An artist in motion

George Clooney has been asked many times to present an Oscar.

He always said no. His stock response: “I’ll go when I’m nominated.”

This could be the year.

His new movie “Good Night, and Good Luck” earned raves at the Venice and New York film festivals, and lit up the box office in early release. (It reached Spokane area theaters this weekend.)

Reviews have been glowing; hardened newshounds have embraced it like a long-lost child.

For Clooney, “Good Night” also sets a high-water mark in his decade-long journey from just another good-looking actor to a cinematic artist of no small ambition.

The movie recounts a famous chapter in TV history when CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow (a 1930 Washington State College graduate) aired a detailed critique of the much feared anti-Communist crusader, Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin.

It was a time when even the hint of tolerance for communist ideas could ruin a career. Murrow’s report made him a target for McCarthy but also galvanized opposition to the senator’s roughshod tactics. Eventually, McCarthy was censured by his Senate colleagues.

“That showdown (with McCarthy) was very famous in our family,” Clooney says, referring to his parents, Nina and Nick.

“As proud of Murrow as my father was is how proud I am of my father, so I felt like (the movie) was in many ways a tip of the hat to the old man.”

Just as Murrow took part in fluffy but popular celebrity interviews that won him the freedom to tackle tough issues, Clooney uses big-bucks Hollywood fare – such as “Ocean’s Eleven” – to make more challenging projects possible.

Clooney produced, directed, co-wrote and co-stars in “Good Night, and Good Luck.” He also shook loose financing – including putting up his villa on Italy’s Lake Como for collateral – on the strength of his stardom and his determination to tell this particular story in his own way.

Such single-minded advocacy sets him apart from his peers in the upper altitudes of movie stardom. It also sets him far apart from the fun-loving kid who was an indifferent student at Northern Kentucky University, and an unhappy shoe salesman in Cincinnati.

Once he jumped into acting, nothing he did in the first half of his career suggested he was on the road to serious artistry. He happily cultivated his reputation as a fun-loving bachelor (minus a four-year marriage) and made a comfortable living with sitcoms and movies such as “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.”

Then came “ER,” which made him rich and famous and led to a starring role in “Batman & Robin” in 1997. The disappointing (if profitable) result woke him up to what he could do with his celebrity.

“If you’re lucky, you get to a point where you’re no longer looking for good roles for yourself,” he says. “You know you’re going to be held responsible for the film itself. For me, that meant I had to start paying attention to things I can be proud about.”

After “Batman,” he set out to push himself as an actor, and to acquire skills to be first a producer, then director. Each successive film revealed rising artistic ambition.

With “Good Night,” he steps into a political realm, drawing specific parallels between Murrow’s 50-year-old confrontation and today’s issues.

“The fights to keep entertainment from pushing news off the air still exist,” he says. “The questions about the government using fear to attack civil liberties still exist – the Patriot Act and Guantanamo Bay certainly are examples of that.

“Keeping (the movie) in a historical reference like that – and being very careful with our facts, which we were – was important, so it cannot be a political, polarizing piece. It’s simply a piece to raise debate and constantly talk about issues. Which I think is a good thing.”

His next film, “Syriana,” based on the memoirs of a veteran CIA agent in the Middle East, also promises to be politically provocative.

” ‘Good Night’ is like a Capra film compared to this,” Clooney says of the movie written and directed by “Traffic” screenwriter Stephen Gaghan.

” ‘Syriana’ is going to get us in a little trouble,” he adds. “But it’s good trouble. It’s the kind of trouble you want to get in. It’s raising debate, it’s bringing up issues, and talking about them, much in the same way that ‘Three Kings’ did, four or five years after the fact of the first Gulf War.”

For “Syriana,” Clooney cloaked his fashion-model image in 30 extra pounds – which contributed to a dangerous back injury that sidelined him for much of 2005 – and grew a scruffy gray beard that makes him almost unrecognizable.

The movie, he says, aims “to actually put a face on enemies, and say … let’s discover how these actually happen. Which is always dangerous, because people get mad.”

For his next directing job, Clooney will shoot a script called “Suburbicon,” written by the Coen brothers, with whom he made “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” and “Intolerable Cruelty.”

“They offered me a part in it a long time ago, and since then decided they have other projects they want to work on,” he says. “So I called them up and said, ‘How about me taking a spin at it?’ Because it’s a really interesting, really funny, very dark comedy.”

Clooney’s career will morph again soon, when the doors close on Section Eight, the production company he founded with director Steven Soderbergh – the man behind the camera on six of Clooney’s films, including next year’s “The Good German.”

“From very early on, Steven and I had an agreement that the minute we start to become administrators and not filmmakers, we have to bring it somewhat to an end,” he says.

Clooney is not part of 2929 Entertainment, Soderbergh’s new experiment in high-definition, low-budget movies meant to appear in theaters, cable TV and DVD outlets simultaneously.

The first film, “Bubble,” was shot in the eastern Ohio hamlet of Belpre with a cast of locals.

“It’s really beautifully done,” Clooney says.

“He did it without (trained) actors and it’s great. Which now means I have to rely on my directing, because he’s gonna make actors obsolete.”