what my friends and I talk about is what happened with our kids today or what they said or did. Now we have this catch phrase--I’ll say, ‘Well, I had One Fine Day today.’ The movie is about having all you can handle with kids and career and trying to find a new relationship in the middle of it. Mel has this desperate need to control the situation and refuses to delegate anything.”

For Pfeiffer, who has two children, Claudia Rose, 3, and John Henry, who will be 2 in August, Mel’s struggles are very real. “I have issues with control--I have a hard time delegating. It’s something I’ve made a conscious effort to learn to do. Actually, I was forced into it when I had kids,” says Pfeiffer, who has drawn distinct lines for herself--like limiting location shoots, keeping her work days to under 12 hours and getting home to put her kids to bed every night.

But it didn’t always work the way she planned it. For example, shooting ran late during a climactic scene in which she tells off her boss. As a result, she missed bedtime. “In the scene, I finally stand up and say, ‘Guys I’m out of here. I may get fired, but I want my kid to know he means more to me.’ It was a 15-hour day, and I kept thinking, ‘Isn’t this ironic? The one day I give this speech in the movie. . . .’ I was so pissed.”

The hardest thing she’s found about being both a movie star and a mother is the inability to do it all. “I have a lot of guilt working mothers feel--not being home with my kids. It’s a constant juggling act: You have to be open to shifting the balance and readjusting all the time, and for a control freak that’s quite a difficult task.”

That particular aspect of her personality worked well for Mel, who is self-sufficient to the point of seeming tough and even foreign to men, especially to Jack.

In another scene at Rockefeller Center, Pfeiffer, dressed in a business suit and rain boots, has drawn even more onlookers, who are blocking foot traffic along the sidewalk. Late and rushing to her office, she stops abruptly at the large revolving doors to let a man through first, simply because she won’t accept help from anyone.

“You first,” the man says.

“No, you first,” retorts Mel, gesturing gallantly, if brusquely, to the door.

“I insist,” the man says.

“I insist more.”

He proceeds, baffled.

According to Guinzburg, Pfeiffer’s producing partner of five years, the actress’ choice to play Mel was telling. “I think everyone who read the script related to Mel on some level, even if they didn’t have children. It’s everywoman, and I think for Michelle to play everywoman is great for her because she usually plays a more rarefied kind of character. In a funny way, getting into real extreme characters like she’s done in the past is almost easier than playing closer to yourself. This is a braver choice to make.”

Though the two lead actors have significantly different personalities and ways of working--Pfeiffer is internal and somewhat shy while Clooney is physical and gregarious--they worked well together on- and off-camera.

For Clooney, working with Pfeiffer was a constant acting lesson. “She would take seemingly straightforward scenes and take them to a completely different level,” Clooney says, recalling one on-screen argument they have in which she unexpectedly welled up with tears and added an unscripted element of fragility to the scene. “I’m thinking, ‘Uh-oh, I’m getting my hat handed to me here.’ You kind of have to step up a little bit and pay attention when you work with someone like Michelle or else you can easily get left behind.”

Hoffman says that wasn’t the case. “George is very flexible because of his TV background,” he says of Clooney’s collaborative tendencies. But at the same time, the actor was used to ignoring directors, for the most part.

“It’s true, he knows more about Doug Ross than the directors who come in. He’s probably used to doing more work on his own. That’s the nature of episodic TV,” Hoffman says. “Everything was fine when he realized I understood Jack in the same way he did. George makes eccentric choices and is great when he has a strong objective to play. He has his own rhythm as an actor. I came to like that. There was something real simple about it, and I think it stems from TV.”

And though the two actors spent time together rehearsing and filming, Clooney and Pfeiffer spent no time together outside the set. “I never saw him,” says Pfeiffer, despite New York gossip columnists’ claims the two were spotted having romantic dinners (in fact, at the time she was in L.A., where she lives with her husband, writer-producer David E. Kelley). “I loved working with George. He was charming and funny and he humanized the character, but we never even had lunch together. He’d go off to play basketball and I’d go off and be a mom.”

Those now-famous basketball games involving Hoffman, Clooney and crew members were serious if not competitive. During one intense and sweaty game, a grip elbowed Clooney in the eye, rupturing his eye socket and leaving a swollen, purple mess.

“Put your finger here--feel this, isn’t that awful?” says Clooney, now somewhat amused by the injury, as he takes a visitor’s finger and traces the bony area under his eyebrow that was broken two months earlier and has strapped him with a left eye that tracks more slowly than the right. “Luckily I had six days off before going back on the movie. My eye was swollen shut, and I still have to put makeup on it to cover the purple. I was still shooting ‘ER’ at the time, and I had to hold a baby in front of my eye until the swelling went down.”

On another difficult day, the cast and crew waited under a tent in Central Park to film the movie’s crucial soccer game scene while it poured for two days straight. “I had this really bad allergic reaction to whatever fertilizer they just laid down on that grass, so I couldn’t breathe,” Clooney recalls. “And we were in this tent with 75 6-year-olds, which is truly a nightmare under any circumstance.”

But the nightmares didn’t end there. While on location at Fifth Avenue’s Elizabeth Arden salon, the production found itself in the middle of the Israeli Day parade. The cast and crew voted on whether to proceed on schedule (they did), despite numerous bomb threats to the political procession. And while filming on the Upper West Side, disgruntled residents, fed up with “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” “The First Wives Club” and an array of other movies shooting in New York this spring, occasionally called the Fire Department so sirens would interrupt filming.

The film wrapped on schedule in May, but the filmmakers aren’t saying how the movie ends. “Mel is a complete mess in the last scene from her day,” says Simon, the screenwriter. “She is wearing sweats and has chop suey all over her clothes. Jack is there, chasing her around the apartment in a cat-and-mouse game, trying to kiss her.”

In Simon’s draft, the exhausted couple fall asleep on the couch before the smooch. But who knows? “They may have snuck it in,” confides Simon. “I think they shot it both ways.”