Authors: Mark Browning
As a first-time director, there was obviously a lot of pressure on Clooney to have a credible presence on set, and he prepared carefully
with meticulous storyboarding and tried to build confidence with some relatively easy shots to start with. However, there is real ambition to tell his story in an innovative fashion, right from the outset. The scene at the door with Barris and Penny was planned as a split screen but with both speakers facing outward, presumably to emphasize the failure to connect at this point, psychologically rather than emotionally. The use of a range of film stock, cross processing (the use of processing film in chemicals normally used to treat other kinds of film), and shots that are not explained fully at the moment they appear (the prostitute singing happy birthday) all present a challenging viewing experience. Flashbacks in black-and-white infrared film are juxtaposed with more lurid color for shots of the hippy counterculture as we criss-cross about 50 years of time in the narrative, often with sudden leaps back to Barris's childhood, in washed-out sepia tones. Clooney is not afraid to use Kane-like extreme low angles, like when Barris picks up some forms for management training, suggesting the character's grandiose dreams. Clooney uses lightweight, mobile cameras for brief, albeit gimmicky, shots like the one from the point of view of the tray on which Patricia carries the poisoned tea.
Barris's fragmented character is conveyed by several shots in which he looks into reflective surfaces, including TVs in a store, inspiring his move to Manhattan to seek a job in the television industry. Later, he is seen in reflection, staring at the names of the NBC chief executives, displayed behind glass. As Penny lies in the bath, talking to him, he is staring into the bathroom mirror, clearly not listening, even being bluntly rude about “dating bullshit” and caring what other people say. Later, we see Penny's face momentarily reflected over that of Tuvia (or possibly this is Barris, raised-as-a-girl), disturbingly suggesting that he never really gets over his strange obsession with the young girl; and also in the very opening scene, there is the faint, even ghostly reflection of Barris himself in the smooth grain of his own door.
Clooney also uses some ambitious long takes, involving large numbers of extras as Barris arrives at NBC first as a visitor as part of a tour and then disappears out of shot only to appear seconds later, leading his own group out of shot and then reappearing eavesdropping on stagehand Debbie (Maggie Gyllenhaal) describing her ideal man, which he instantly resolves to become. Time is telescoped as well as showing Barris's drive to succeed. Later as Byrd explains his idea of Barris's chaperoning role as cover for European operations, Clooney shoots the scene in long shot, refusing to cut closer so that we hear their conversation but only see Barris speaking to Byrd's back, seen from outside the glass of a control room. This makes Barris seem more isolated and not only forces viewers
to pay closer attention to the dialogue but is preceded by continuous dialogue on the floor of
The Dating Game
and then the lighting gantry as if Byrd can flit ghost-like from place to place.
In particular, Clooney tries ambitious theatrical transition shots in which rather than cutting or using some elaborate postproduction process, he opts for flyway scenery and actors moving once they have left the frame. This might reflect nervousness over cost or unfamiliarity with the technical nature of some processes, but it also rings true with the period in which the film is set, when such effects were not yet possible. He zooms into an extreme close-up of Barris's eyes in the bathroom, where he has the idea of
The Dating Game
; there is a turntable effect to an adjacent set and then a zoom out to the presentation of the pitch for the program itself. Later, we pull back from a shot of the pilot that Barris has made to the stony silence of the board of ABC executives, unimpressed by the thinly veiled innuendo on a primetime show. Wes Anderson, with whom Clooney would go on to work with on
Fantastic Mr. Fox
(2009), uses a similar effect for his AT&T series of commercials in 2007.
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Later, we pan slowly from left to right and then back again across contestants on
The Dating Game
, who change by the time we return to them (we have actors, including Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, rapidly swapping places) almost like the schoolboy gag of appearing in a photo twice by running from one end to the other. The effect of suggesting a repeated process and the passage of time is similar to a jump cut but less intrusive.
A similar effect is used to take us from Barris on the phone to TV executive Larry Goldberg (Jerry Weintraub). Barris steps to the edge of the set and we see Goldberg speaking from an adjacent set, effectively giving us a split-screen effect but in reality rather than by a technical trick. Clooney then pushes this theatrical device a stage further by having Penny dance across both sets, in a literally impossible action, underlining the subjectivity of what we are seeing. Like the ABC tour guide scene, Barrymore then has to run around the set to be in shot again as the camera tracks left back into the domestic scene. There is an effective juxtaposition of the snapshot of Barris's literally colorless parents and his mother's monotone observation to her unresponsive husband that they need a new icebox before the scenery flies away to reveal the color and vibrancy of one of Barris's TV shows in which the star prize is a new freezer.
Fly-away scenery is possibly overused, appearing again in Barris's fantasy while auditioning terrible talent show acts, as the wall behind the contestants slides back to reveal the church square where he killed Renta (both original scene and fantasy, shot on location), and then he
fantasizes about blasting the singer in front of him with a shotgun in an act of wish fulfillment. However, we zoom into an extreme close-up at the sound of a gong as he has his eureka moment and dreams up the premise of
The Gong Show
. All the way through the narrative there are some examples of creative shot composition. When Barris is thrown out of the bar onto the street, we see Byrd exit the bar and begin to address an apparently empty space before Barris stands up into the shot. As Barris walks into the extreme foreground, Byrd is framed as a tiny devil-like figure on his shoulder.
In among some visual bravura transitions, there are also scenes like Jenks's barking at the contestants where Clooney just allows his actors to perform without any gimmickry. In this scene, Burke's head bobbing and manic delivery, eyeballing certain individuals while dismissing others, and walking off before his speech really reaches its conclusion as if he could not be bothered to finish it, all work really well.
The scenes that Clooney ultimately chose to delete also tell us something about him as a director. He certainly seems ruthless, willing to cut good performances (the bellboy exchange with Barris), spectacle that must have taken time (and presumably money) like the Mexican procession, or the expressionistic explosion of Mr. Flexnor's head on delivering bad news to Barris who pretends to shoot him with his finger. It is not quite in the league of David Cronenberg's
Scanners
(1980) but it is still an example of a stunt or effect, like the excerpt of a piano falling on a contestant and her dog in “How's Your Mother-in-Law?” which Clooney is prepared to lose if it takes his narrative in a direction he does not want. This suggests a strong sense of personal vision and a necessary willingness to sacrifice material that does not conform to that. The loss of the scene in which we see Renta actually killed might have made us believe Barris's story a little more, but like Penny's suicide attempt, this would have shifted the narrative toward a more clearly dark and tragic tone and made Barris a less empathetic figure. A bigger loss is the sequence leading up to Barris's discovery of Penny's suicide, in which Clooney uses a triple split-screen, so that we see Barris's actions within the house from three different camera positions, running simultaneously, giving us the unusual effect of appearing in two frames at once and possibly reflecting Barris's fragmented psyche and his fractured love life.
In all of the deleted scenes, there is still some visual panache on show. When Barris meets “Old Tuvia,” as he calls her, on an ill-advised date with the focus of his childhood obsession, Clooney uses freeze-frames at the moment of their meeting at the door and rather heavy-handed symbolism of the woman willingly eating strawberries in a provocative
fashion, which feels too much like obvious wish fulfillment on the part of Barris. An amusing scene of Barris's growing paranoia shows him pulling a gun on a car that appears to be following him, only to reveal two young fans. Barris's offer of an autograph is funny and shows the sudden switches in tone of his character, but perhaps the film would struggle to accommodate this.
Some of Barris's walking around the back of the TV set is included in the finished film, but the additional footage cut from this shows the direction that the original Kaufman script might have taken, complete with a
Malkovich
-style opening of a door onto a bricked-up wall and the sound of audience laughter, as if he is a small Kafkaesque figure trapped in a surreal universe. He undertakes an expressionist journey through key images in his recent past, including the church square where he killed Renta, the Berlin alleyway, and a shot of a sky that is apparently moving but is really a piece of scenery being carried through the shot. By choosing the theatrical option of a physical illusion in front of the camera in real time, Clooney keeps an element of theatricality in the film and also makes Barris's character seem more believable. It is harder to dismiss what he sees and does as subjective illusion when the fabric of the film remains in front of the camera rather than in postproduction trickery.
It was Clooney's securing of Roberts's name that persuaded Miramax to allow the casting of Rockwell. In a virtual parody of a film noir femme fatale, Roberts wears her hair up, heavy red lipstick, big hats, and big boots and sits forward into the light on command to catch her prominent cheekbones (or create her own effect in the scene where she sits in the dark in Barris's apartment until turning on a lamp above her head). The montage of Barris's growing romance with Patricia, intercut with Penny over an Elvis impersonator's version of “Can't Help Falling in Love,” does suggest Barris's confusion between the two women; and the plot twist, with Patricia admitting to killing Keeler and thereby exposing herself as the mole, is neatly done as Barris falls to the floor, apparently poisoned, only to reappear healthy in the center of shot as Patricia herself is suddenly struck down.
Clooney's childhood involved time on TV sets of game shows (his father, Nick, was host of
The Money Maze
) and he effectively intercuts audience and contestants with playback cameras and extracts from real shows to break up the conventional lines of continuity, so that in these scenes we occupy several different viewing positions, giving the sense of a vibrant, unpredictable atmosphere. This also required some creations of fake footage, which also then had to match activity in the fictional studioâall for only a few split-second glimpses but it reflects Clooney's
attention to detail. This is also expressed in the gag of naming two of the CIA trainees “Ruby” and “Oswald,” the latter being unable to fire more than a single shot before his rifle jams out on the range.
It seems Clooney is most influenced by American conspiracy thrillers of the '70s, such as Alan J. Pakula's
The Parallax View
(1974) and
All the President's Men
(1976) or Mike Nichols's
Carnal Knowledge
(1971), like the shot of the whining contestant asking for Barris's help with the girl, paralleling Jonathan (Jack Nicholson) and Sandy (Art Garfunkel) in Nichols's film. Clooney claims that the similarity of the alleyway scene to
The Exorcist
(William Friedkin, 1971) struck him only later but this seems a little odd, especially since the earlier shot of Barris walking away from the contestant as he stands under a prominent single street lamp and the whole notion of Barris selling his soul to a tempting devil-like figure in Byrd evoke the earlier film quite strongly. The prime reference to
All the President's Men
is the use of silhouettes or at least insufficient light to see faces clearly, as when Barris is caught cheating by Penny. Here, it is Penny's dignity that is more important, and also it avoids a literally awkward moment for Rockwell to convey. There is another nod to the same movie in a deleted scene in which we see a more collaborative form of working in the TV studio, like the conference call in Pakula's film.
From
The Parallax View
we have the juxtaposition of Keeler's assurances that everything will be fine to a shot of him on a mortuary slab, like the character of Lee Carter (Paula Prentiss) being assured by Joe Frady (Warren Beatty) that she will be fine and the next we see of her is as a corpse, supposedly the result of an overdose. The influence of Sidney Lumet's
Fail Safe
(1964), discussed in chapter 7, is seen in the tight shot on Flexnor's eye. The small musical cues, particularly via a few somber piano notes, are inspired partly by Pakula's
Klute
(1971) and Bob Fosse's
All That Jazz
(1979). The only slightly more modern film Clooney mentions on the DVD extras is
The Princess Bride
(Rob Reiner, 1987) in reference to the game of bluff in which Barris and Patricia switch the signals, showing which cup is poisoned.
Like Barris's book, the film is an ambitious blend of thriller, comedy, conspiracy thriller, and love story, all in the framework of a delusional fantasy. It is hardly surprising then that it is a little uneven in tone or that it struggled to find an audience, mis-marketed primarily as a thriller. The choice of a script by Kaufman (whose involvement dates from around 1997), who was a known quantity in terms of his experimental and boundary-stretching nature, seems a mixture of courage, hubris, ambition, and naiveté. Perhaps Clooney's decision to moderate some of the more extreme elements of the script was the only way to bring it to a wider
public, and at this stage of his career, it may not really have been his decision at all. In Kaufman's original, Barris gets the poisoned cup from Patricia, but this would hardly tally with the continued life of Barris the author and make the events in the film clearly a fiction. Kaufman had planned to use a voice-over by Barris himself, which would have underlined the unreliability of the narration more strongly and emphasized his sense of regret about his life, but perhaps for his first directing experience, Clooney opted for coherence and may have been wary of extensive voice-over use. For a directing debut, wanting to make the film one's own and being unwilling to cede too much hard-won control is perhaps understandable. Clooney's next directing project,
Leatherheads
(2008), also included difficulties over the script, but by the time of
The Ides of March
(2011) it looks like Clooney has settled into writing with a partner who he feels most comfortable with and can trust: Grant Heslov.