[continued]

I've heard George Clooney say on TV that when he was young he idolized CBS producer Fred Friendly, the man he plays in this film. That was because of his father, who (in this interview) he says was a journalist who "went directly at" presidents on the most important stories.

His father also idolized Murrow. From the Guardian story:

Clooney's father is a silent presence throughout Good Night, and Good Luck, which was inspired partly by the memories Clooney has of hanging around as a child at the TV studio where he worked, in Kentucky. Clooney Snr believed, as Murrow did, that McCarthy's anti-communist hearings compromised basic civil liberties in the US, in a way that his son parallels with Bush's anti-terrorism laws. It is a very good film, shot in black and white and romantic about the golden age of TV, when everyone smoked and drank Scotch ("and died of emphysema" drawls Clooney) and a news show like Murrow's could collar a 40-million strong audience. The end of the film lifts the hairs on your neck, when Murrow addresses the annual TV industry gathering and makes what has become known as the "box and wires speech", in which he says that television has the power to enlighten but "it can do so only to the extent that humans are allowed to use it to those ends. Otherwise, it is merely wires and lights in a box". Clooney recalls his father standing on a chair at home and reciting it.

Clooney, who co-wrote and directed the film, decided not to play Murrow himself because "the secret to Murrow is that there is a sadness to him. You always felt that he was carrying the weight of the world on his shoulders, and that's not something that you can act, it's something that you just sort of are. " He found that kind of demeanor in the character actor, David Strathairn (I'll always remember him as Molly Dodd's shy bookstore owner boyfriend), who also has a great voice for the part---not as rich and important-sounding as Murrow's, but close.

Clooney knew he couldn't pull that off--he can act a solemn demeanor, pissed-off and even cold, and he's terrific at being comically confused, but he's done best by the shades his own affable charm. His success came fairly late---he was 33 when he started "ER," the part that launched him, and now that he's a big star at 44, he's also becoming one of the more politically active Hollywood figures with the clout and intent to communicate by means of the stories he chooses to tell.

He's also become tougher about political attack, and though he says he prefers to deflect it and make his points with some humor or at least irony, he can be pretty articulate directly:

Clooney is sufficiently battle-hardened these days to shrug it off when people have a go at him. "I was at a party the other night and it was all these hardcore Republicans and these guys are like, 'Why do you hate your country?' I said, 'I love my country.' They said, 'Why, at a time of war, would you criticise it then?' And I said, 'My country right or wrong means women don't vote, black people sit in the back of buses and we're still in Vietnam. My country right or wrong means we don't have the New Deal.' I mean, what, are you crazy? My country, right or wrong? It's not your right, it's your duty. And then I said, 'Where was I wrong, schmuck?' In 2003 I was saying, where are the ties [between Iraq] and al-Qaida? Where are the ties to 9/11? I knew it; where the fuck were these Democrats who said, 'We were misled'? That's the kind of thing that drives me crazy: 'We were misled.' Fuck you, you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

Clooney doesn't only look to the best of a previous generation for heroes in general, but also for models for his own career. With Good Night and Good Luck and his other political film, Syriana, winning audience, critical acclaim and Oscar nominations, he told the Guardian that he's hoping to follow "the tradition of the great campaigning film-makers of the 1960s and 1970s - "Sidney Lumet, Alan Pakula, Hal Ashby, Kubrick." He is having the time of his life now; everything that came before was just prologue. "I've taken on my dad's battles. I'm fighting the fights that he fought. Oh, it's trouble," he grins. "Trouble big-time."