George Clooney is not Jay Kelly. That much he is sure of.
But when a famous movie star of a certain age decides to take on a role as a famous movie star of a certain age, full of regrets and realizing that he’s missed out on so much of his own life in pursuit of greatness and fame, it does invite some questions.
Clooney, 64, wasn’t thinking about all that when Noah Baumbach called him about the part. He was just thinking about how hard it is to get good roles the older he gets.
“I was predisposed to want to do it before I even read it,” Clooney said in a recent interview.
He wasn’t the only one. Adam Sandler, Laura Dern and Billy Crudup were just a few of the many stars of “Jay Kelly,” streaming on Netflix on Friday, who pretty much signed on script unread. Baumbach’s name, as the writer-director behind “Marriage Story” and “The Squid and the Whale,” has that kind of effect on actors, from those he’s worked with before, to those who’ve just admired him from afar.
“Jay Kelly,” which Baumbach wrote with Emily Mortimer, wasn’t just a clever character study but a lovingly clear-eyed portrait of the strange business of Hollywood moviemaking and the personalities involved — the managers (Sandler), the publicists (Dern), the makeup artists (Mortimer), the best actor from acting class who didn’t make it (Crudup), and, of course, the one who did (Clooney).
“It’s so lush in its appreciation for the sort of carnival life of actors and the proximity to some kind of gilded, glorious life that’s always tantalizingly close,” Crudup said. “We use movie stars as some kind of analogy about what it means to be successful and have a happy life, when in fact, that’s smoke and mirrors. And if you’re too busy looking out for that, you’re gonna miss the life that you have.”
Fame, failure and figuring out what matters
Clooney saw the trappings of fame, especially when achieved too young, through the lens of his very famous aunt Rosemary Clooney, at a safe distance from his home in Kentucky.
“She got her fame at 16, and it was big. She was on a cover of Time magazine,” he said. “And she believed all the stuff when they tell you how great you are … Then the business changed and she wasn’t prepared for that. If you believe the first part, you gotta believe the second part.”
Failure, which he came to appreciate through many, many rejections, was an important part of the game. Clooney was in his 30s when he launched into the stratosphere with “ER.”
“You can’t be an actor and not fail,” he said. “And that’s the risk, right? That’s why when it’s successful it pays off. It’s because you’re willing to risk humiliation.”
Jay Kelly, after the death of the filmmaker who gave him his first break and a run-in with his old acting school buddy, starts to take stock of his life and relationships. He has one estranged daughter and one headed that way: She’s backpacking through Europe before college. And he decides to follow her across the Atlantic under the pretense of having to get to Italy for a life achievement award, leaving his team baffled and trying to pick up the pieces.
“There’s something inherently confusing about spending your life pretending to be other people,” Mortimer said. “There’s this push and pull constantly because you’re interested in reality and so you want to help tell stories about it. But it’s much easier to bear life in this kind of contained way.”
Clooney doesn’t have Jay Kelly’s regrets. He likes to say if he got hit by a bus tomorrow, he’d be OK with what he left behind — good relationships with friends, family and a few great films. But like Jay Kelly, Clooney is someone who can’t exactly walk onto a train and go unnoticed.
The people behind the star
There’s a recurring joke where Jay Kelly says he’s always alone and his daughter counters that he’s never alone. Movie stars, especially, are constantly, if not surrounded by, in touch with, their “teams.”
Sandler and Dern, both Baumbach veterans, didn’t have to look too far to prepare to play manager and publicist. They’ve had their own for many years.
“I did sit in the room and watch my agent make a lot of calls. And, by the way, he made so many while texting at the same time, I’m like, is he concentrating at all on any of these?” Sandler laughed. “I did see the passion and the warmth. And when he would stop texting and go straight to the phone, I knew it was business.”
Dern said she’s been watching her publicist raise her since she was 19 years old.
“They’ve been growing with us,” Dern said. “It’s hopefully an homage to everything they’ve taught us by the way they’ve cared for us all these years.”
Lessons from a life in the movies
The film also had everyone thinking about people who believed in them early in their careers and the advice they offered. Both Dern and Baumbach got boosts from Peter Bogdanovich. Sandler’s came from Dustin Hoffman who, right after “Billy Madison” came out, called Sandler and invited him over to his house for dinner to talk about his future.
“He said, ‘all the advice I can give you is meet three great filmmakers who wanna work with you,'” Sandler said. “He kept saying that: Worry about the filmmakers. You don’t just want to be a star.”
It wasn’t advice Sandler took right away, but he still thinks about it. Two decades later they’d find themselves working together, and with Baumbach, on “The Meyerowitz Stories.”
A name Clooney kept coming back to was Norman Lear, an exemplar to him of a life in show business well-lived. He told him that no one who gets to his age looks back on life and thinks “I wish I worked more.”
“It’s always the idea of I wish I’d spent more time with the people I love,” Clooney said. “I’ve always taken that to heart.”
The big montage
During the making of “Jay Kelly,” Baumbach was also putting together a montage of that character’s career, which would play during a tribute ceremony. While it’s well-established that George Clooney is definitely not Jay Kelly, in this case, he definitely was. The montage was all Clooney films. And the actor portraying Jay Kelly had no idea what was coming when he sat down in that theater to film the last scene of the movie.
Clooney was taken aback, first by all the “bad haircuts,” then by this tremendous sense of time.
“We spent a lot of time that morning making sure all the technical stuff was gonna work,” Baumbach said. “When George came, I just told him ‘I’m gonna show you this reel and I just want you to watch it.” A lot of actors wouldn’t necessarily be open to giving up that kind of control. But what I find beautiful about that sequence is that something is really happening, he’s really having this experience watching his life before him. And he’s having a real experience.”
On that first take, overwhelmed by emotion, Clooney instinctively grabbed Sandler’s hand. It’s an image that made it not just into the movie, but onto the poster as well. And it was as authentic as it gets.
“There’s a line in this film, ‘all my memories are movies,'” Clooney said. “That’s not true with me. But my memories of movies are not the scenes or the movie. It’s the experience.”
He added: “What a lucky life I’ve lived.”
