Fail Safe (thank you Shelby, Mac, Ann, Nathalie, Barb, Phyl, Joanne, Cece, Lisa, Linda and me!)

Soap Opera Update, 4/11/00

US Magazine, 4/17/00

ON THE BRINK
George Clooney leads old pal Noah Wyle and Richard Dreyfuss into a daring live-TV production of FAIL-SAFE by Johanna Schneller

The role George Clooney chose for himself in Fail-Safe, a cautionary tale set in the '60's about a nuclear catastrophe, which CBS will air live--live!-- on April 9, is that of a pilot en route to Moscow with an atom bomb. This is no accident Clooney, 38, is Fail-Safe's commander, in every way. The idea for this unusual TV broadcast was his. In addition to starring in the drama, he's producing it. He assembled the cast: Richard Dreyfuss, 52, as the president of the US; Noah Wyle, 28, as a translator ; and a pantheon of manliness--Harvey Keitel, Brian Dennehy, Sam Elliott--as military experts. (Clooney sent each of them a handwritten note along with the script, personally asking them to come and play.) He picked the crew, including director Stephen Frears (Dangerous Liaisons, High Fidelity), co producer Laura Ziskin (who produced Pretty Woman) and as many veterans of live TV as he could find. (Which is not many; live-TV dramas, such as the weekly Playhouse 90, evaporated nearly 40 years ago.) He persuaded CBS head Les Moonves to air Fail-Safe in black&white because it's truer to the period and mood of the piece. (West Coast audiences will see a B&W video tape of the drama.) Clooney even designed the promotional poster. He actually sat down and cut out photographs, pasted them on paper, then photocopied it to get the right retro look. "I said to him. 'You really are the full-service producer.'" says Ziskin.

"Yeah, it seems right that I play the idiot who can't be called back," Clooney says, laughing, in his office on the Warner Bros lot during a break in rehearsals. "Everybody understands: It's me that's going to destroy everything."

Clooney's in charge alright, but it's the opposite of a disaster.  Fail-Safe is his first foray back into television since leaving ER last year, and it symbolizes the status he has attained. After 15 years of kicking around Hollywood in lackluster projects (plus a year on Sisters and another on Roseanne), he finally hit it big as  pediatrician-Lothario Doug Ross on ER, then parlayed his popularity into bona fide movie stardom (Batman and Robin, Out of Sight, Three Kings), He has two big films coming out in the next few months: Oh Brother, Where Art Thou?, about a 1930's prison break, which he calls "probably the best movie I'll ever be in, in my life"; and The Perfect Storm, based on Sebastian Junger's bestseller about a nautical nightmare, which blows into theaters June 30.   Clooney will also star in the remake of the Rat Pack classic Ocean's 11, opposite Brad Pitt and Julia Roberts. Fail-Safe is his answer to the question "Now that you can do anything, what do you want to do?" And if it's a risk, well that's also the rush.

In Noah Wyle's office, near the ER set on the Warner Bros lot, there is a big bowl of Tootsie Pops on a table, plus four SAG Awards (for ensemble acting in ER) on the bookshelf. the SAG Award, call the  Actor, is a foot-high statue of a naked man holding the comedy and tragedy masks. "Yeah, he's everyone's idea of the perfect actor," says Wyle, "No mouth and a great ass."

In person, Wyle is impossibly fine-boned and young looking. He's dressed not in his actual translator's costume but in character all the same, in a gray suit and a crisp, white shirt. "If I'm going to be wearing lace-up shoes and a jacket (for a part), I like to rehearse in that, so I don't suddenly find myself moving in the wrong ways," he says.

Wyle was one of the first people Clooney signed on for Fail-Safe, he  got him to agree while they were playing basketball at Clooney's house.  Wyle didn't think about it again for a year and a half, until he read the start date in the Hollywood trade publications. Now he's high on adrenaline, 'playing doctor' for ER in the mornings and spending afternoons in a windowless bunker set with Dreyfuss. "It's like when I was in seventh grade and made the all-star team in baseball" he says "Suddenly you find yourself throwing the ball around with all these guys you've heard about, and you just think to yourself 'Wow, I made the squad' I'm low man on the totem pole, but what a beautiful totem pole."

His only goal, says Wyle, is "to not f--- up on show night. half the people tune in to watch you succeed, and the other half tune in to watch you fail. Suddenly you're on the edge of your seat, and it has nothing to do with special effects. It's just the bare-bones acting of a bunch of guys in a room together, which you're seeing as it happens."

Which is why he loved that at the table reading, Clooney kept it light and informal. "He made everybody feel extremely welcome. he said, 'A lot of people said no, but everybody at this table said yes. We're all in this together.' His energy is infectious. I love seeing him finally arrive at the place where I know he's always wanted to be which is in a position to push challenging material and to give opportunities to his friends."

"George is definitely the most loyal person I've ever met in my life,"  Wyle continues. "Friendship, loyalty and good work all mean something  to him. He's making a career out of marrying those three, which not many are able to do."

On a wall in the Fail-Safe production bunker, four wall clocks, set to correspond to the films four time zones (Moscow, Washington DC, Nebraska, and Anchorage, Alaska) tick away. Clooney appears loose and relaxed. Though his brown hair is spiked with gray, his face is tanned and unlined, and his eyes are the dark, burning brown of the last cup of coffee in the pot. His frame, clad in khakis, a much-washed black t-shirt and scuffed work boots, is smaller than it looks onscreen, but the muscles packed onto it like lumps of clay. He looks totally at  home in it. He looks happy.

"George makes everyone around him work very hard, but with a smile on their face," says Hank Azaria, who's playing a fanatic academic in Fail-Safe and who has known Clooney for years. "You can tell it means a lot to him, and you want to rise to the occasion. You can also tell that he's working twice as hard as you are."

Fail-Safe began life in 1962 as a best selling novel by Harvey Wheeler and Eugene Burdick. In 1964, Sidney Lumet made a film of it, which starred Henry Fonda as the president and a cast of somber, interchangeable men in dark suits. It's full of lines like "Technology acts faster than men can think" and "History depends on what each of us does," intoned with the utmost solemnity. Ant it's been one of Clooney's favorite movies since he happened upon it as a teenager flipping TV channels on a lazy weekday afternoon. He has since seen it "literally a hundred times," he says " And every time I see it, it just stops me cold."

Not only was Clooney raised on live TV, his father, Nick, hosted a live variety show in Cincinnati, then went on to be a newsreader in LA and, recently, a host on American Movie Classics. From the age of 5, George helped out, gophering and appearing in promotions for potato chips and Ivory liquid soap. "He saw all the successes and failures, the joys and headaches, of show business. He learned not to buy into the hype," says the actor Miguel Ferrer (Clooney's cousin, whose mother, singer Rosemary Clooney, also knew a thing or two about being famous).

"Live television is all or nothing," says Clooney. "If one thing screws up and we don't have it on the night, then we have nothing. Which is the point." The live episode of ER, which opened the show's 98-99 season, was his idea. "We didn't do it that well. when you see it shot in the same style but on video, it just throws you off. It's like a porno film without the sex."

Clooney can reel off a breathtaking list of the technical innovations that will keep Fail-Safe out of that trap. There are four sets housed in two separate soundstages on the Warner Bros lot. They'll use 16 cameras, including Steadicams hidden inside fake computer terminals on wheels, which cameramen dressed in air-force uniforms will push around.  The show's cinematographer, John Alonzo, shot Chinatown. The set designer has a Tony Award. The soundman, Ed Green, had to devise technology to synch up the four room tones. Oscar-winning editor Anne Coates (Lawrence of Arabia), whom Clooney met on Out of Sight, came in to help Frears choose shots in advance. (When asked how he was preparing himself to direct live, Frears responded drolly, "You mean what tablets I'm taking?") The budget is $5 million--cheap for a theatrical film, but Clooney claims that Fail-Safe is one of the most expensive two-hour made-for-TV drama ever made.

It is also an all-out, old fashioned festival of manhood, the kind of film, like All Quiet on The Western Front, that Clooney adores. "It both celebrates masculinity and says that what men do is insane. Let's face it: if the world was run by women, we wouldn't be blowing each other up," he says "But nothing will make me cry harder in a movie than a guy who's never going to show his emotions in a tragic situation. It just devastates me, that attempt to hold on to that sort of masculinity."

Indeed, a large part of Clooney's appeal is that his is masculine through and through, without having to define, explain or apologize for it. From his father, he says, he learned to be a "door-opening, chair-pulling-out, stand-up-when-a-girl-comes-in kind of guy." he knows what a man is and he knows what's good and bad about it. For example, he likes Robert Bly's Iron John (and the men's movement the book generated) for acknowledging that men have lost some of their status in society; he doesn't like it, however, when men use that as an excuse for chauvinism.

"In my company" -- Maysville Pictures, named for a Kentucky town he grew up in -- "I'm surrounded by incredibly capable and talented women," he says "because when I was first starting out, I didn't have much money, and I knew that I could hire a woman with twice as much talent and credentials as a man for less money." Now that Maysville ahs eight films in active development, a partnership with Out of Sight director Steven Soderbergh and a TV deal, Clooney "pays the women what a man would be paid, But I'm very clear-eyed about how it works."

Richard Dreyfuss knows everyone at Art's Deli (WHERE EVERY SANDWICH IS A WORK OF ART read a sigh outside) on Ventura Blvd. in Studio City. He's dressed like a golfer on his day off, with a baseball cap that he occasionally lifts off to run a hand over his smooth head. 

"I applaud any attempt by anyone to do anything arrhythmia," the actor says over eggs and iced coffee. "Isn't it true that George spent the 10 years before ER hovering, his face at the windowpane? That gives a person the desire to seize the moment."

Dreyfuss agreed to seize Fail-Safe for a number of reasons. One, he's playing the president, which is a pretty good role. "I've never played a character of this authority or dilemma," he says "This is a guy who can't fidget, and that very much appealed to me."

Two, it's a chance for him to explain to his teenage daughter what the Cold War was all about, "that there was a time we walked around knowing that there was a real life possibility that we could take the crust off the earth seven times in our lifetime," he says. "In 1962, I hitched a ride home from school with the mother of a friend, Mrs. Mast. And on the radio was the announcement of the blockade of Cuba, and Mrs. Mast could not control her hands on the wheel. I watched that with awe.  That was real."

And three, playing this role is Fail-Safe gives Dreyfuss an opportunity to "Stare down an audience of glib, cynical, distrustful people and make them remember that humans are capable of honor."

Clooney has insisted that Fail-Safe be an "irony-free zone". That the innocence, the seriousness and the naiveté of the early 60's are retained, right down to making sure that now modern 'um's and 'you knows creep into the dialogue. "Look, have we come all that far since 1961?" asks James Cromwell (Babe, The Generals Daughter) who plays computer expert Gordon Knapp. "We have the same reliance eon technology, the same miscommunication, the same demonizing of the enemy. It's all still relevant today. Everyone still just does their job, instead of thing, 'To what end?'" At the broadcasts conclusion Clooney plans to run -- without commentary -- a simple scroll that lists each country  with nuclear capability and the number of bombs that it has. In 1964 only two countries had nuclear weapons. Roughly a dozen possess them now.

There are a couple of things Clooney won't be doing anytime soon. the first is popping up on ER. When Dr. Doug Ross left County General, he also left his TV girlfriend, nurse Carol Hathaway (Julianna Margulies), pregnant with twins. Margulies is exiting the show at the end of this season; it seems a logical time for one last glimpse of Doug. But Clooney says he "never had a conversation with anyone at ER" about coming back for a guest shot. He understands why: From the time he announced, in season four, that he would be leaving, and for a full season after he was gone, "the producers had to deal with the question of whether the show would survive without Doug. Of course it did.  Because the star of that show, which I said all along, is the show."  He says he can see why they don't want to dredge up the issue that there are no hard feelings and that he sees ER exec producer John Wells on the lot all the time.

Still, Clooney calls his send-off, in which Doug defied County protocol, then slunk off to a Seattle HMO with his tail between his legs, "Horribly weak. I was really disappointed in the way they dealt with that. I though it was a cheap way to end with him."

The second thing Clooney won't be doing when Fail-Safe ends is celebrating with a girlfriend. His most recent, model Celine Balitran, ended their three year relationship last year. "My girlfriend now is work," says Clooney. "Any other girl friend around has to come second.  There were moments when Celine would say 'How about a vacation?', but I don't know how to do that right now. If the Coen brothers send me a script that's based on Homer's Odyssey -- and I get to play Ulysses -- I look at that and go 'I have to do it, I have to. I don't know how to turn that down.' And that can cost you a relationship."

"I believe that you only have a short period of time in your life to make your mark, and I'm there right now," Clooney adds firmly. "It's why I did seven films while putting in 12-hr days on ER. I was willing to say 'OK, I won't sleep for six years and I'll work summers, I'll fly in and fly out on the same day.'" He stops for a second, as if he's just heard how earnest he sounds, and laughs at himself. "Yeah, I don't like sleep. Sleep is boring."

Clooney doesn't long for intimacy, he says : "I have a great personal life. I have the closest friends in the world." And he doesn't yearn for children: "I don't have any interest in having replicants." when he was younger, he thought his movies would be his legacy -- until his father asked him to name 10 big stars from the 1920's. George couldn't. "He goes, 'So what you're really buying is 80 years.' Thanks Pop. But he's right. The results only last for a second. they're the icing on the cake, the satellite moments in your life. what you have to love, which I do, is the process, the day-to-day work."

Clooney hopes that live TV will catch on, that there will be interest in redoing some of his other favorites, A Patch of Blue or A Thousand Clowns, maybe four times a year. "Paddy Chayefsky, Rod Serling, Walter Bersnstein, I think these guys are our Shakespeare's, and we should do them live," he says "With Fail-Safe, we find the tension really lies in the stillness. Like when the president says, 'Get me the Soviet premier', and then for 30 seconds they just sit there and wait, completely still, at a table. I want to take away the tricks we've grown used to and desensitize the television viewer to really simple, effective storytelling."

Clooney's on a roll now. He loves this and it shows. "And then at the of this night, April 9, we'll go next door to a soundstage where some people will be watching the monitors, and we're going to pour a drink, and all of us, from the original people of television -- like Harvey Wheeler, who wrote the book; and Walter Bernstein, who was blacklisted, who wrote Lumet's movie and our teleplay; and Ethel Winant, who's older than those two, who was a producer on all the original Playhouse 90's and who's been on our set every day, consulting -- on up to the rest of us, we'll have a toast and go 'Well we gave it a run.' That's fun.  that doesn't happen very often." Unless you're George Clooney and you make it happen.

Seattle Ads

TV Guide (Arizona ads)

Time, 4/10

Canadian TV Guide

TV Guide - American

George Clooney speeds around the studio lot at Warner Bros. in his golf cart as if he were the mayor of Hollywood. Wearing a black T-shirt, khakis and his wide, breezy, gleaming smile, he leans out of the cart and waves at any and all who make eye contact. He has long enjoyed a reputation as one of this town's more down to earth, affable, stars — a friend and defender of the lowliest crew members. But these days his antic friendliness and high spirits are due, at least in part, to the project at hand, a live version of the 1964 film Fail Safe, his first television acting appearance since leaving ER in February 1999.

Based on the best selling 1962 novel by Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler, Fail Safe is a stark nail-biter about the mayhem that ensues when a bomber, misled by a mechanical error, sets out to nuke Moscow. Clooney, 38, first saw the movie in high school. A few years later he saw it again and taped it — "and I watched it and I watched it and I watched it. And then I kept showing it to people," he recalls. Clooney was taken with the movie's spare, theatrical seriousness, reminiscent of the strong storytelling of the landmark live drama series Playhouse 90. The scenes of stillness and silence riveted him. CBS supported his vision of a black-and-white remake, and the network also said yes to doing it live. (Clooney, after all, was the chief instigator behind the live ER episode.)

The network was concerned, though, that the no-frills drama might not hold the attention of today’s audience, but Clooney isn’t worried. "I said, it’s literally like if you come home and someone says, ‘Your father’s been in a car accident. He’s at Cedars Sinai.’ You call the hospital and say, ‘What’s going on?’ And they say, ‘Hold please.’ That period of time when you are holding is everything, when this incredible tension takes place." The analogy in Fail-Safe would be the moment when the president of the United States — faced with the task of informing Russia that a nuclear bomb is headed its way — says, "I’ll talk to the Soviet premier."

"Then you just see him and the translator sitting and waiting," Clooney says. "They don’t do anything for 30 seconds except drink a glass of water. And you can’t take your eyes off them." Without Clooney’s passion — and his willingness to take a role as the pilot flying the bomber in the remake — Fail-Safe would never have happened. Given that the Cold War is over, movies about the Evil Empire are a tough sell, even though the threat of a nuclear catastrophe remains evergreen. (According to Walter Bernstein, who wrote screenplays for both the original and the remake: "When we did it the first time there were just two superpowers with nuclear weapons. Now, if you have a plane flying by mistake over China or India or Pakistan or Israel or France, you’d have the same situation, really.") The truth is that after a checkered career as a film actor, Clooney’s recent successes in such movies as Three Kings and Out of Sight have given him more than enough clout to get his dream projects produced." If I were coming off of Batman & Robin, it would have been a lot harder," he confesses.

As he bounds onto a soundstage, Clooney exchanges exuberant pleasantries with the carpenters who are hard at work. He climbs around the set, thrilled with its authenticity — the sober war room; the computer consoles with their industrial, stripped-down, ’60s-era feel; the cramped cockpit nestled inside a sawed-off nose cone in which he and Don Cheadle (A Lesson Before Dying), who is also playing a bomber pilot, will sit for the entire production. Clooney admits that casting Cheadle, his Out of Sight co-star, was "a bit of a stretch, because, in 1964, quite honestly, there weren’t any black pilots carrying nuclear bombs," he says. But in Clooney’s mind that concern was trumped by Cheadle’s talent. "He’s the best actor I’ve ever worked with," he says. "We’d do a scene and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I held my own in that one.’ Then I’d see it and realize he ate me alive. Just buried me." Richard Dreyfuss takes the Henry Fonda role of president, which means he is stuck in his bunker for most of the movie with ER’s Noah Wyle as Buck, the translator (originally played by Larry Hagman).

Harvey Keitel has the rich role of Blackie (originally played by Dan O’Herlihy), a general whose patriotism is heinously tested. Also in the cast are Brian Dennehy, the Tony award-winning star of Death of a Salesman, and blue-chip character actors such as Hank Azaria, James Cromwell and Sam Elliott. Bowled over by Clooney’s enthusiasm for the piece, Stephen Frears, of Dangerous Liaisons fame, agreed to direct. "George is so passionate about it — rather courageous and old-fashioned," says Frears, 58. "Sort of like a fighter pilot himself. And so you just think, ‘Well, if this guy’s got the guts to do all this, I think I have.’"

Clooney won Wyle over during a game of B-ball. "I was playing defense and he was dribbling the ball," Wyle says. "And he said, ‘I’m thinking about doing Fail-Safe. And I said, ‘The remake?’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, for TV, live. You wanna play Buck?’ And I said, ‘Sure.’" Like Clooney, Wyle, 28, was taken with the narrative- and character-driven power of the material. "Some of the TV-movies in the last couple of years have really played up the digital morphing and animation and blue screens, and this is sort of taking all that and throwing it out and saying, ‘We’re going back to putting on a show in the barn. You sew the costumes and I’m going to make the programs.’" He isn’t exaggerating. Recently, executive producer Laura Ziskin came upon Clooney, also an executive producer, cutting out head shots of the cast that he would later paste on to a promotional poster. It seems the $5.5 million budget (which included a $50,000 salary per principal) didn’t allow for an art director.

For Clooney, the appeal of doing Fail-Safe goes well beyond its narrative integrity. He also gets to inhabit a time period he was actually too young to remember, the ’60s, his favorite. "It was Camelot — there was an innocence," he says of the Kennedy era. "I loved the politics and I loved the singers," he adds, referring to Dean Martin and the rest of the Rat Pack. He also loved the writers Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky and the legendary newsman Walter Cronkite and the race to the moon. "Guys wore hats to work every day. And suits. There was a style to it that we lost after Kennedy was killed, really. After rock and roll and the sexual revolution, everything sort of changed." Indeed, with his short, graying hair, athletic good looks and broadcaster’s voice, it is impossible to imagine Clooney as having ever been anything approaching a hippie. "I’m nostalgic for black and white in a way," he says, "and I don’t mean black and white, the colors. I mean black and white, the feeling. I like things simpler." Simpler, more honest, more honorable, less jaded — which is surely why Clooney declared the working set of Fail-Safe an "irony-free zone."

However retro it might seem, Clooney continues to live by his code: Be kind, open doors for women, pay for their dinner and — above all — be one of the guys. For Clooney, this means being one of "the Boys," as he refers to his eight best friends of 20 years. The Boys have seen one another through endless career woes and personal travails; at various points any number of them, like Spin City’s Richard Kind, have crashed at Clooney’s large house in the Hollywood Hills. When Kind’s father died a few years back, there was little that could have kept Clooney from the funeral; nothing makes him prouder than the fact that he managed to secure a jet at a moment’s notice and fly with the remaining boys to the ceremony in Trenton, New Jersey, thoroughly surprising and comforting Kind. "I love the idea of friends," Clooney says. "There’s something really great about looking over at the same group of guys for 20 years with this familiarity and understanding that, win or lose, we sort of made it through together."

Despite the fact that there are no Boys living with Clooney these days, his life remains Boy-centric (with its nearly all-male cast, Fail-Safe is nothing if not a guy movie), especially now that he and his recent girlfriend of three years, model and former law student Céline Balitran, have broken up. Clooney, who is currently not dating anyone seriously, hardly seems devastated by this turn of events. "I’m a workaholic," he says. "I’m no good at vacationing, and I think that can be a source of frustration to a girl. I think they hate that. They say, ‘I thought you weren’t going to take a job.’" If that’s what they thought, they don’t know George: In addition to Fail-Safe, he stars in The Perfect Storm this summer, as well as in the new Coen brothers movie, O Brother, Where Art Thou? this fall. He’s also running a TV and film production company. The Clooney-produced Metal God is due out within the year and he is planning a remake of the Rat Pack caper Ocean’s 11 with Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt. If Fail-Safe is successful, Clooney wants to do a live remake of the 1965 film A Patch of Blue with Cheadle in the Sidney Poitier role.

Amid the flurry of new challenges, does he ever miss ER? "Not in the least," Clooney says, adding that the show’s stories had become too pat for him by the time he left. "I actually wrote a letter to Lydia [Woodward, executive producer], saying that in the first year of the show we had a guy walk in with an arrow stuck on his head. He asked for admitting, we pointed him in that direction, and we never saw him again. I said, if we did it now, we’d all take him into the emergency room and talk about how amazing it is that he’s alive. And then, you know, Julianna’s [Margulies] character would sort of cry because her parents died from an Indian attack. And I said, you know, that’s the problem now." Clooney says these shortcomings have been rectified and he would consider a guest appearance on the show for Margulies’s exit in May, if anyone asked him, which they haven’t.

It is tempting to ponder what Clooney is compensating for by working so furiously and compulsively. Clearly, he doesn’t need the cash. "I don’t have to make any more money," he says. "And I’m not the idiot that buys six houses. I don’t want six houses. I have one great, giant, beautiful house," which he is currently enhancing with guest quarters and decks all around.

On some level, Clooney is packing in as many projects as he can before his time as a force in Hollywood runs out. Because, as he says, "When you are sick of me, I will go away. And you will get sick of me. That’s the rule." Perhaps. Although anyone audacious enough to take a Cold War story and turn it into the gripping drama that Clooney’s Fail-Safe may very well be is someone who knows how to break the rules.

TV Guide - Canadian

People Magazine, 4/00

Direct TV, 4/00

General Photos

New website up and running!  http://www.FailSafeTV.com

Wednesday March 29, 7:02 am Eastern Time

Company Press Release

SOURCE: Warner Bros. Online

Momentous Live Television Movie 'Fail Safe' to Launch One-of-a-Kind Black & White Web Site Via Warner Bros. Online

Press Conference to Be Webcast Live Wednesday, April 5 with George Clooney, Noah Wyle, Harvey Keitel, Richard Dreyfuss, Don Cheadle and Others Clooney & Wyle to Conduct Online Chat Friday, April 7 at 2:10 PM, PT 

BURBANK, Calif., March 29 /PRNewswire/ -- ``Fail Safe,'' a thrilling black & white television movie (based on the 1962 best-selling novel of the same title) set to broadcast live Sunday, April 9 (9:00-11:00 PM, ET [delayed PT]) on the CBS Television Network, will launch a multi-tiered black & white Web site on Warner Bros. Online: http://www.warnerbros.com or http://www.FailSafeTV.com

George Clooney, who also serves as executive producer, reunites with his former ``ER'' co-star Noah Wyle, in the suspenseful drama in which Cold War tensions climb over a botched military exercise. In the movie, Clooney will play Colonel Jack Grady, a U.S. Air Force pilot who is accidentally ordered to drop a nuclear warhead on Moscow. Wyle will portray Buck, a young translator for the U.S. President (played by Richard Dreyfuss), responsible for communicating his messages to the Russian Chairman. The story follows American military experts and heads of state as they tentatively team with their Russian counterparts and plunge into a crisis of split-second decision-making -- until time runs out.

The Web site itself is set to launch Thursday, March 30 and will include an exclusive audio interview with ``Fail Safe'' executive producer/star George Clooney; a historical interactive timeline of the development of the Atomic Bomb, the film's central focus, and a ``Fail Safe'' screening room with streaming video of ``behind-the-scenes'' footage from the actors' promotional photo shoot and press conference footage. It also contains synopses of the film's historic tale as well as the original novel; biographies of the telefilm's award-winning actors, producers, writers and director as well as a biography of original screenplay writer, Walter Bernstein, and novelists, Harvey Wheeler and Eugene Burdick. 

On Wednesday, April 5 (1:00-2:00PM, PT), the entire cast of ``Fail Safe,'' including Clooney and Wyle, as well as the project's behind-the-scenes talent will participate in a press conference which will be Webcast live by Warner Bros. Online. The event will be rebroadcast in its entirety (check http://www.warnerbros.com for times) and excerpts will be downloadable. Two days later, on Friday, April 7 (2:10-2:30 PM, PT), Clooney and Wyle will conduct a live chat session hosted by America Online an accessible at keyword: AOL Live.

In addition to Clooney and Wyle (``ER,'' ``A Few Good Men''), ``Fail Safe'' also stars Richard Dreyfuss (``Mr. Holland's Opus,'' ``The Goodbye Girl''), Harvey Keitel (``Mean Streets,'' ``Taxi Driver''), Hank Azaria (``The Birdcage,'' ``Grosse Pointe Blank''), Brian Dennehy (``Presumed Innocent,'' ``Cocoon''), James Cromwell (``The General's Daughter,'' ``The Green Mile''), Sam Elliott (``The Big Lebowski,'' ``Tombstone''), Don Cheadle (``Boogie Nights,'' ``Bulworth''), William Smitrovich (``Life Goes On,'' ``Independence Day''), John Diehl (``The Client'') and Norman Lloyd (``Dead Poets Society,'' ``Journey of Honor''). The production team behind ``Fail Safe,'' charged with successfully broadcasting a live event of this magnitude, includes executive producer Laura Ziskin (``No Way Out,'' ``Pretty Woman,'' and ``As Good As It Gets''), director Stephen Frears (``Dangerous Liaisons,'' ``The Grifters'' and ``Mary Reilly''), famed screenwriter, Walter Bernstein (who returns to write the screenplay for the live broadcast and who originally authored the screenplay for the 1964 film of the same title), and producer Ethel Winant (``Playhouse 90''), a television industry pioneer.

``Fail Safe'' is being produced by George Clooney's Maysville Pictures, in association with Warner Bros. Television.  George Clooney, Pam Williams and Laura Ziskin are the executive producers; Tom Park is the producer. ``Fail Safe'' is sponsored in part by Ford Motor Company's Ford Division, which is represented by Ford Motor Media and J. Walter Thompson, and by State Farm Insurance Companies, which are represented by DDB Worldwide.

Warner Bros. Online (warnerbros.com) is positioned to become the ultimate Internet entertainment destination, offering the best of what the best has to offer. Providing an exclusive, official entry point into all things that are Warner Bros., complete with breaking news, detailed information, exclusive proprietary still images and video clips, movie trailers and ad campaigns, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, contests, interactive fan opportunities and e-commerce related to all Warner Bros.-based entertainment, and also featuring exclusive, innovative original content that may or may not be drawn from popular Warner Bros. icons. Warner Bros. Online is accessible on the World Wide Web at http://www.warnerbros.com 

Warner Bros. Online contact: Cathy Dore, 818-977-8864, cdore@wb.com  

SOURCE: Warner Bros. Online

Back to Sights and Sounds