14 DAY TRIAL // Almost a week ago, George Clooney gave an interview to trade publication Deadline expressing his disappointment and outrage at Sony Pictures’ decision to pull “The Interview” from the release schedule because hackers from #GOP had threatened them.
Also then, he went out of his way to say that, with the cancelation, Sony was giving in to terrorism and infringing upon freedom of speech and of artistic expression. To stress that he wasn’t just a loudmouth, he said he tried to get Sony bosses to see things his way by launching a petition with his CAA agent Bryan Lourd, which he sent to all studio executives and industry people.
The petition was a “we stand together for freedom” type of text, but no one would sign it. He wouldn’t name any names but he did say this much: everyone he approached told him that they would sign it if they weren’t the first name on the list and since no one wanted to be that, no one signed in the end.
This failure made George Clooney disappointed in all Hollywood and this tendency to bury their heads in the sand to pretend that a problem doesn’t exist.
A problem does exist but it’s not what Clooney says it is. THR approached all major studios for comment on this and executives say that they never saw or even heard of the petition until the actor went to the media to brag / lament about it.
Universal, Disney, 20th Century Fox, Warner Bros. and talent agencies UTA and WME have gone on the record saying they have no knowledge of the petition. Paramount wouldn’t comment, but insiders tell the publication that they didn’t see it either.
“I never heard of it until I saw press about a petition not getting signed,” a studio boss says, asking to have their identity withheld. “No one I know has heard of it. We were just discussing that, of course, we would've signed it, but we had never heard of it, and these were a lot of high-level industry people.”
So either all these studio bosses and industry people are lying, or George is. Who do you think it is? By the way, “The Interview” is getting a theatrical release after all, so no, the terrorists have not won.
