The only movie George Clooney wasn’t allowed to direct: “Complete fucking agony”
He may not be anyone’s idea of a box office draw anymore, but George Clooney still has more than enough cache in Hollywood to make almost anything he wants, unless the person who created the thing he wants to make tells him that he doesn’t want them to make it.
As an actor, hits are becoming fewer and further between. The last bona fide commercial success Clooney starred in came when he re-teamed with Julia Roberts in 2022’s Ticket to Paradise, his first in almost a decade after Gravity and The Monuments Men gave him back-to-back wins in the space of a few months.
As a filmmaker, things are much the same. He showed enormous promise with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night, and Good Luck, but things have been fairly middling since then. Whether it’s The Boys in the Boat, The Midnight Sky, Suburbicon, or The Tender Bar, you could make an argument that he hasn’t quite fulfilled his potential on the other side of the camera.
He’s George Clooney, though, which comes with its own set of perks. He’s one of the most famous faces in Tinseltown, and his credentials speak for themselves, since he’s a two-time Academy Award winner who’s notched eight nominations in six different categories, with only Kenneth Branagh proving more versatile in Oscars history.
Shortly after his sophomore feature had notched a sextet of Oscar nods, including one for ‘Best Director’, Clooney set his sights on his next picture. He went straight to the source, but when he rang Peter Morgan to pitch himself as the perfect person to bring Frost/Nixon from the stage to the screen, the playwright and screenwriter had to let him down gently, much to his wife’s chagrin.
“He said things like, ‘We are really going to kick ass with this!'” Morgan recalled to W. “Not going with him was complete fucking agony, because he suggested doing some script work at his house by Lake Como, at which point, my wife was just shaking her head. I expect I will spend the rest of my life making amends to him and to my wife, and to everybody about my decision. Now I will never have him ringing me again, asking to do my work.”
He wasn’t wrong; it’s been almost two decades since Frost/Nixon was released, and the scribe has never collaborated with Clooney. Instead, Ron Howard got the nod. Or, to be more accurate, he pitched himself harder than the ex-Batman, demanding that his production company secure the film rights to the play as soon as he walked out of the theatre after seeing it for the first time.
A post-Good Night, and Good Luck Clooney could have probably made a solid movie out of Frost/Nixon, but he was denied in favour of a former Happy Days star. Howard’s flick may have underperformed at the box office, but it remains one of the best-reviewed entries in his filmography, winning plenty of acclaim and awards season recognition along the way.
If anything, the biggest loser in the whole situation was Morgan’s wife, at least the way he tells it.
