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Clooney Doubles Up

Thu., Nov. 30, 2006 3:17 PM PST by Josh Grossberg

People just named George Clooney's the Sexiest Man Alive. He might also be the busiest.

The actor-writer-director is teaming up with Warner Bros. for a pair of thrillers poised to further cement his reputation for playing cool celluloid customers, a studio spokeswoman confirmed today.

The first picture, White Jazz, is a film noir based on James Ellroy's acclaimed crime novel—the final volume in the author's "L.A. Quartet" of books (L.A. Confidential, The Big Nowhere and The Black Dahlia) focusing on murder and police corruption in 1940s and 1950s Los Angeles.

In White Jazz, Clooney will essay the role of David Klein, a dirty police lieutenant beholden to the mob who gets set up to be the fall guy when feds launch a corruption probe into the police force.

The hardboiler will be produced by Patrick Cheh, Diane Nabatoff, Clark Peterson and Michelle Grace and is being cofinanced Cherry Road Films and Warner Independent Pictures, which will also distribute. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the film will be directed by Joe Carnahan (Narc) from a script by his brother Matthew Michael Carnahan, but the studio would not confirm.

The movie has been mired in development for a good five years now. According to Variety, before the Good Night, and Good Luck star got involved, Nick Nolte and John Cusack were previously attached to headline the project with Robert Richardson at the helm, but nothing ever came to fruition.

The second high-profile new project will see the Oscar winner direct and star in Belmont Boys, a heist drama written by Ocean's Thirteen scribes David Levien and Brian Koppelman that follows seven crooks who reunite at a racetrack to finish a job they started three decades earlier.

Boys will be distributed by Warner Bros. and produced by Jerry Weintraub, who has worked with Clooney on Ocean's Eleven and Ocean's Twelve. And like the latter, the film will be shot on locations in both the U.S. and Europe.

Weintraub told Variety that the film will feature an older ensemble than the Ocean's films, "though all big stars." He added that he and Clooney are recruiting actors now.

Both of the new flicks return the thesp to the familiar (if shady) territory he covered in Out of Sight, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and the Ocean's saga.

A studio rep said Warners hasn't determined which film will shoot first. In any case, the studio will have to wait for Clooney to make room on his already jammed calendar, which means that neither is expected to go before the cameras until 2008.

The former ER hunk, who was just named People's Sexiest Man Alive for the second time, is set to reunite with Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed him in O Brother Where Art Thou? and Intolerable Cruelty, for their third collaboration, Burn After Reading. The film takes a humorous look at the secret world of spooks.

He then plans to direct and star in the period football film Leatherheads, which begins principal photography in March.

Clooney next hits theaters Dec. 15 in pal Steven Soderbergh's stylized World War II period drama The Good German. He follows that next summer with the release of Ocean's Thirteen, also by Soderbergh, followed by a role as a high-powered attorney whose past comes back to haunt him in the thriller, Michael Clayton.