TV

TV Database

EW Presents...

Continued

Boy, George!

More

Previous Page 2 of 6 Next

That's good enough news to soothe anybody's gastric juices, but it's only the beginning, it seems. Even as he's up to his stethoscope in script pages for ER, he's just signed for twomore films to shoot during his series hiatus. He'll reportedly pull down $3 million to play opposite Michelle Pfeiffer in One Fine Day, a single-parent romantic comedy. And by all accounts, he'll receive about the same amount to anchor DreamWorks SKG's The Peacemaker, an action spectacle in which he'll chase black-market nuclear materials around the globe. Steven Spielberg himself made the pitch. ''He sent me a note,'' says Clooney, grinning. ''It said, 'This is our first project at DreamWorks, and you're my first choice to do it.''' Indeed, Spielberg even got Clooney out of his semi-binding commitment to make Universal's The Green Hornet, which the actor had planned to star in with Jason Scott Lee for...yep, a reported $3 million.

Clooney won this windfall of offers before his first major movie had even opened. While editing From Dusk Till Dawn, director Robert Rodriguez assembled a trailer showcasing the actor, complete with fake reviews he says some agents were gullible enough to believe authentic. ''I told George, All we need to do is send bootleg footage around town and people will want to see it and we'll get everybody stirred up about you,'' says Rodriguez. ''You'll be a millionaire before the movie even comes out. I did the same thing with Antonio Banderas right after we wrapped Desperado, and that's how he got Assassins.''

Clooney viewed Dawn, which also stars Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis, and its screenwriter, Quentin Tarantino, as ''an ensemble piece, and that's what you want your first up. When I was doing Roseanne with Laurie Metcalf, I'd watch her go off and do small parts in Internal Affairs and JFK and I thought, That's the perfect way to go, because eventually the TV series goes away. You need to fall back on something, and that's what my plan was.''

Of course, Clooney would have had no plan at all had ER's executive producer, John Wells, not agreed to work around Dawn's shoot. But Clooney's growing movie career has led to speculation about his future on ER. ''I did 80 TV interviews last Saturday for Dusk, and David [Caruso]'s name must have come up in 70 of them,'' he says. ''Everyone keeps coming up to me asking, Are you going to pull a David Caruso? And you say, Guys, in the history of television there's been really one major star of a hot show to leave abruptly, and that's David, to 'do movies,' and I'm not so sure he did leave for movies alone. [NYPD Blue creator Steven] Bochco is a very controlling, strong character, and David is too. From everything I hear, they didn't get along. I have left shows because of fights, so I understand truly creative differences.''

But Clooney's conundrum isn't nearly so dire as Caruso's was: He's lucky enough to be the breakout star on a show he doesn't have to carry. ''We have a large ensemble in which the work is evenly split,'' says Wells. ''If George is on a movie set Tuesday through Saturday, we can slot his stuff for Mondays, at least for a while. I think I'm more reasonable accommodating George because I was actually able to be more reasonable. George is not the central figure Caruso was for NYPD Blue.''

Previous Page 2 of 6 Next