George: with a new movie about another time when anxiety, fear and suspicion cast a shadow over American life, George Clooney asks hard questions about two subjects close to his heart: the country's freedom and the power of television

We may now live in an era when the television news media seems fraught with credibility issues, but George Clooney's latest directorial effort, Good Night, and Good Luck, captures a moment in the early days of broadcast journalism when its true power was just starting to be realized. The film, which hits theaters this month, tracks the exploits of famed CBS newsman and See It Now host Edward R. Murrow (played in the film by David Strathairn), who, along with his producers Fred Friendly and Joe Wershba, fought through the political pressures, corporate concerns, and atmosphere of fear that predominated over early '50s America to take on Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose civil liberties-trampling campaign to root out Communist sympathizers in America Murrow--and, as it turned out, most of America--would come to view as little more than a witch hunt. For Clooney, the film is a personal one, having grown up around newsrooms with his father, Nick Clooney, who was himself a television newsman. Here, the actor and director, who also appears next month in the CIA thriller Syriana, talks to pioneering producer Norman Lear, the man who gave him his first break in television more than two decades ago on a short-lived sitcom ironically titled E/R.

NORMAN LEAR: Hey, George.

GEORGE CLOONEY: Hello, Norman. How are you, my friend?

NL: If I had a complaint I'd be an ingrate.

GC: [laughs] I enjoy complaining though. Hey, how about Peter Jennings today?

NL: Yeah that was sad. Terribly sad.

GC: I really admired him. He was the last of the guys to really ask the tough questions at the tough times.

NL: As you know, we've been on this tour over the last couple of years, taking an original copy of the Declaration of Independence around the country, and we had it up at the Time Warner building in New York about eight months ago. It was just before Peter announced he was iii, and, my God, I'll never forget him that night. He had only recently become an American citizen.

GC: He was very proud of his new citizenship.

NL: He was so proud of it. He spoke for about 10 minutes, and he was so off-the-cuff and eloquent.

GC: It was such a funny thing, because he kept his Canadian citizenship for so long as a tribute to his parents. Then, when he finally decided to become American, he went out and bragged about getting a perfect score on his citizenship test and was able to vote in only one election before he got sick and died. In a way that seems sort of tragic.

NL: He had another connection with your film: He was another guy in the news media who smoked.

GC: Yeah, he sure did. It was actually one of the reasons that we put a cigarette ad in the film. I'm a big non-smoker, and since we weren't doing a biopic where you would see that all these news guys who smoke in the movie eventually would up dying of lung cancer later, we didn't want to just glamorize it. When you put people smoking in a movie, you can make it look really attractive. So I wanted to put in that Kent commercial just to say that we're not condoning smoking, but we can't avoid it. So many people now try to rewrite history by taking it out when they make movies. NL: I was a four-pack-a-day smoker.

GC: Were you really?

NL: I was. When I was writing, I smoked incessantly. Then I made a film called Cold Turkey [1971], about a town that's impelled by a big $25 million offer from a cigarette company to give up smoking. So I said to myself, "I will quit smoking the day I start filming." So I got off the plane and didn't smoke for a few days. Then on the first day of shooting, I found out that Barnard Hughes, who played a surgeon who was a four-pack-a-day smoker in the film, had never smoked a cigarette in his life, so I had to show him how to achieve orgasm. [Clooney laughs] Finally, I just said, "Well, God, you want me to smoke. I'll smoke till the bitch is over."

GC: And how long ago was it that you quit?

NL: When we made the film in '68 or some thing like that.

GC: Do you have any itches for it now?

NL: I will smoke a few cigars in the course of a year. I love the smoke. If there is a reason to believe in God, it would be the Havana Leaf. [both laugh]

GC: My grandparents back in Kentucky owned a tobacco farm. So to make money in the summer we would cut and chop and top and house and strip the tobacco. It sure made you not want to smoke.

NL: You never smoked?

GC: No, never. You know I had ten great aunts and uncles on my father's side, and six of them died of lung cancer. Rosemary [Clooney's aunt] died of lung cancer, too, and she had emphysema. Both my grandparents died of lung cancer. So I got quite a lesson in the payback later in life of smoking and if you keep it up how bad it can be. it was very sad about Jennings though, because I remember right after 9/11 when it was difficult to ask the really tough questions, he was the only guy who did. And during the lead up to the war when no one was really asking those questions, he seemed to be the one to say, "Okay, unfortunately I have to ask you, Mr. President, about these things." I always found that to be so courageous at a network where it's a very hard thing to do. You ask one tough question, and you get sent to the back of the press room and never get called on again.