Fascinations: June 2011

"Please don't use my words out of context."

favorite song is "Destination Moon" by Dinah Washington
favorite novel is Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace"

i love the textures here;
the hair, beard, skin, shirt, jacket,
the tones and the feel of this.

"You never really learn much from hearing yourself talk."

"You can't really blame outside forces for things not working out.
You have to take some responsibility."

"The best advice I got was;
don't wake up at seventy years old sighing over what you should have tried.
Just do it, be willing to fail, and at least you gave it a shot."

"The only failure is not to try."

aging perfectly.

When he was 38, he bet both Michelle Pfeiffer and Nicole Kidman $10,000 each
that he wouldn't be a father by the time he turned 40.
They were both wrong, and each sent him a check.
George returned the money,
betting double or nothing that he wouldn't be married by age 50.

Putting to rest aligations of plastic surgery;
"I did get my balls done, though. I got them unwrinkled.
It's the new thing in Hollywood -- ball ironing."

"I never wear makeup for movies and now it's starting to show.
It's funny, because most male actors work with actresses who are considerably younger.
But earlier in my career I was working with a lot of actresses
who were my age or older so people always thought I was older anyway;
and now I'm going through this thing with people thinking I'm about 60.
But I'm kind of comfortable with getting older
because it's better than the other option, which is being dead.
So I'll take getting older."

"Here's your options: Live long enough to watch your friends die, or die young.
Now, I'm not pessimistic at all. I'm just saying I realize that's true.
I don't want to see any of my buddies die,
and I don't have any interest in dying young, either.
But I had to come to terms with what I'm not going to do."

"I don't believe in happy endings, but I do believe in happy travels,
because ultimately, you die at a very young age,
or you live long enough to watch your friends die.
It's a mean thing, life."

“What you learn after you're 40 is it's just about plugging up holes in the boat."

The Fabric of George Clooney.
when i visited Mood (fabric store in new york),
i got to touch the actual material this coat was cut from.

"Once people have a few drinks, they get brave.
All of a sudden, there is a crowd of guys going, "Dude!" and hanging on to me.
They want to buy me a drink and sit down and talk.
But I've got my friends, see. I don't want a bunch of guys coming over to buy me drinks.
The funny part is what I end up doing: I'm polite and I sit and talk to them.
I wind up doing the things a girl would do in the same sort of situation at a bar."

"Here's an example of how it works.
I had never been to the Playboy Mansion and really wanted to go.
When I finally did, it was for one of the Mansion's pajama parties,
where I was hanging out with Leonardo DiCaprio and Jim Carrey.
We were all sort of protecting one another;
you don't want to seem like you're desperate.
I grew up with the magazine, so naturally I wanted to see the Grotto.
When I got there, I was cornered by about 15 people, most of them pretty girls.
But it's not like you might imagine.
Instead, they all wanted to have their picture taken with me.
When that happens, it's like you're a cardboard cutout for people to stand next to.
It's not like talking to a girl and getting to know her.
At the height of it, when there were people pulling at me from every direction
and it was at its most embarrassing, some guy comes over and says,
"Look at this sh*t, man! You got it made! Chicks are all over you."
Meanwhile, I was thinking how much easier it was before this.
Then it was just about being a guy talking to a girl
and all the other stuff that's so interesting about dating -that dance you do.
You see somebody at a party and lock eyes and eventually get closer and closer to each other.
Somehow you find a way to talk and maybe-all that stuff. That's a turn-on.
That has been taken away from me.
If you were to ask what I miss about the anonymity that I used to have,
it's that experience, that slow and natural getting to know someone-that kind of electricity."

"I've got eight buddies, the boys. They've been my friends for 20 years.
Every Sunday we ride motorcycles and play basketball together.
For Christmas this year, the boys came out and there were new bikes sitting out there
-new Indians for each of them.
The best part of having money is sharing it with your buddies.
I lived on their closet floors when I was broke and they had money and were working.
They've been through this whole ride with me.
So now, when someone comes up to me and says, "You're so brilliant,"
they look over at me and go, "Man, can you believe that sh*t?"
I met them when I first moved out here, in acting classes.
Richard Kind, who's on "Spin City", is one of them.
When his father died of a heart attack,
Richard called and said he was going to Trenton for the funeral.
All the boys were immersed in work at that point and had no time,
but I called them up and told them what happened.
There were no commercial flights available, so I chartered a jet.
We didn't tell him we were coming.
We sat in the back of the synagogue and Richard was in front with his back to us.
When he got up and started to talk about his dad, he saw us and started sobbing.
He said, "I'm sorry, but I just saw my best friends back there."
There was this amazing feeling that every one of these guys had dropped everything just to be there.
That's what it's like. People like that keep you sane."

"I can still remember sitting on the closet floor of my buddy's house, completely broke.
My friends would want to go out to dinner, to get a hamburger, and I couldn't afford to go.
They had the money to pay, but I didn't want them to pay. That happened a lot.
At one point, I remember my buddy Brad loaning me a hundred dollars.
He's now running our production company.
I'm still paying that debt off, you know?"

yes. to both.

"I think people in Italy live their lives better than we do.
It's an older country, and they've learned to celebrate dinner and lunch,
whereas we sort of eat as quickly as we can to get through it.
We're constantly going – work, work, work."

"I bought a piano once because I had the dream of playing As Time Goes By
as some girl's leaning on it drinking a martini. Great image.
But none of it worked out. I can't even play Chopsticks.
But I've got a nice piano at my house!"

"I'd think, 'In a relationship, we should never have his kind of fight.'
Then, instead of figuring out how to make it work,
I looked for a way to get out of it.
The truth is, you shouldn't be married if you're that kind of person."

"Here is my theory in debunking photographs in magazines.
You know, the paparazzi photographs.
I want to spend every single night for three months
going out with a different famous actress.
You know, Halle Berry one night, Salma Hayek the next,
and then walk on the beach holding hands with Leonardo DiCaprio.
People would still buy the magazines,
they'd still buy the pictures, but they would always go,
'I don't know if these guys are putting us on or not.'"

i loved from Dusk til Dawn.
this would be a perfect movie for the drive-in.

"I once had lunch with a movie producer
who was completely dismissive and rude to our waiter,
which told me all I needed to know about him"

"It's not about an opening weekend.
It's about a career, building a set of films you're proud of. Period."

"The last real movie stars were probably Redford and Newman.
And things were different then.
There wasn't this amazing amount of magazines and information about them."

Rupert Everett told The Independent;
"Clooney thinks that, provided he does films which are politically committed,
he's allowed to do Ocean's 11, 12, and 13.
But the Ocean's movies are a cancer to world culture.
They're destroying us."
"You go, Where did that come from?" George says.
"You kind of go, Dude, weren't you in Dunston Checks In?"

"Daniel Day-Lewis sort of irritates all of us because he's so good.
I'll tell you right now, I don't like him!"

"You cannot make a good film out of a bad script.
You can make a bad film out of a good script - easily.
I've seen that happen before,
but you can't do it the other way around."

george as Kip.
screen capture i snapped from Murder She Wrote season 3.
his voice was really high. it cracked me up. this was pre-roseanne, even.
cmon. "KIP" !?

"Had I not got the Thursday night ten o'clock slot at "ER",
if they'd put us on Friday night,
then I wouldn't have a film career.
That's luck, not my own genius, ...though I like to think it was."

seriously!

"Sense of humor is No. 1 for me.
It's certainly what's most attractive.
It's not the first thing you notice at 21,
but it's the first thing you notice now."

"If I do get beaten down by Fabio, that will be far worse than the pain."

"I'd rather have a rectal examination on live TV
by a fellow with cold hands
than have a Facebook page!"

"I predict the death of the guy who stands under an elephant."

The SUV pulls up to the photo studio.
Or what is supposed to be a photo studio.
It's an unmarked brown door on a deserted street in Brooklyn.
"Where the hell are we?" asks Clooney. "This is a hit, isn't it?"

I show him a site called "George Clooney is GAY GAY GAY."
Clooney starts to read:
George Clooney's life parallels Rock Hudson's way too much to be a coincidence.
He dates beautiful women and nothing happens and they disappear into oblivion.
"That's because I eat them."
So . . . any truth to this?
"No. I'm gay, gay. The third gay -- that was pushing it."

Regarding this film;
"Republicans hate the beginning of the movie,
the Democrats hate the end.
So we're good."

"Directing is really exciting.
In the end, it's more fun to be the painter than the paint."

In 2003, George Clooney said:
"The problem is, we elected a manager and we need a leader. Let's face it: Bush is just dim."
..."That was 2003?" he says now. "Gee, gosh, I was wrong about that.
Bush turned out to be really great at all this."

"It's true information is harder to get these days.
When I was growing up there were three networks
- three news shows, delivering the same information.
You took that information into your home and you formed your own opinions.
Now we have 130 channels.
You go to the channel that plays to your belief pattern.
We start with different sets of facts, it's more polarizing."

"If celebrity is a credit card, I'm using my credit.
My job is to try and find ways of talking about issues that move us forward.
I don't make policy, but I can shine a light on faulty or good policy.
The Not On Our Watch launch reached more than 9 million people.
We need to focus global attention on the plight of the 2.5 million civilians who have fled their homes.
Rather than talk about who I'm dating, let's talk about saving lives."

"Help look out for people that are less fortunate than you
and challenge people that are in power."

...
these helped:
http://www.esquire.com/features/george-clooney-0408
http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/g/george_clooney.html
http://www.cnn.com/2011/SHOWBIZ/01/20/clooney.piers.morgan/index.html