As you enter George Clooney’s mahogany-walled office on the Warner Bros. lot, it’s hard not to notice the only framed image of Clooney in character, which hangs behind his desk. The portrait is not from one of his box-office hits like Ocean’s Eleven or The Perfect Storm, or even from one of the forty-four-year-old actor-director’s acclaimed performances in Out of Sight, Intolerable Cruelty or Three Kings. The tight headshot is of a dead-serious Clooney in his Caped Crusader cowl from 1997’s Batman & Robin.
“It reminds of so many things,” he says. “How excited I was when I first got the role. How I realized I wasn’t only responsible for my performance anymore, but for the films themselves, which was a turning point in my career. Also, the minute you think you’re too smart, you turn around and are reminded that you actually uttered that immortal line, ‘Freeze, Freeze.’”
Batman & Robin gave Clooney the first bad reviews of his career and left him to claim – until this summer’s Batman Begins – that he’d killed off the franchise. The film turned out to be a seminal experience for Clooney, one that set him on a different path from most of his contemporaries.
Rather than aspire to the $20 million paycheck and superstar career of, say, Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt, Clooney chose to use his star power selectively. His plan? Big studio films would serve as currency to be spent making a series of riskier projects that mattered to him, even though he knew he would make little or no money on them. This strategy allowed Clooney to make better choices.
The success of Out of Sight led to Section Eight, his partnership with the film’s director, Steven Soderbergh, who’ll next direct Clooney in the black-and-white, post-World War II drama The Good German. Clooney made O Brother, Where Art Thou? to work with Joel and Ethan Coen, which led to Intolerable Cruelty and plans for a third collaboration, Hail Caesar. By his estimation, the commercial clout he and Soderbergh earned with Ocean’s Eleven allowed them to make Solaris, and spurred Clooney to direct the long-stalled Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, about game-show producer Chuck Barris’ putative career as a government assassin. Ocean’s Twelve enabled Syriana, a politically charged film about a jaded CIA operative, and his second film as a director, Good Night, and Good Luck, about 1950s broadcast-journalism legend Edward R. Murrow’s face-off with notorious, red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin.
Neither Solaris nor Confessions were hits, but they were intriguing. And the HBO improvisational series K Street and Unscripted? “You could call them huge failures, or flops, if you prefer,” says Clooney. But both served a purpose: Clooney got to be the camera operator when Soderbergh directed the K Street episodes, and then Clooney directed the first five episodes of Unscripted.
“I couldn’t have done Good Night, and Good Luck without that experience, where I learned so much about overlapping dialogue, having the camera move in certain ways,” he admits. “Unscripted was an exercise in getting away from the feeling that this was acting. In [Confessions of a Dangerous Mind], I made the camera one of the characters. [With Good Night], I wanted the camera to not be part of the film at all, so you’d feel like a voyeur [when you were] watching it. That series taught me how to do it, and how to get it done quickly.”
Good Night, and Good Luck might well bring the quality payoff Clooney has long been seeking. In addition to directing, he co-wrote, produced and acted in the black-and-white dramatization of how Murrow, host of the CBS News program See It Now, took on McCarthy, the chairman of the House Un-American Activities Committee, in 1953. The story has a real-time feel; there is little explanation of the fear and career destruction McCarthy wrought in Hollywood in search of the Red Menace. When Murrow learned that a Navy pilot was grounded because he wouldn’t denounce family members deemed communist sympathizers, he believed that McCarthy had stepped over an unforgivable line and decided to take on the powerful pol – mindful that if he lost, McCarthy might emerge more powerful and fledgling CBS might be out of business.
To get this $8 million film financed, Clooney cast himself as CBS producer Fred Friendly, but refused to play Murrow. Instead, he wisely chose David Strathairn, whose dead-on performance has generated Oscar buzz before the film’s release. Then he surrounded Strathairn with veteran actors who could disappear into the period, like Frank Langella, Jeff Daniels, Robert Downey Jr. and Patricia Clarkson.
Clooney’s commitment to depicting a pivotal moment in modern American journalism, in which principle took precedence over profits, is far from a pampered superstar’s calculated ploy to garner respect not to mention awards consideration. On the contrary, journalism is in his blood. His father, Nick Clooney, was a TV anchor known for butting heads with station management, and Clooney himself studied journalism at Northern Kentucky University. In this light, his obsessive rendering of period detail, from the black-and-white photography to the interspersing of actual CBS News footage with that of the actors playing Murrow, et al, seems as much a moral endeavor as an artistic one.
His early career was a study in futility: fifteen failed TV pilots, films like Combat High and Return of the Killer Tomatoes and a near miss with Thelma & Louise, for which he auditioned five times to play the handsome hustler who beds Geena Davis, only to have his expectations crushed yet again when director Ridley Scott gave the role to Brad Pitt. But his movie star potential was acknowledged in 1994, when the NBC medical drama ER became the biggest hit on television, with Clooney’s brooding pediatrician Doug Ross its centerpiece.
So darkly handsome that he didn’t even need or wear makeup for his scenes, Clooney was different from boyish-looking superstars like Cruise, Pitt or even Tom Hanks. Though he was young, Clooney looked like a man’s man, a throwback to a different era of leading man. He also had acting chops. Steven Spielberg, whose company produced ER, used his considerable clout to extricate Clooney from a pay-or-play deal in Universal’s The Green Hornet, so he could instead star in The Peacemaker, the first feature from Spielberg’s DreamWorks.
Peacemaker didn’t fare well at the box office, but Clooney soon had the momentum to replace Val Kilmer in Batman & Robin. But there is inherent dishonesty in the unstated agreement whereby an actor who takes a big studio movie check must enthusiastically promote it even when the results are bad. That began to wear quickly on Clooney, who was raised in Kentucky by parents who taught him to be honest.
This is the guy, after all, who turned down huge pay raises and million-dollar bonus checks given other ER regulars, because he didn’t want to be indebted beyond the terms of his original five-year series contract.
As Clooney takes his seat behind his desk, he seems a bit uncomfortable, putting his feet up, then down, and shifting often in his chair. The physical impairment is a lingering souvenir from Section Eight’s other risky project, Syriana, for which Clooney gained thirty-five pounds to play a CIA agent in a rise-of-terrorism drama that writer-director Stephen Gaghan loosely based on Robert Baer’s CIA memoir See No Evil: The True Story of a Ground Soldier in the CIA’s War On Terrorism. Clooney’s inability to sit still came from an injury sustained during a torture scene. It left him leaking spinal fluid and suffering excruciating headaches, unable to move until doctors finally figured out what was wrong.
Several operations later, Clooney has improved to what he considers a manageable amount of pain. Gritting his way through the pickup basketball games that have long been a staple of his exercise regimen, he has lost the excess Syriana bloat, but he’s hardly in tiptop shape. After he concludes the following conversation with Fade In, he drives directly to a hospital, where doctors will inject his own blood into his spinal cord in an attempt to dam up the remaining leaks and end the agonizing headaches.

There seems to be a shift in Hollywood these days: box office is down, DVDs are being released more and more quickly. What do you make of the changes? There’s a generation that just isn’t being talked about, and that’s the DVD generation. DVDs are more and more and more an element of box office. Kids will go see a movie once instead of six times, and then get the DVD a couple months later. And that repeat business was usually where you got the big summer box office from. But I’ll tell ya, I don’t worry about it. [Going to the movies is] still the best date you can do. It’s still fun to have a collective laugh with other people, or to be shocked or scared with other people. It’s not as dangerous, for instance, as what’s going on in the recording industry, where you can just download everything for free. People are still going to want to go to movie theatres, even if it’s in [fewer] numbers. But television has always been a big intruder in that. In general, [though], DVDs have become a bigger and bigger part of it. That’s something that studios don’t really like to acknowledge because they still keep that as their “vig”; they don’t want to talk about the fact that they’re making a pretty big killing right now in DVDs.

Because they keep eighty cents on the dollar? Yeah, when you negotiate your contract, you’re never really negotiating for DVDs. Some people do. I’ve had some luck at times with it. But you’re not really negotiating for DVDs because the truth is they’ve always said, “No. No. No. That’s nothing.” Because the truth is, for the longest time that was nothing. It’s just now becoming a very big part of the box office.

So now when we’re reading these stories about the box office being down, and they’re saying, “Oh, yeah, that’s too bad, the box office is down,” these studios are actually salivating that four months from now the Cinderella Man DVD is going to come out? Think about it: In order to sell a DVD, what you really need is that big opening weekend, and then that’s it. Then you can say on the box, “#1 Movie in America” when it opened up, and that’s your biggest promotion for it. There’re all these other elements. Foreign box office pays more than domestic now. It’s 60/40 usually. That’s a big deal – a big shift, too. The other element, which is true, is it wasn’t the greatest summer for movies. That happens. Every two or three years, we [say],“What a shitty summer.” So [box office] will diminish more and more; it has to. That’s the beauty of what’s happening with these young kids with digital cameras. They’re going to go out and they’re going to make these fucking great, interesting movies that haven’t been through a tumbler at an agency to take all of the edges off of it. They’re going to shoot it themselves, and it’s going to look like 16mm film because the quality is getting better and better. They’re going to download it on the fucking computer, and you’re going to buy it for six bucks. And you’re going to go, “Fuck, that’s great.” I still think that the star system will exist for a while because we still like stars. I do. I like going to see a movie with Matt Damon in it. There is a security in a star.

When you look at a picture like Intolerable Cruelty, which had two major stars but was not as big of a hit as one would have hoped – It underplayed big-time, yeah. They thought it was going to do a lot.

Are we dumbing down audiences with so many remakes and sequels that smart, sexy comedies like Intolerable can’t find an audience? No. That was simply the marketing of that film. They marketed that film, which was a comedy version of War of the Roses, as a love story. Which it wasn’t. It was basically a hate story, a dark comedy. Same thing happened to Solaris, which was really well reviewed and bombed badly. The studio sold it as a big sci-fi movie. The truth was, it was an art film that questioned life and death. Out of Sight underperformed; [it] didn’t make its money back. And Out of Sight is as good a film as I’ve made. [That was due to] bad timing, bad marketing and probably the fact that I was still on television. Three Kings made about $60 million and cost about fifty, and it’s a tremendously great film. O Brother made about $45 million for the Coen brothers – it’s their biggest-grossing film. But for a film, it’s not a big gigantic hit. Ocean’s opens gigantic, and is a big hit.

Do you love the Ocean’s films? I love the first one. I like the second one a lot because [Steven] didn’t remake the first one. That I love. We had too many stories going in the second one. But that’s OK, too, because in a way it’s sort of like the second Batman. I remember it was dark, and got a bit offline a little bit, but there was something that I loved about the idea that the second one wasn’t the first one. I’m extraordinarily proud of [the second Ocean’s], but I like the first one better because it’s a cleaner film. [It’s] hard to do it again like that. Steven’s such a smart filmmaker. Everything he does, I watch and go, “Goddamn it, look how he told that story.” I’ve stolen so many things from him it’s ridiculous.

These days, the way the studios run the business, they cut development to the quick. They have a release date, and they write a script around it.

That seems to happen often, with pictures like The Poseidon Adventure. They have a release date, a great technical director in Wolfgang Petersen, and they built a boat in a tank. But they are writing like crazy, struggling to get the script right. You have to wonder: Why doesn’t that precede everything else? There’s an interesting thing that happens with those [pictures]. On some of those you go, “Look, if you’re going to remake Poseidon Adventure, which I suppose is a classic, you’re basically saying we’re going to sell you a boat turning upside down.” Because that was the big thing. And in a way, you have to go, “Well, I’m in for the ride.” Perfect Storm, in a way, had some of that because it was mostly about a big wave. Perfect Storm was such a big break because that finally got everyone off my back who was [asking if I’d] survive from television to film. Up until then, even though there was Three Kings or Out of Sight, it was still, “He’s a TV actor.”
I went to dinner with Terry [Semel], Bob [Daly] and Lorenzo [di Bonaventura] at the time, and we went to the Palm [restaurant] the night we opened to celebrate, and there was a big surprise because everyone thought that The Patriot was going to double us and then we doubled them. And those things usually never happen. So it was a big “Holy shit!” Terry raises his glass [and toasts], “To George, for carrying us on his shoulders.” And I go, “The funny thing is, this is a movie about a giant wave. And that’s what the star of the movie is. But, since I took so much shit for Batman & Robin, I’m going to take credit for this one.” [Laughs] They all sort of laughed. So certain [films], I understand that kind of mentality – “Well, that’s what this is going to be, and it’s going to do that.” But you can get caught with films like Batman & Robin, where it’s just gone haywire with that… and I’m just as responsible as anybody because I was in it.

But wasn’t that your initial ambition, to be in an event film? Sure. I was so excited to get the part. I called all of my friends up: “I’m Batman, you fuckers!” [Laughs] “Hey, I’m in Ishtar!” you know. [Laughs] I guarantee you that someone called up and said that. But the truth of the matter is, those are things that just didn’t work for whatever reason. Something went haywire or someone missed a crumb.

So you once were on a mission to become the next $20 million superstar, but your priorities changed from making blockbusters to making smaller films like Good Night, and Good Luck – films that are much riskier. Clearly, the major paydays are no longer important to you. A lot of doors open when, like in this case, I gave the check back so that we could use the money to get the film made. I acted in it for SAG scale. We don’t have any hope of making any back-end money because we didn’t have that kind of deal to get this kind of a film made. So what you’re going to go through is a couple of years of your life to make something that you won’t hope to make any money out of. The reason that you do it is because you can and, fuck it, I’ve got money. I’m OK. So it’s so much more fun to be working on stuff where you go, “Well, this is creative and exciting and topical and it’s certainly going to get us into some trouble, which is always fun.” It’s fun to get people angry or at least talking about things for different reasons. And you want to be able to be sixty-five-years old, and have them put some films up when they do that tribute they do and go, “Yeah, that was pretty fun. I’m proud of that.” To me, it’s all about that legacy.

As you make these passion projects, you tend to turn down other high-profile studio projects. For instance, you could have had the role in Mystic River that Sean Penn took. I always hate to talk about movies that you didn’t do because other actors did do it, and it is insulting. But I would say this: There’re plenty of films that I was in the game for and I would say that wasn’t an offer. It was a discussion, and at the same time I was working on Confessions so there’s no way I could have done it. But they were looking at Sean for that role from the beginning. If I was Clint Eastwood and I was directing it, I would have been looking at Sean for that role before I would have begun looking at me for that role. If you get Sean Penn in your movie, you get Sean Penn in your movie. So I’ve heard that a lot, but would tend to doubt it was that serious.
There are other films that have come out recently. Alexander Payne told everybody he passed on me for Sideways, which is true. I chased him around left and right and I make no apologies for chasing a good director around. Anything he wants to do – that guy is four for four. He makes great films. I was like, “What do you want me to do? I’ll do anything you want.” And he’s like, “Don’t be so famous and be a better actor.” [Laughs] He was great about it. That’s when it comes out and all of a sudden somebody else talks about it and you’re like, “Oh, don’t punish me for trying to get a good part in a film.” But I didn’t care. It makes you laugh.

Directing, producing, acting, writing and running your own production company along with Steven Soderbergh – that’s a lot of multitasking. Does it have an impact on each vocation? For instance, would you be a more seasoned actor right now had you not gotten into producing and directing? Who knows? Look, I guess I could be a better actor for a billion reasons. For me, your skill as an actor is based on your script and your director. I was the same actor on Out of Sight as I was on Batman & Robin. Then I got a lot of credit on Out of Sight and got killed on Batman & Robin. So I feel that writing seems to be the secret to all of that. But I’m pretty good at multitasking. I can juggle, and I like it. I’ve had trouble in the last year because I’ve had health issues. I really got hurt [on Syriana]. And because of [that], I’m having trouble physically doing the things that I need to do. I can do a movie and do the action sequence. I can do anything, and I still play basketball with the guys, but my head hurts, a lot.

What’s wrong with your head? I tore the dura [mater], which is the wrapping around your spine that holds your spinal fluid. I tore it in a lot of places in my back. I put on a lot of weight to do [Syriana]. It was a fight scene. I was acting.

You didn’t look so well at the Ocean’s 12 premiere. That was the end of me. I literally went from that premiere to checking into a hospital. I had surgery two days later. So I’m going in today. They do these things they call blood patches, where they shoot blood into your spinal column to try and patch up the holes. But the problem is not your spine. My back doesn’t hurt at all. It’s your head. Your spinal fluid holds your brain up, and when it leaks out your brain sinks and your ears pop. I was reading about it on the Internet and they were saying that it makes a migraine look like a hangnail. It’s a really brutally painful thing, and it’s twelve hours a day. It’s gotten infinitely better since the surgery. Before the surgery, I couldn’t function. I couldn’t walk. I just said, “Honestly, I’m not feeling sorry for myself. I need two bottles of Ambien if this doesn’t work. I’ve got to take myself out. I can’t live like this. I can’t survive like this.” You can’t talk, you can’t function, you can’t move. Then, when they found out what it was, the [doctor] was like, “Oh, yeah, that’ll hurt. That’ll kill ya.” I’ve gotten it to a place where I can function. Now I’m at that frustrating point medically where you have to keep doing the same thing over and over again, hoping that one time it’ll take. They’re at their limit: “This is what we know to do…”
It was tough directing Good Night, and Good Luck because directing is all about energy. It’s about driving things. And I’m usually really good at that, and I had days where it was very hard. I had to wear a brace that straps around your stomach and your back; it basically squeezes spinal fluid back into the top of your head. [Laughs]

Ouch. Well, you lost all of the weight you had put on. Mostly. It’s about working out, and working out damages your back… It’s all a difficult balance. I ain’t complaining. I’m just saying, in terms of [the] company, I look at things like, “Do I really want to have a meeting with the publicity department on so-and-so’s film?” I don’t care.

You recently attended the G8 Summit, in Germany. You have always been very vocal when it comes to political issues, but why have such a physical presence, especially when you’re not feeling 100 percent? It was one of those things where I’ve been shamefully absent from something as important as Africa, and incredibly uninformed in many ways. Certainly not understanding enough about trade issues. I knew a lot about aid and transparency. You don’t want to give money to [Zimbabwe President Robert] Mugabe, and you don’t want to help out Sierra Leone. But, by the same token, the countries that were moving toward successful places, and finding ways to get that money – the debt relief – was a big one. I spent a day in a room with [World Bank President] Paul Wolfowitz, Bono, Djimon Hounsou, the actor, and Bob Geldof – the five of us in a room by ourselves having conversations about how we can get this money to fifty billion [people]. What we can do to assure [Tony] Blair success up at G8… And partially because I got called by Brad [Pitt] and then Bono and asked to do it, I also had gotten involved in the commercial for one.org, which ran during the Oscars.
There are some things that I was pretty good at. One of those things was I said, “We have to bring in the [political] right. It can’t just be a liberal piece, or you’re not going to get this through.” So I called Pat Robertson and got him involved. I said, “Obviously, [Rev.] Robertson, you and I are going to disagree on everything, pretty much. But there aren’t really two sides to this issue. And you and I can agree that there aren’t two sides to ending starvation and poverty.” And he said, “Yeah, you’re right. I’ve been doing it for a long time already.” I said, “That’s right, you have an infrastructure, and we’d like to use it. We’d also like to get a senator; another right-winger.” He got us Rick Santorum. It doesn’t get much further to the right than that. The idea was, all this aside, there is a firestorm right now on that continent. We do have some responsibility because we also have some culpability. We are also involved in this.

As Americans? As Americans, but [more so] as human beings. This isn’t a political issue. This is a humanitarian issue. It’s safer to be an Iraqi prime minister on a bicycle tour through Fallujah than to be a four-year-old boy in Niger right now. So, to me, the idea was, get involved and bring some focus, be informed. Then my job was to try and bring other elements; bring in some conservatives because I was such a liberal. See, the only way to properly do it is for me to go in, hat in hand, saying, “Guys, we need your help.” Then we’d have a chance of getting them in.

Do you feel it’s part of an artist’s responsibility to get out there and promote change? If you’re informed. If you’re not informed, you could do a lot of damage. So your first responsibility, whatever your cause is, is to be overly, stupidly, ridiculously informed. So that when you get trapped – and you will get trapped, because people do like to marginalize well-known people who take up causes. Shit, how do you find fault in us doing the 9/11 telethon? Bill O’Reilly created this bullshit firestorm that was made up out of whole cloth, and I called him on it, and he eventually had to eat a lot of shit for it. But how do you find fault in that? What do you do? Not hold a telethon? Not try to help people? Even the tsunami thing – are we not going to do that? You have to be informed so you can’t be marginalized. Because you will get marginalized. Always look at the argument against it. That way you can be prepared for the argument because you are going to get it no matter what you do. Then, if it’s important for you to do, it’s shameful if you don’t.

There is a great deal of backlash from the public and the media when celebrities back causes or presidential campaigns. Has backing causes or announcing you’re a liberal hurt your career? I do OK. I make a good living. Bill O’Reilly did a whole half-hour on it – that my career was over because of my political views. Brought some producer on I’d never heard of, who said, “I’d never hire him.” That same year, Sean [Penn] had taken a very strong stand and gone to Iraq. [Look at] Tim Robbins, who took a very strong stand and was a pretty severe Bush basher. Both won the Oscars that year. So I don’t know if it really affects your career.
I was at my dear friend Jerry Weintraub’s party a couple of months ago, and there were a bunch of guys – friends of his – there who were all big-businessmen Republicans. And I spent a lot of time with Republicans doing K Street; it’s not like we’re at war. I’ve met some smart, fun, interesting Republicans along the way.  But there was this one guy there who really wanted to pick a fight with me. He kept saying to me, “What the fuck’s wrong with you and your political beliefs? Why do you hate your country so much?” Hate my country? I’m a patriot. I’m a patriot to the extent that I don’t think it’s just your right but your duty to question the actions of your government. And he said, “Not at a time of war.” So I said, “Where was I wrong?” Before the war I said, “There are no ties to 9/11. There are no ties between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein.” We don’t know whether there are weapons, but I figured they’d find some. But they didn’t find any. They’re not going to welcome us with open arms. This is going to be a quagmire. This is the Pottery Barn system: if you break it, you buy it. Then I said, “So now I’m not standing up saying, ‘Hey, I was right. Good for me.’ I’m just saying, ‘Don’t turn around and yell at me and say what an asshole I am when I go, “Where was I wrong? What did I say that was wrong?”’” And then he did this [sticks up middle finger]. So does it hurt? Every once in a while. Certainly there’re some people that won’t like me, but who cares?

Is there a part of you, though, that believes by calling Bill O’Reilly on what he did, you’re also taking the bait and empowering him by giving him the attention he craves? Some, but if you’re famous, that’s like saying, “OK, I’ll take this even though they said this about me [because] if I fight ’em, it just makes it bigger.” But then they’ll say [something like], “You put a Ku Klux Klan hood on and you said, ‘Let’s go coon-hunting.’” That happened to me in the L.A. Times – front page of the L.A. Times, actually. I said, “Well, that one I have to go at.” So I brought everybody who was on the set that day, and I said, “You can ask them.” It was the Anti-Defamation League who leaked the story to the L.A. Times, and the L.A. Times goes,“Well, we know that the accusation is there.” [To which I replied], “Well, you can’t run the story because it’s inflammatory. It’s not fair, it didn’t happen.” They said, “ Well, when that doesn’t happen, we’ll run that.” And I said, “Well, that’s too late.” So they ran the story. Front page of the Saturday L.A. Times,  and it was really damaging to me personally.

What movie was this on? It wasn’t on a movie. It was while I was on ER. An extra said I had done that. And A Current Affair called and said, “We’re going to run the story.” I said, “Go run the fucking story. You’ve got nothing.” Then I brought in the Anti-Defamation League and said, “I’m an Irish-American, and I believe I’ve been defamed, and need to know what to do.” “What happened here?” “Well, an employee who I was working with made some claims that were not true. That person went to an agency like yours, one designed to protect the rights of individuals, and that agency – without ever speaking to me or finding out if anything he said was true – leaked that story to the L.A. Times. My name was on the front page of the L.A. Times, and I want to know if I’ve been slandered.” They said, “You’re kidding. You’ve been libeled, sir. Who did this?” And I said, “Are you kidding? It’s you: the Anti-Defamation League. My name’s George Clooney. I was on the front page of the fucking L.A. Times, and I’d like to know what you’re going to do about that!” So a lawyer here at Warner Bros. set up a room and brought in every other African-American extra that was there that day. I wasn’t there. I said, “You bring them in, you speak to them all, individually. And I don’t give a fuck what you find; if you find me guilty, fine. But whatever you find, you find it today and you get it back in the paper. Because you are responsible for this.” So then the Anti-Defamation League came back and said, “There are no findings; there is no truth to the thing,” and I got a retraction – on the fortieth page, so it didn’t matter. My point being, there are ones that you actually have to fight. I asked a bunch of celebrities to come answer a phone for a telethon. I put it together. I was responsible for them. And Bill O’Reilly had gone to each one of them and basically tried to bait them on the show by saying, “It’s a fraud. You guys don’t follow up on this, and where’s the money going?” Remembering, at this point, they thought it was 6,000 people who were dead, and they later realized it was 2,800. [New York State Attorney General] Eliot Spitzer was still going through a list of names. We were not going to irresponsibly hand out $330 million; we thought that would be a silly thing to do. We had spent $36 million on the ground. But Frank Thomas, who’s a beautiful man, was working it out; [he] was the head of the Ford Foundation for a while. He’s a brilliant, great guy. He had the patience to say, “This was a month after the telethon, it wasn’t a year after.” So my job was to protect them. So I said it was a ratings thing. O’Reilly said, “Debate me on the show.” And I said, “You’d just do it because you’re trying to get ratings for your show so you can take out ads saying you’re beating Larry King.” And he said there was no such thing as ratings in cable. So I said, “OK, if you’re just trying to help people, I will debate you on this subject, on Larry King during sweeps. If it’s not about self-promotion, then I’ll debate you there.” I ask him every time. Every time I do Charlie Rose, I go, “I’m waitin’.” So in some ways it is helpful to them, but every once in a while you have to take on a fight.

A few years back you took a stand against Hard Copy for running a story about you and a female friend. It had an impact, momentarily mobilizing some celebrities to make a stand. But look at the way things are now. Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Brad and Angelina – are they together or aren’t they? Russell Crowe throwing a phone, Tom publicly criticizing Brooke Shields for ingesting post-partum drugs, Jude Law and his nanny… Is celebrity culture, and the press’s fascination with it, getting out of hand? Yeah, it is. It is sort of like watching a wreck on the side of the road that you slow down to look at. It’s certainly an easy sell. The thing that has been disturbing to me – I don’t like seeing artists attack other artists. I have a real problem with that. Russell [Crowe], for some reason, picked a fight with me, and I tried to make a joke out of it and he sort of came at me again. Then, the next morning, he was arrested and I thought, “Well, I don’t need to do a public brawl with this guy because the only people that succeed out of that work for Us magazine.” The same thing with Tom [Cruise], and he’s a friend of mine. I’ve known him a long time. I worry about the idea, and I’ve seen it a lot lately, of artists attacking artists. We have so little by way of protections in terms of, it’s easy, [so] everyone’s going to come at us, because they assume we’re privileged – and they’re probably right about that in a lot of ways. So I look at it like we need to rally troops around one another, whether we disagree politically, whether we disagree socially. We shouldn’t be out publicly attacking one other. I don’t think there’s any need for it because all it does is give tabloids fodder. You got a problem? Call them up and tell them you’ve got a problem. I’ve certainly called people up and said, “What the fuck is wrong with you?” But not publicly. Go after your politicans, publicly. We give them our vote.