ClooneyGate: Clooney Will Not Be Threatened By Arianna Huffington
Like a slasher movie psychopath refusing to be put down despite a liberal amount of shotgunning and a wrought iron fireplace poker to the eyesocket, ClooneyGate shambles forward once again, however briefly. NY Daily News JV gossip Lloyd Grove talked to the "spitting mad" non-blogging actor, who expressed his defiance in the face of pressure from HuffPo host Arianna Huffington:
"She said some things that I won't share, but she did tell me that this could be bad for me - bad for my career. Well, screw you!" the movie star told me yesterday about a conversation he had with the doyenne of Huffingtonpost.com. "I'm not going to be threatened by Arianna Huffington!" [...]
"I feel abused," he said. [...]
Clooney told me: "Nobody has ever written an op-ed piece for me. If I say I've written something, I've written it. When I go to the Oscars, I write everything I say...I stand by what I do, but I'm very cautious not to take giant steps onto soapboxes because I think they're polarizing."
Clooney said that when he demanded a disclaimer from Huffington, she refused. "She told me that it's a big no-no in the blogosphere, where people are supposed to write their own pieces."
The parallels to Clooney's Oscar-nominated Good Night, and Good Luck—now available on DVD, coincidentally! — are fairly pronounced. (And even if they're not, we're running with it. Welcome to the blogosphere!) Surely, Black-and-White Clooney and stalwart publicist sidekick Stan Rosenfeld spent hours hunkered down before a screen in their war room showing a loop of Huffington's television appearances, then soberly decided to resist the pundit's threats by taking the fight to the tabloids.