The Wiz Of Show Biz

By Joel Stein/Los Angeles

Yes, George Clooney is one charming bastard. He ducks your compliments, absorbs your indelicate questions, jabs back with interest in you and never appears tired of the exchange: he is the middleweight champion of charm. His best punch is his wry self-awareness. While Clooney lives in one of those huge houses in the hills of Los Angeles with a giant, swinging electronic door at the foot of his driveway, he says, "I don't want to get into this behind-the-fence world. I'm afraid of getting isolated from society." When asked how he'll make sure that doesn't happen, he pauses thoughtfully and replies, "I have people to do that for me."

Another effective tactic in his charm arsenal is to disarm with

openness. Sitting in a full Nike outfit--black sweat pants, black T shirt and white sneakers--with his arms crossed and legs splayed, he strikes a balance between being tough and being approachable, like the anti--Larry David. Not only does Clooney talk about his money (lots), his dating resume (long), his bombs (Solaris), his critics (Los Angeles Times reviewer Kenneth Turan, who says Clooney throws "everything but the kitchen sink onto the screen"), his embarrassing roles (the giant-nippled Batman), the people he doesn't like (director David O. Russell) and the hubris of having a potbellied pig as a pet (Max, now 300 lbs.), but he also gives reporters his home number (which this reporter should really remove from his cell phone because of the temptation to make prank calls as Robin) and invites them to his house. People who have met him just once have got offers to stay at his villa in Lake Como, Italy. It's exactly how generous you hope you'd be if you were a rich, famous, 43year-old bachelor. A bachelor so charming that even his ex-girlfriends speak of him without bitterness. Quite a feat, especially when you consider that they are women who narrowly missed out on marrying George Clooney.

False modesty isn't charming, so Clooney readily admits that he's a giant celebrity, only he presents it more as a fact than an accomplishment. "It doesn't matter how much talent and ambition you have. You need a big piece of luck," he says, sitting on the maroon leather couch in his lodge-like living room. "If ER got a Friday-night pickup instead of Thursday, then I don't get to do movies," he says, acknowledging that being part of NBC's "must-see" lineup meant that people actually saw him.

Clooney is never more a movie star than when he's playing everyone's favorite scoundrel, Danny Ocean, the part once owned by Frank Sinatra. In Ocean's Twelve, the sequel to 2001's $183 million--grossing remake of the 1960 caper flick Ocean's Eleven, he is flanked again by Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Matt Damon, Don Cheadle, Bernie Mac, Carl Reiner, Elliott Gould and Andy Garcia and newcomers Catherine Zeta-Jones and Bruce Willis--and they just make Clooney seem bigger. Even around Pitt, he's still the alpha male. When the Ocean's actors needed to get away from the crowds who waited outside their hotel, Clooney would shout "Hey! It's Brad Pitt!", so that the fans would swarm the star and the others could walk to their cars in peace. "We'd chum the water with him," he says, sitting under a small, framed photo of the Sinatra Rat Pack on a mantel.

Because Clooney thinks of celebrity as something that is happening to him rather than who he is, he's able to exploit the power of fame for creative control. Since forming the production company Section Eight in 2000 with director Steven Soderbergh, with whom he had worked on Out of Sight, Clooney the producer has used Clooney the actor as barter. He did it to get Warner Bros. to make next year's Good Night and Good Luck, a movie about Edward R. Murrow's battle with Joseph McCarthy that CBS, Murrow's old network, had passed on as a TV movie. "It's hard to shoot something in black and white," Clooney says. "If I say I'll be in it for scale and direct it for scale, it helps a lot."

The downside to putting on passion projects is that they rarely make any money. Section Eight has made 23 film and television projects in the past four years, but none besides Ocean's Eleven has made a profit. "Steven and I are massively in the hole for Section Eight. Massively. We figured the other day that we are each $850,000 in the hole," Clooney says of the partnership, in which they have agreed to finance any project the other feels strongly about. Nevertheless, it's a relationship that he believes more star-director combos should attempt. "I think it's really irresponsible to make really crappy movies for the up-front money," he says. "If you need a job or are just coming up, by all means take the job. I was in Return of the Killer Tomatoes. But if you have the ability to green-light a script, I think it's wrong."

Clooney and Soderbergh don't get much in acting and directing fees, owing to their willingness to swap cash for creative control. "I got paid more on K Street as a union camera operator than as a producer," Clooney says of the political-drama series they did for HBO. But on Ocean's Eleven, Clooney the actor made such a phenomenal amount on his percentage of the gross that he's still living off it. "We're basically living Ocean's to Ocean's," he says.

Although it's the company's only profit source, Clooney says the Ocean's franchise is finished, partly because corralling all the actors and stringing together the intricate plotline are too hard on Soderbergh and partly because capers, Clooney learned firsthand, are trickier than they look. During shooting, his Lake Como house was broken into four times by the same guys, who were after a safe. "The second time they came, they put Jergens lotion all over the hardwood floor to slide it out. At least I hope that's all they were using the lotion for," he says.

In addition to the Murrow movie, Section Eight has eight projects awaiting release, including an improvised sitcom about actors, premiering on Jan. 9 on HBO, and is developing a mini-series for FX comprising 10 short dramas based on the Ten Commandments, as well as 12 more films. Both partners are heavily involved in all of them. "They each put in several years of work on The Jacket," says Mandalay Pictures CEO Peter Guber about a small-budget thriller he's making with Soderbergh and Clooney, starring Adrien Brody and Keira Knightley. "They really get into the details of the business. They come to meetings and are involved in everything, even approving one sheets [movie posters]." Maybe because that's where the star sees his future. "You can't be an actor for too long," Clooney says. "If you're 60, you don't want to be hoping a casting agent likes you."

Or that you like the director. Though he's proud of Three Kings, Clooney says he will never again work with David O. Russell. "I don't know if he's bipolar. But he is crazy. I can't stand him," says Clooney, who reportedly came to blows with Russell because he felt the director was bullying an extra. "David tries to sell the idea of screaming and yelling and hitting as a way to get a performance out of people. But when he's screaming at a cameraman, then it's just that he's not in control." Russell, through a spokesman, declined to comment except to say that their clash was over a long time ago. But Clooney's decision to stand up to him illustrates another trait. He is one of the few leading men who come off as adults. He's 43, but--unlike most other actors--he often plays older.

Clooney, who is a hard-core Democrat, wants to bring some of that full-grown masculinity to his party and uses the term "ruthless liberalism" as an antidote to compassionate conservatism. Clooney's father Nick, a former Cincinnati, Ohio, anchorman and host on cable's American Movie Classics, ran for Congress in Kentucky as a Democrat and got crushed. Though George raised funds, he didn't do any campaigning for his dad. "It would have been Hollywood versus the heartland," he says. "I definitely would have hurt him." Charm, apparently, will go only so far.

You get a sense that Clooney's passion for acting will run its course sooner rather than later. He gained 30 lbs. in 30 days for a role in Syriana, a Soderbergh-produced film about oil corruption with Damon and Amanda Peet. Although he has worked off 18 lbs. playing basketball and eating light, he regrets taking the role. "There was not one thing that was fun about it," he says. "It really messed me up. I have these migraines now. I would trade not having done the movie for the pain it's caused me." But then he catches himself and realizes how he sounds. "Even a migraine," he says, putting the grin back on, "sounds like a Hollywood thing." It's pretty charming when you can be self-aware with a splitting headache.