Just when I got tired of watching George Clooney — courtesy of The Descendants, which I thought was rather a boring movie, though I know I am in the minority (I found The Ides of March to be more entertaining) — he comes up with a project I probably will want to watch.
On Saturday, at the Palm Springs International Film Festival, Clooney said he’s going to make a movie telling the story of the Monuments Men — the American men and women who worked in Europe after World War II to rescue art that had been looted by Hitler and his henchmen.
Clooney is reportedly writing the script with Grant Heslov, his regular production partner, and plans to both star in and direct the film.
The movie will focus on the art historians who landed at Normandy — a “group of 11 civilian art experts [that] included Lincoln Kirstein, the founder of the New York City Ballet; George Stout, who worked at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum; and James J. Rorimer, from the Metropolitan Museum,” according to John Horn of the Los Angeles Times, who added:
The team had never trained for combat, and yet they faced live fire–two of them even died on the mission. Even though the experts were mere privates, they occasionally had to shout out battlefield instructions–“Don’t aim your tank over there, that’s the Leaning Tower of Pisa!” Clooney suggested–to preserve the works of art they were charged to find.
The announcement is another coup for Robert Edsel (above), whose 2009 book The Monuments Men, and website, has done well spreading the word of this marvelous moment in American history and art history. I last wrote about him here, when his Monuments Men Foundation for the Preservation of Art found a woman member of the team still living in Boston: Mary Regan Quessenberry. She died in 2010.
Edsel is from Dallas, and the Dallas Morning News has an article today saying Edsel’s ” passion has drawn the attention of George Clooney.” I think it’s more than that. As I recall, from a contact made some years ago, when Edsel published his first book, he has connections to Luke and Owen Wilson.
Clooney hasn’t cast the movie yet, so now’s the time to weigh in. What role should he play? And who should play the others?
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Dallas Morning News