Doin’ It Live

Fuck it! We’ll do it live! These, of course, are the immortal words of Bill O’Reilly. But George Clooney had a similar thought recently—involving a different former CBS newsman—when he decided to mount a live televised production of Good Night, and Good Luck, a Broadway play that he cowrote, based on a movie that he cowrote, based on Edward R. Murrow’s famous takedown of the demagogue Joseph McCarthy in the fifties. (In the movie, Clooney played Murrow’s producer Fred Friendly, but in the stage show, he plays Murrow himself.) While numerous Broadway shows have been filmed for subsequent distribution in recent years—think Hamilton on Disney+—broadcasting live is unusual. Clooney has suggested that he was motivated to do it, in part, by the fact that Murrow’s newscasts went out live. (“There’s no safety net,” he told the New York Times, “and it’s a fun thing to do.”) Putting the show on TV also offered a chance to see it without shelling out for a ticket, the average price of which has hovered in the three-hundred-dollar range. CNN agreed to air it for free.