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EXCLUSIVE: George Clooney, who yesterday sent his Smokehouse Pictures partner Grant Heslov to Hollywood to show Sony and Fox a first cut of their Oscar-season period film The Monuments Men, has spent most of his career navigating the challenge of making provocative movies at studios obsessed with tentpoles. While he’s won Oscars — the latest the Best Picture prize he shared with Heslov and producer-director Ben Affleck for Argo — Clooney is also the guy who kept a photo of himself as Batman prominently displayed on his office wall, as a cautionary reminder of what can happen when you make movies solely for commercial reasons.
Working
on post-production for his latest directing effort in Italy to ready
for Sony’s December 18 release, Clooney spoke to me about his new movie
and how it’s getting harder to make films like Monuments, Argo and the Smokehouse-produced August: Osage County. The discussion turned toward recent critical comments made by Third Point LLC hedge fund head Daniel Loeb and the pressure he is placing on Sony Pictures chiefs Michael Lynton and Amy Pascal, centered around the under-performing back to back summer films After Earth and White House Down.
Loeb, whose fund controls 7% of Sony stock, is pressing for Sony to
spin off its entertainment assets and likened those misfires to historic
flops Waterworld and Ishtar. Though Clooney and
Heslov base their Smokehouse Pictures banner at Sony, and Loeb’s
influence is growing there, Clooney has never been shy about standing up
to what he feels is wrong. So, buckle up.
Said Clooney: “I’ve been reading a lot about Daniel Loeb, a hedge fund
guy who describes himself as an activist but who knows nothing about
our business, and he is looking to take scalps at Sony because two
movies in a row underperformed? When does the clock stop and start for
him at Sony? Why didn’t he include Skyfall, the 007 movie that grossed a billion dollars, or Zero Dark Thirty or Django Unchained? And what about the rest of a year that includes Elysium, Captain Phillips, American Hustle and The Monuments Men?
You can’t cherry pick a small time period and point to two films that
didn’t do great. It makes me crazy. Fortunately, this business is run by
people who understand that the movie business ebbs and flows and the
good news is they are ignoring his calls to spin off the entertainment
assets. How any hedge fund guy can call for responsibility is beyond me,
because if you look at those guys, there is no conscience at work. It
is a business that is only about creating wealth, where when they fail,
they get bailed out and where nobody gets fired. A guy from a hedge fund
entity is the single least qualified person to be making these kinds of
judgments, and he is dangerous to our industry.”
Why is he dangerous?
“[Loeb]
calls himself an activist investor, and I would call him a carpet
bagger, and one who is trying to spread a climate of fear that pushes
studios to want to make only tent poles,” Clooney said. “Films like Michael Clayton, Out of Sight, Good Night, And Good Luck, The Descendants and O, Brother Where Art Though?,
none of these are movies studios are inclined to make. What he’s doing
is scaring studios and pushing them to make decisions from a place of
fear. Why is he buying stock like crazy if he’s so down on things? He’s
trying to manipulate the market. I am no apologist for the studios, but
these people know what they are doing. If you look at the industry track
record, this business has made a lot of money. It creates a lot of jobs
and is still one of the largest exporters in the world. To have this
guy portraying it that Sony
management is the bad stepchild and doesn’t know what it is doing and
he’s going to fix it? That is like Walmart saying, let me fix your town,
putting in their store, strangling all the small shops and getting
everyone who worked in them to work for minimum wage with no health
insurance.
“It’s crazy he has weight in this conversation at all,” Clooney
continued. “If guys like this are given any weight because they’ve
bought stock and suddenly feel they can tell us how to do our business —
one he knows nothing about — this does great damage than trickles down.
The board of directors starts saying, ‘Wait a minute. What guarantee do
you have that this movie makes money?’ Well, there are no guarantees,
but if you average out the films Will Smith and Channing Tatum
have made, you will take that bet every time, even if sometimes it just
doesn’t work out.” Clooney also said he believes that down the line
both films have a chance to be a wash. Clooney was particularly
sensitive on the subject of job creation.
“Hedge fund guys do not create jobs, and we do,” he said. “On the movie
we just made, we put 300 people to work every day. I’m talking about
nice, regular people, and when we shot in a town, we’d put another 300
people to work. This is an industry that thrives; there are thousands of
workers who make films. You want to see what happens if outside forces
start to scare the industry and studios just make tent poles out of
fear? You will see a lot of crap coming out.”
