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Hollywood for Grownups: The Magic Behind George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s On-Screen Chemistry
Plus Richard Linklater’s latest film will take 20 years to shoot, and James Woods — movie mogul?
(Left to right) Richard Linklater, James Woods, Brad Pitt and George Clooney
AARP (Chris Saucedo/Getty Images; Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images; Presley Ann/Getty Images; Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)
Hollywood produces some strange bedfellows — and some very successful ones.
James Woods
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James Woods: Actor Turned Producer
James Woods, 77, known best for starring in Casino, Nixon, Once Upon a Time in America, etc., hasn’t actively acted for more than a decade. But he’s hardly retired. He just bought rights to the 1997 book Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage, by Christopher Anderson; it’s filled with anecdotes about America’s First Couple, and Woods plans to produce it into a movie with, according to him, Oliver Stone, 77, on board to direct. Makes sense: Stone made JFK and Nixon, in which Woods played H.R. Haldeman.
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Woods got the producing bug when he serendipitously exec-produced Oppenheimer, 2023’s most successful film. How? The book it’s based upon was optioned by several businesspeople but couldn’t gain traction. Woods was asked to step in. He sent it to veteran producer Chuck Roven, 74, who got it to Chris Nolan, 53, and the film went on to win seven Oscars. As for the Jack and Jackie project, who could play the storied couple? How about Jake Gyllenhaal or Andrew Garfield; Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman?
Richard Linklater
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Richard Linklater Likes the Long Game
Director-writer Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, School of Rock), 63, has a thing for movies about aging — movies in which the actors also age. He’s following his 2014 saga Boyhood method of shooting in real time with a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, a 1981 flop that closed after 16 shows but is now a smash Broadway revival about a theater-based friendship that unfolds over two decades. It won the Tony Award for best revival of a musical at the awards show Sunday. Linklater’s film version and its three stars — Paul Mescal, 28; Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein, both 30 — will be shooting over a 20-year span; they actually started in 2019. The actors will, of course, be middle-aged by wrap date — and Linklater will be 78! They’re shooting the last act first as Sondheim’s musical tells its story backwards.
Linklater’s recent Netflix flick Hit Man garnered killer reviews and viewership, but he’s already wrapped another, wildly different, feature, Nouvelle Vague, about the making of the 1960’s classic Breathless, with Zoey Deutch as Jean Seberg.
George Clooney and Brad Pitt: A Smart Magic
Might the reunion of five-time costars George Clooney, 63, and Brad Pitt, 60 (Burn After Reading, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the Oceans trilogy) in the upcoming action-comedy Wolfs bring Apple TV+ an even bigger slice of the pie than 2023 did? Last year, Ted Lasso and Killers of the Flower Moon set records for the streamer. But the combined box office of the three Clooney–Pitt Oceans movies alone was a billion and a half bucks, so Apple isn’t naive in betting on the literal payoff of their on-screen chemistry. It’s more than money, though. Says longtime Hollywood PR executive Simon Halls of Slate PR. “Brad and George’s secret sauce is that audiences are invested in them. They’ve watched them grow up. They want them to succeed. And here’s the magic: Both Brad and George are what Hollywood calls “good pickers.” They pick smart projects. Not all have been commercial successes, but they’ve all been tremendous creative successes.” In Wolfs, the pair play almost identical — and mutually despising — fixers. We’ll see Sept. 20 whether their titular canine forces sink into the box office.
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