More than 25 years ago, at the height of his ER popularity, George Clooney told me about his desire to do a movie about his father’s hero, legendary CBS broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow.
Now the Oscar-winning actor plans to make his Broadway debut next year as Murrow in an adaptation of his 2005 movie, Good Night, and Good Luck, which was nominated for six Academy Awards, including best picture.
In the film, Clooney portrayed Fred Friendly, who produced Murrow’s See It Now weekly news series, which did an expose in 1954 on Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade that led to his downfall. David Straithairn was nominated as best lead actor for playing Murrow in the movie.
Clooney has been obsessed with Murrow since hearing his father talk about the newsman’s iconic live CBS News reports from London and Europe during World War II in the 1940s, when his father was a child.
What he originally envisioned as a HBO movie in the 1990s morphed into the theatrical film called Good Night, and Good Luck, which was Murrow’s sign-off phrase. Clooney and longtime business partner Grant Heslov were nominated for an Academy Award for writing the original screenplay. Clooney was also nominated as the director; along with nominations for cinematography and art direction.
A stage adaptation of Good Night, and Good Luck was supposed to premiere at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre during its 2020-21 season, but the production was postponed due to COVID-19, Broadway.com reported.
Clooney and Heslov sought to revamp the Murrow story into a TV series for AMC and AMC+ about 18 months ago. AMC announced in November 2022 a deal with Clooney and Heslov to produce a serial version of Good Night, and Good Luck about “the newsmen and women who worked alongside Edward R. Murrow amid a post-war climate of fear and hysteria. The series was to be told through a young See It Now cameraman named Sy Steingartner, "who is forced to juggle his admiration for Murrow with his own ambition” as CBS executives pushed “an anti-Communist Loyalty Oath on Murrow and his staff.”
AMC “did not move forward” with the Murrow series,” AMC publicist Jim Maiella told me Wednesday. He did not explain why or when the project was dropped.
Clooney and Heslov will collaborate on the stage adaptation planned for a spring 2025 premiere “at a Shubert Theatre to be announced,” according to the Associated Press. Tony Award winner David Cromer (The Band’s Visit) will direct.
“I am honored, after all these years, to be coming back to the stage and especially, to Broadway, the art form and the venue that every actor aspires to," Clooney said in the announcement quoted by AP.
On stage, “Clooney starred alongside Martin Sheen and Brad Pitt in a March 2012 performance of Dustin Lance Black's play 8 — a staged reenactment of the federal trial that overturned California's Prop 8 ban on same-sex marriage. The production was held at the Wilshire Ebell Theatre in Los Angeles and broadcast on YouTube to raise money for the American Foundation for Equal Rights,” Broadway.com reported.
"Edward R. Murrow operated from a kind of moral clarity that feels vanishingly rare in today’s media landscape," said Cromer in the statement. "There was an immediacy in those early live television broadcasts that today can only be effectively captured on stage, in front of a live audience.”
At the 2005 Good Night, and Good Luck premiere, George’s father Nick reconnected with retired CBS Evening News anchor Walter Cronkite, whom he had met while covering the 1976 Republican Convention as WKRC-TV news anchor. They became such good friends that Nick Clooney was asked to speak at Cronkite’s funeral in Manhattan in 2009.
