Dates with George Clooney
IT’S been an odd and brilliant sort of year for Grant Heslov. The awards, the reviews, the nominations, the interviews, the endless hours spent standing in a tuxedo watching women, and men, elbow past him to get to George Clooney -- it’s all been very dreamlike, as if he were watching it happen to someone else.
“It’s an emotional rollercoaster,” he says, totally non-tuxeoed in a temporary production office in Burbank. Head shots of actors are pinned to the wall behind him; cases of water and variety packs of chips are on the bookshelf across from his desk. In the next office, the still untitled pilot he recently shot for HBO is playing. It’s about a professional basketball team, and the sounds of cheering crowds and the squeak of court shoes on shiny wood occasionally threaten to overwhelm his low and steady tones. “You tell yourself you’re not going to get caught up in the whole thing, but of course you absolutely do.”
“Good Night, and Good Luck” is up for six Oscars, including best picture, which, as sole producer, Heslov would accept should the film win. And when he discusses this possibility, in fact when he discusses the entire awards season, he tends to shake his head, as if in disbelief, a speechless shrug shadowing his words.
Being friends with Clooney for more than 20 years has helped, in more ways than one. As both men have said, a black-and-white film starring David Strathairn as Edward R. Murrow would not have gotten made without Clooney’s clout. But more than that, being friends with a former Sexiest Man Alive prepared Heslov a bit for the onslaught of awards season. As Clooney’s “date” to virtually every red carpet event and countless interviews and appearances, Heslov has gotten used to the inevitable line of mostly female well-wishers shoving him aside to get to Clooney.
“Look,” Heslov says, when asked if this bothers him. “I know exactly who my partner is in this. I know exactly what the deal is. He’s a gigantic movie star, which you forget until you go out in public and you can’t sit down to dinner.”
Now, of course, Heslov finds himself facing the same kind of thing. Maybe not on a Clooney level, but still there is a growing amount of street recognition that has taken some getting used to.
For one thing, Heslov looks like a guy you might actually know. Someone with a calling outside the entertainment industry -- a teacher, perhaps, or a scientist. He does not have the square-jawed, overly hair-producted look that would make someone wonder: “Isn’t he
For another, he was supposed to get famous in a very different way.
“I spent 20 years as an actor,” he says, “and I never got this kind of attention, so frankly, it’s kind of weird.”
But between Heslov’s nominations and that of Dan Futterman (best screenplay for “Capote”), this year’s Oscar race seems to be sending a clear message to struggling actors: Write a screenplay. Without a part for you.
Actually, Heslov does have a small role in “Good Night, and Good Luck,” but he took it simply because it was cheaper for him to play it than to hire an actor at scale plus 10. And as the film’s producer, as well as co-writer, Heslov was suddenly concerned with all sorts of bottom-line things that never crossed his mind during the two decades he supported himself as an actor.
“That has been strange,” he says. “I am making those sorts of decisions that as an actor I never thought about. I mean, now I know who will go to the junket and who will do the press based on who has best name recognition, who will get the film the most coverage. When I was an actor, all I thought was, ‘Why don’t I ever get to go?’ ”
But then most everything that has happened recently has been a bit strange. From the time the film opened at the Venice Film Festival to a standing ovation when Heslov and Clooney accepted the Paul Selvin Award from the Writers Guild of America.
“Venice was like something out of a Cary Grant movie,” he says. “We were staying at the Cipriani and because my wife and I were with George, there’s all that craziness. We were going to go home but then people said, ‘You should stay, see if it wins an award,’ so we went to George’s house [on Lake Como] and kept getting these calls about how great the film was doing .... “
Now the shrug is obvious; Heslov widens his dark, pensive eyes and grins. “It’s easy to get caught up in it. But still there is a sense that I have somehow watched it from the outside.”
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A couple of struggling actors
THE two men famously met when Clooney was broke, was living at his Aunt Rosemary’s house and didn’t own a car; any time the two are interviewed together, which lately has been a lot, Clooney inevitably tells the story of how Heslov had to lend him a hundred bucks to get head shots.
Heslov, 42, grew up in Palos Verdes and always wanted to be an actor. He started going on auditions at 19, and went to USC to study theater. He and Clooney met in acting class and broke into TV during the early ‘80s in roles that reflected their different characteristics -- Heslov on shows like “Joanie Loves Chachi” and “Family Ties,” Clooney on “Riptide” and “E/R” with Elliott Gould.
“We were never competing,” Heslov says. “If we were auditioning for the same role, then they really didn’t know what they were looking for. And once George started working, he never really stopped.”
The same was not true for Heslov; he worked steadily with guest appearances on TV and small roles in films but never got the series or the breakthrough role. Instead he got married. And when he and his wife, Lysa, had a child, Heslov realized what many other working actors come to know: It is very hard to live on the fees paid to supporting players.
“I would go on these auditions and see character actors I knew from ‘Maude’ or ‘All in the Family,’ good actors and there they’d be, auditioning for a three-line part,” he says. “It broke my heart and I realized I didn’t want to be doing that.”
The turning point came when he got an audition for Woody Allen. “The audition went a certain way,” he says, “and when I told people about it, they said I should make a movie.” So he did, a well-received short called “Waiting for Woody.”
Suddenly, he was signed by Creative Artists Agency and was being sent out to take meetings. “I was meeting people about tons of movies, big, high concept movies that I was never going to get,” he says. “I had no game plan. Other writers go into these meetings with boxes of scripts and treatments and ideas. I had no scripts, no ideas. I was just so surprised I had somehow made a film people enjoyed watching.”
Four years ago, when it looked as if there might be an actors’ strike, Heslov had a conversation with Clooney, who invited him to join him and Steven Soderbergh at their production company, Section Eight Television. There, Heslov worked as a producer on “K Street” and producer-director for “Unscripted.” He and Clooney discussed a variety of projects, including a film about Murrow; Clooney had worked on one version but hadn’t been able to make it fly.
Then a book crossed their desks about Milo Radulovich, the Air Force reservist whose persecution during the communist witch hunts of the 1950s sparked Murrow’s resolution to take on Sen. Joseph McCarthy at the height of the senator’s power. Heslov said he and Clooney decided to do a live TV movie focused on the case. They approached the project journalistically, flying back East to interview as many of the people involved as they could and sifting through the mountain of transcripts and scholarship about Murrow and McCarthy and the people involved at Murrow’s network, CBS.
CBS expressed interest, but then Janet Jackson had her “wardrobe malfunction” and all thoughts of live television flew out the window.
“Now, I am pretty much of a pessimist,” Heslov says. “But I have to think it happened for a reason. Because if it had been a live television show, it would have been good but then it would have been gone. As a feature film it has had a much broader impact.”
He is a little concerned that the message of the movie is being lost in all the hoopla of the multiple nominations and the ubiquitousness of Clooney.
“It is a highly charged time, politically and journalistically, and I think this film speaks to that,” he says. “The film is the film and it would be even if [George] weren’t a big movie star. But,” he adds, the producer surfacing for a moment, “in this market you do what you have to do because it’s so competitive.”
And if that hoopla is a little hard on his family life, and his dry-cleaning bill, he is unabashedly enjoying himself quite a bit.
“I’ve gotten to hang out with Paul Haggis and Bennett Miller,” he says. “I know Dan Futterman from when we were in ‘The Birdcage’ together. I get to sit at the big tables in the front and look over and see people who produced movies I was in. That’s cool.”
