Clooney

Hunter Biden finally made news outside the MAGA mediasphere for something that’s usually the work of Fox News and other deep state disseminators: He verbally bashed the Democratic Party, CNN’s Jake Tapper, former Obama aides and even Hollywood’s devastatingly handsome ambassador George Clooney.

President Biden’s son, whose very name inspires a Pavlovian response among right-wing conspiracy theorists, appears to have pulled a page from the opposition’s playbook when during two recent interviews he leaned into grievance politics, repeatedly hurled expletives and condemned those who “did not remain loyal” to his father.

Hunter Biden’s first round of interviews since the 2024 election started out tame enough when last week on a new podcast hosted by Jaime Harrison, former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, he said that Democrats lost to Donald Trump because they abandoned his father. There was no “grand conspiracy” to hide his father’s health issues, he said. “We lost the last election because we did not remain loyal to the leader of the party. That’s my position. We had the advantage of incumbency, we had the advantage of an incredibly successful administration, and the Democratic Party literally melted down.”

Fair enough. Then it was on to Clooney, one of the first high-profile figures on the left to call for Biden to step aside from his reelection campaign after a disastrous debate performance. Hunter Biden disparagingly referred to the actor as “a brand” and told Harrison, “Do you think in Middle America, that voter in Green Bay, Wis., gives a s— what George Clooney thinks about who she should vote for?”

Then came the knockout punch. In a separate, three-hour-plus interview released Monday with YouTuber Andrew Callaghan, he said of the star: “George Clooney is not a f— actor. He is a f—, I don’t know what he is. He’s a brand. … F— him and everybody around him.”

George Clooney was among Kennedy Center honorees welcomed by President Biden at the White House on Dec. 4, 2022.

(Manuel Balce Ceneta / Associated Press)

Hunter Biden also had some words for senior Biden aide Anita Dunn. “The Anita Dunns of the world, who’s made $40 [million], $50 million off the Democratic Party, they’re all going to insert their judgment over a man who has figured out, unlike anybody else, how to get elected to the United States Senate over seven times, how to pass more legislation than any president in history, how to have a better midterm election than anyone in history and how to garner more votes than any president that has ever run.” Former Obama aide and political analyst David Axelrod was also on the list. He said Axelrod “had one success in his political life, and that was Barack Obama, and that was because of Barack Obama.”

And if the above sentiments were attributed to the current president’s sons, who’ve characterized the Democratic Party as Nazis and referred to those who were protesting immigration sweeps by the patently offensive term “mongoloids”? Meh, it’s just another Monday. But Hunter Biden, like most public-facing Democrats, is held to a different standard. When they go low, we go high. Remember that sage advice that worked for Democrats back in the late aughts and early 2010s but now sounds like advice pulled from a 1950s guide to etiquette? The younger Biden not only deviated from that lefty code but also mirrored his tormentors, then unleashed his ire onto his own party.

Hunter Biden‘s own reckless actions over the years made him grist for all manner of right-wing helmed investigations. Then there are the stupid conspiracies, whether it’s the missing laptop or that mysterious bag of cocaine found in the White House. Hard to keep track, but the younger Biden went there during his recent interview. “I have been clean and sober since June of 2019. I have not touched a drop of alcohol or a drug, and I’m incredibly proud of that,” he told Callaghan. “And why would I bring cocaine into the White House and stick it into a cubby outside of the Situation Room in the West Wing?”

But he also attributed at least one recent alleged conspiracy to those outside the right-wing cabal or, more specifically, to Jake Tapper. The CNN anchor co-wrote “Original Sin,” a provocative book that claimed President Biden’s confidants worked to conceal his declining health from the public.

Hunter Biden argued that it was nonsense and that the “ability to keep a secret in Washington is zero.”
“What sells, Jaime?” he asked Harrison. “What sells is the idea of a conspiracy.” And the public spectacle of flaming your enemy’s enemy.

When “Good Night, and Good Luck” arrived on Broadway this spring, it initially provoked a surprising amount of cynicism. There were complaints that the adaptation by George Clooney and Grant Heslov was basically a reproduction of the 2005 film, which chronicled CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow’s heroic crusade against Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunts.

The sky-high cost of tickets was another source of criticism. Was Broadway pricing itself beyond the reach of its core audience? Reports of “Good Night, and Good Luck” shattering box office records served to remind those who couldn’t afford a ticket that they were being left behind by a theater culture that was siding with the haves over the have-nots.

In a Broadway season that featured Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal in a rudderless “Othello” and Kieran Culkin in a “Glengarry Glen Ross” revival that might have been stronger without him, “Good Night, and Good Luck” was a convenient target for anti-Hollywood sentiment.

When I arrived at the Winter Garden for a Saturday matinee in April, I can’t say my expectations were especially high. I admired the film but hadn’t seen it in nearly 20 years. The broodingly elegant production, sharply directed by David Cromer and starring a quietly committed Clooney in the role of Murrow (played in the film by David Strathairn), was not only one of the most stirring offerings of the Broadway season but also one of the most necessary.

I left the theater wishing I could buy tickets for my friends and family. That won’t be necessary — thankfully for my credit cards — because CNN will be broadcasting a live performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” from the Winter Garden on Saturday (4 p.m. PDT). It’s apparently the first time a Broadway play will be shown live on television, and the timing could not be better.

As media companies face a campaign of intimidation from the Trump administration, the figure of Murrow, standing tall in the face of demagogic adversity, is the courageous example we need right now.

I don’t know how different the experience will be watching at home, but “Good Night, and Good Luck” made me reflect on what theatergoing might have been like in ancient Greece. Athenian citizens would gather at an open-air theater as a democratic privilege and responsibility. Playwrights addressed the polis not by dramatizing current events but by recasting tales from the mythological and historic past to sharpen critical thinking on contemporary concerns.

Clooney and Heslov aren’t writing dramatic poetry. Their more straightforward approach is closer to documentary drama, but the effect is not so disparate. We are affirmed in the knowledge that we are the body politic.

CNN will broadcast the penultimate performance of “Good Night, and Good Luck” on the eve of the Tony Awards. The production is up for five Tonys, including one for Clooney in the lead performance by an actor in a play category. But however the awards shake out, Clooney is already a winner. Like Murrow, he reminds us that conscience can still be a defining feature of the American character.

Saturday afternoon out west and evening back east, as citizens faced off against ICE agents in the streets of Los Angeles, “Good Night, and Good Luck,” George Clooney’s 2005 dramatic film tribute to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, became a Major Television Event, broadcast live from Manhattan’s Winter Garden Theater, by CNN and Max. That it was made available free to anyone with an internet connection, via the CNN website, was a nice gesture to theater fans, Clooney stans and anyone interested to see how a movie about television translates into a play about television.

The broadcast is being ballyhooed as historic, the first time a play has been aired live from Broadway. And while there is no arguing with that fact, performances of plays have been recorded onstage before, and are being so now. It’s a great practice; I wish it were done more often. At the moment, PBS.org is streaming recent productions of Cole Porter’s “Kiss Me, Kate!,” the Bob Dylan-scored “Girl From the North Country,” David Henry Hwang‘s “Yellow Face” and the Pulitzer Prize-winning mental health rock musical “Next to Normal.” Britain’s National Theater at Home subscription service offers a wealth of classical and modern plays, including Andrew Scott’s one-man “Vanya,” as hot a ticket in New York this spring as Clooney’s play. And the archives run deep; that a trip to YouTube can deliver you Richard Burton’s “Hamlet” or “Sunday in the Park With George” with Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters is a gift not to be overlooked.

Clooney, with co-star Anthony Edwards, had earlier been behind a live broadcast of “Ambush,” the fourth season opener of “ER” as a throwback to the particular seat-of-your-pants, walking-on-a-wire energy of 1950s television. (It was performed twice, once for the East and once for the West Coast.) That it earned an audience of 42.71 million, breaking a couple of records in the bargain, suggests that, from a commercial perspective, it was not at all a bad idea. (Reviews were mixed, but critics don’t know everything.)

Like that episode, the “live” element of Saturday’s broadcast was essentially a stunt, though one that ensured, at least, that no post-production editing has been applied, and that if anyone blew a line, or the house was invaded by heckling MAGA hats, or simply disrupted by audience members who regarded the enormous price they paid for a ticket as a license to chatter through the show, it would presumably have been part of the broadcast. None of that happened — but, it could have! (Clooney did stumble over “simple,” but that’s all I caught.) And, it offered the groundlings at home the chance to see a much-discussed, well-reviewed production only a relatively few were able to see in person — which I applaud on principal and enjoyed in practice — and which will very probably not come again, not counting the next day’s final performance.

Glenn Fleshler, left, plays Fred Friendly in the stage production, a role that George Clooney performed in the film version of “Good Night, and Good Luck.”

(Emilio Madrid)

The film, directed by Clooney and co-written with Grant Heslov (who co-wrote the stage version as well), featured the actor as producer and ally Fred W. Friendly to David Strathairn’s memorable Murrow. Here, a more aggressive Clooney takes the Murrow role, while Glenn Fleshler plays Friendly. Released during the second term of the Bush administration, the movie was a meditation on the state of things through the prism of 1954 (and a famous framing speech from 1958 about the possibilities and potential failures of television), the fear-fueled demagoguery of Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and Murrow’s determination to take him on. (The 1954 “See It Now” episode, “A Report on Sen. Joseph McCarthy,” helped bring about his end.) As in the film, McCarthy is represented entirely through projected film clips, echoing the way that Murrow impeached the senator with his own words.

It’s a combination of political and backstage drama — with a soupcon of office romance, represented by the secretly married Wershbas (Ilana Glazer and Carter Hudson) — even more hermetically set within the confines of CBS News than was the film. It felt relevant in 2005, before the influence of network news was dissolved in the acid of the internet and an administration began assaulting the legitimate press with threats and lawsuits; but the play’s discussions of habeas corpus, due process, self-censoring media and the both-sides-ism that seems increasingly to afflict modern media feel queasily contemporary. “I simply cannot accept that there are, on every story two equal and logical sides to an argument,” says Clooney’s Murrow to his boss, William F. Paley (an excellent Paul Gross, from the great “Slings & Arrows”). As was shown here, Murrow offered McCarthy equal time on “See It Now” — which he hosted alongside the celebrity-focused “Person to Person,” represented by an interview with Liberace — but it proved largely a rope for the senator to hang himself.

Though modern stage productions, with their computer-controlled modular parts, can replicate the rhythms and scene changes of a film, there are obvious differences between a movie, where camera angles and editing drive the story. It’s an illusion of life, stitched together from bits and pieces. A stage play proceeds in real time and offers a single view (differing, of course, depending on where one sits), within which you direct your attention as you will. What illusions it offers are, as it were, stage magic. It’s choreographed, like a dance, which actors must repeat night after night, putting feeling into lines they may speak to one another, but send out to the farthest corners of the theater.

Clooney, whose furrowed brow is a good match for Murrow’s, did not attempt to imitate him, or perhaps did within the limits of theatrical delivery; he was serious and effective in the role if not achieving the quiet perfection of Strathairn’s performance. Scott Pask‘s set was an ingenious moving modular arrangement of office spaces, backed by a control room, highlighted or darkened as needs be; a raised platform stage left supported the jazz group and vocalist, which, as in the movie, performed songs whose lyrics at times commented slyly on the action. Though television squashed the production into two dimensions, the broadcast nevertheless felt real and exciting; director David Comer let the camera play on the players, rather than trying for a cinematic effect through an excess of close-ups and cutaways.

While the play generally followed the lines of the film, there was some rearrangement of scenes, reassignment of dialogue — it was a streamlined cast — and interpolations to make a point, or more directly pitch to 2025. New York news anchor Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg, very moving in the only role with an emotional arc) described feeling “hijacked … as if all the reasonable people went to Europe and left us behind,” getting a big reaction. One character wondered about opening “the door to news with a dash of commentary — what happens when it isn’t Edward R. Murrow minding the store?” A rapid montage of clips tracking the decay of TV news and politics — including Obama’s tan suit kerfuffle and the barring of AP for not bowing to Trump’s Gulf of America edit and ending with Elon Musk’s notorious straight-arm gesture, looking like nothing so much as a Nazi salute — was flown into Clooney’s final speech.

Last but not least, there is the audience, your stand-ins at the Winter Garden Theatre, which laughed at the jokes and applauded the big speeches, transcribed from Murrow’s own. And then, the curtain call, to remind you that whatever came before, the actors are fine, drinking in your appreciation and sending you out happy and exhilarated and perhaps full of hope.

A CNN roundtable followed to bring you back to Earth.