Hollywood for Grownups: The Magic Behind George Clooney and Brad Pitt’s On-Screen Chemistry

Hollywood produces some strange bedfellows — and some very successful ones.

Hollywood for Grownups

Hollywood reporter Merle Ginsberg has written about celebrities, film, TV, music and fashion for publications including The New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, Cosmopolitan and more. Each week she’ll cover celebrity news for AARP’s Hollywood for Grownups column.

James Woods

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James Woods: Actor Turned Producer

James Woods, 77, known best for starring in Casino, Nixon, Once Upon a Time in America, etc., hasn’t actively acted for more than a decade. But he’s hardly retired. He just bought rights to the 1997 book Jack and Jackie: Portrait of an American Marriage, by Christopher Anderson; it’s filled with anecdotes about America’s First Couple, and Woods plans to produce it into a movie with, according to him, Oliver Stone, 77, on board to direct. Makes sense: Stone made JFK and Nixon, in which Woods played H.R. Haldeman.

Woods got the producing bug when he serendipitously exec-produced Oppenheimer, 2023’s most successful film. How? The book it’s based upon was optioned by several businesspeople but couldn’t gain traction. Woods was asked to step in. He sent it to veteran producer Chuck Roven, 74, who got it to Chris Nolan, 53, and the film went on to win seven Oscars. As for the Jack and Jackie project, who could play the storied couple? How about Jake Gyllenhaal or Andrew Garfield; Anne Hathaway or Natalie Portman?

Richard Linklater

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Richard Linklater Likes the Long Game

Director-writer Richard Linklater (Before Sunset, School of Rock), 63, has a thing for movies about aging — movies in which the actors also age. He’s following his 2014 saga Boyhood method of shooting in real time with a film adaptation of Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s musical Merrily We Roll Along, a 1981 flop that closed after 16 shows but is now a smash Broadway revival about a theater-based friendship that unfolds over two decades. It won the Tony Award for best revival of a musical at the awards show Sunday. Linklater’s film version and its three stars — Paul Mescal, 28; Ben Platt and Beanie Feldstein, both 30 — will be shooting over a 20-year span; they actually started in 2019. The actors will, of course, be middle-aged by wrap date — and Linklater will be 78! They’re shooting the last act first as Sondheim’s musical tells its story backwards.