[Part 2 of “Good Night, and Good Luck (CNN, 7 June 2025)” picks up right where Part 1 left off. I recommend that readers who’ve just joined this series go back to Thursday, 24 September, and read the first installment before reading the second.
[Because Good Night, and Good Luck is based on history that goes back to 1954, I have inserted commentary to define, identify, or explain references with which some visitors to Rick On Theater may not be familiar. I haven’t, however, repeated those comments from the first part in the continuation below. Part 2 won’t make a lot of sense without having read Part 1.]
GOOD NIGHT, AND
GOOD LUCK LIVE: CNN SPECIAL EVENT
(Continued)
In Good Night, and Good Luck, Edward R. Murrow and his team also have to fight the influence—and attempted interference—of “corporate,” the business entity that owns the news section. CBS was a corporation, even before the absorption of news organizations, both TV networks and newspapers, by diversified companies (today, CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, a multinational conglomerate, and CNN is a division of Warner Bros. Discovery, a multinational mass media and entertainment conglomerate), and one of Paley’s principal innovations when he took over CBS was to put advertisers and sponsors, the network’s bread and butter, at the top of the broadcasting food chain.
In the play, there’s friction between Paley and Murrow, originally staunch allies. Paley brought Murrow into CBS and then moved him from radio to TV. Paley even set Murrow up with See It Now, with the promise that “corporate” would have no say over editorial content, and gave him Person to Person, Murrow’s popular celebrity interview show, to pay for the news program.
The Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa, its familiar acronym, became the official corporate name in 1999) was virtually the sole sponsor of See It Now during the show’s prime-time run. Paley thwarted the company’s attempts to influence See It Now’s programming until the McCarthy segment, after which Alcoa withdrew its support. The broadcast was never able to attract another sponsor.
In the play, this episode unfolds in a scene in Paley’s office. Fred Friendly (1915-98; Glenn Fleshler), co-creator and producer of See It Now; Murrow; and Paley have something of an angry showdown over the proposed McCarthy episode of the show. After showing filmed incidents of “the junior senator from Wisconsin,” as the newsman repeatedly and patronizingly calls him, making a series of contradictory and false statements, Murrow would conclude the episode with a commentary.
paley: So, you just wanna forego the standards you’ve stuck to for over fifteen years: both sides, no commentary . . . . I’m just making sure we identify what it is you’re both doing.
murrow: I can’t find any justification for this. I can’t accept it on every story—there are two equal and logical sides. You wanna call that “editorializing.” We’ll give them equal time.
paley: It is editorializing—period.
I have to go back to Alcoa, who sponsors your show and also has military contracts, and I gotta tell ’em they might get caught in a tough bind because you had a beef with Joe McCarthy.
murrow: You guaranteed me—this goes back to Hear It Now—you guaranteed that corporate would have no influence over news content.
(Hear It Now was a CBS radio program from 15 December 1950 to 15 June 1951, hosted by Murrow and produced by Murrow and Friendly. Hear It Now transferred to television on 18 November 1951 as See It Now.)
The thing is, of course, that Paley’s right. What Murrow and Friendly were doing was editorializing. Cooper and Bret Stephens were right, too (see Part 1): reporters and news editors can’t really “bury” their “partisanship”—not completely. Even relative to McCarthy, we can see it in the material Murrow selected to air in the “Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy”: the See It Now crew carefully cherry-picked only the worst and most obvious breaches to make their point.
They certainly didn’t include any statements the senator made that were correct or true; they were hardly even-handed. To be sure, there may have been few such declarations, and Tail-Gunner Joe’s motives were hardly pure in any case—but that didn’t make Murrow, et al., spick-and-span, themselves.
Then, again, See It Now wasn’t strictly “news.” It was commentary; Murrow editorialized because what he was presenting were editorials. If he were writing in a newspaper today, he’d be an op-ed columnist and his output would be labeled “opinion,” like the New York Times columns of Bret Stephens.
Of course, what differentiated Murrow from the likes of McCarthy and his allies such as Jack O’Brian (1914-2000), the TV critic for the William Randolph Hearst-owned New York Journal-American, who was a McCarthy supporter and Murrow/See It Now detractor who assailed CBS reporter Don Hollenbeck (1905-54), was that Murrow carefully checked his sources and the information he presented as facts.
(Some readers may recall that not checking the validity of sources scuttled Dan Rather’s career at CBS and the survival of 60 Minutes II. The 8 September 2004 investigative report, “Bush’s National Guard Record,” involved memoranda from the files of President George W. Bush’s former Guard commander that purported to show that Bush [b. 1946; 43rd President of the United States: 2001-09] had received special treatment while serving with the Texas Air National Guard, 1968-72.
(After the 60 Minutes II segment aired, an examination determined that the memoranda weren’t authentic. They were latter-day forgeries. Three senior staffers were forced to resign in 2005 and the network cancelled 60 Minutes II later that year. CBS fired Rather [b. 1931] in 2006. [A fuller account of this episode is in “Pearl Tytell, Matriarch of Document Sleuths (1917-2021)” (17 October 2021).])
That’s why McCarthy was left only with ad hominem attacks on Murrow to discredit him: the senator couldn’t effectively attack the reporter’s statements the way Murrow did the statements and accusations made by McCarthy.
Alcoa’s withdrawal of its sponsorship precipitated Paley’s decision to change See It Now’s scheduling from a weekly half hour on Tuesday nights at 10:30-11:00 p.m. (from September 1953 to July 1955, including the McCarthy episodes) to an irregular schedule, intermittently broadcast on Sunday afternoons at 5 p.m., a low-viewership slot, in one-hour segments for five episodes a season (September 1955 to July 1958).
After the “Wires and Lights” speech opening (Part 1), a large projection of a black-and-white TV screen appears at stage left with Don Hollenbeck (Clark Gregg), CBS reporter, delivering a news bulletin about Adlai Stevenson (1900-65; politician and diplomat; Governor of Illinois: 1949-53; Democratic nominee for President of the United States in 1952 and 1956; U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations: 1961-65) making remarks on a U.S.-Soviet disarmament proposal that came out of his “globe-circling tour.”
(Stevenson made a worldwide tour from 3 March 1953 to 20 August 1954. After his return, he made a speech at a Democratic fundraising rally in Chicago on 15 September ’54, in which he urged President Dwight D. [“Ike”] Eisenhower [1890-1969; Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe: 1943-45; 34th President of the United States: 1953-61] to take the initiative in peace talks with the Soviets by considering disarmament and “durable assurances” for non-aggression.
(Later, at a 1 October briefing with Eisenhower, he advised the president to meet the Soviets with “guarantees that they have nothing to fear from us.”)
During Hollenbeck’s report, the production refocuses from the black-and-white screen to a “booth” up center with actor Gregg at a desk, live-broadcasting the news. The front curtain rises as the lights come up on the stage, which now includes the whole newsroom of CBS-TV with members of the staff of See It Now scurrying about with phones ringing, as they prepare for a broadcast.
This short scene is an example of a technique used often in Good Night, and Good Luck: the shifting or combining of “live” (and therefore, color) images and video (that is, black-and-white) images. Stage director David Cromer staged many of the interview moments, for instance, with a live actor—Clooney as Murrow or Carter Hudson as Joseph Wershba (1920-2011; CBS television reporter, writer, and editor who worked on See It Now)—speaking with video images of Liberace (1919-87) on Person to Person and Milo John Radulovich (1926-2007) for See It Now on a TV monitor or a drop-down screen. In several of these scenes, the actor in GNGL starts out on a monitor, then shifts to live—just as the Hollenbeck newscast does.
At home on TV, however, we see only one view at a time, the actors or the video images, while in the theater, both are probably visible to the in-house audience with the monitors behind or above the actors. This, I gather, is what GNGL costume designer Brenda Abbandandolo (b. ca. 1975) meant when she told CNN correspondent Pamela Brown (b. 1983), “Most people don’t know this story in color, and it’s hard to sometimes imagine what that would be. And because they’re also broadcasting the episodes on video in black and white, you get to see how the color moves to black and white.”
Later, when we see archival video recordings of McCarthy or historical figures in his wake, such as Milo Radulovich or Annie Lee Moss (1905-96), two targets of McCarthy’s Red Scare investigations and subjects of Murrow’s broadcasts, it becomes clear that Cromer is also preparing us for black-and-white video images amidst the color live performances so that the historical figures are normalized within the world of this play and blend with the live actors.
(The 2005 film was released in black and white, so this dichotomy wasn’t an issue. Nonetheless, Clooney deadpanned in the New York Times, that even though “‘McCarthy is still played by McCarthy,’ . . . before the film’s release, preview audiences complained that ‘the guy playing McCarthy was overacting.’”)
The differences between an in-person theater experience and a live television broadcast of the same play notwithstanding, I’ll try now to report on Good Night, and Good Luck as a play. (It’s not really relevant, since I’m assessing the play as I saw it, but I’ve been trying to obtain the play text of the Clooney-Heslov drama, but so far, it hasn’t been released for retail purchase. The production rights will be licensed through Concord Theatricals, but the acting edition of the script is only available for production or reading purposes to prospective licensees. The 2005 screenplay [Newmarket Press, 2006] is available at bookstores and other outlets, however.)
I remarked earlier that I was disappointed in GNGL [see Part 1] and this is the appropriate moment to explain that. My main complaint is that it essentially begs the question regarding whether there was an actual “national security” issue with regard to the spread of communism and, if there was—remember, Julius (1918-53) and Ethel Rosenberg (1915-53) actually did pass nuclear secrets to the Soviets—how to fight the threat.
The play starts off with the assumption that McCarthy was Wrong and Evil and Murrow was Correct and Righteous. As I asserted previously, McCarthy’s been adjudged nefarious by history, and GNGL accepts that received verdict without testing it. The play wasn’t a fair trial; it was a grand jury hearing: one-sided and predetermined.
Now, don’t mistake me. I have no personal doubt that McCarthy was a charlatan, a self-promoter, a demagogue, an abuser-of-power, and a fear-monger. On the other hand, while I was only 10 when Tail-Gunner Joe died, I was 18 when Murrow passed, by which time my family had a slight connection with him (as I explain in my afterword following Part 3).
I grew up with the image of Edward R. Murrow as a stalwart champion for the truth and freedom of thought. Furthermore, I’m also pretty much a First Amendment absolutist, as I confessed as far back as “The First Amendment & The Arts” (8 May 2010) and many more times on this blog. With few exceptions, I oppose suppression of speech and artistic expression, whether by government action or private intimidation, for political or any other reason.
I have spent some time in college classrooms teaching writing, including argument, persuasion, and rhetoric. In that sphere, begging the question (Petitio Principii) or relying on received conceptions (Argumentum ad Antiquitatem: Appeal to Tradition. or Argumentum ad Populum: Bandwagon Fallacy) are inadequate and ineffectual.
For one thing, that kind of argument preaches to the choir. The play’s message about journalistic integrity and holding power to account is highly relevant to today’s polarized political climate. But it’s aimed at an audience that already agrees with its message, failing to speak to the skeptics it needs to reach.
Further, CNN’s viewership leans largely liberal to start with, limiting the play’s reach, while if it had been broadcast on a network like, say, Fox News (not that Fox would probably agree to air it), it might have challenged opposing viewpoints directly.
But, irrespective of the platform of the telecast, there’s also the issue of the play, itself. It presents a foregone conclusion with regard to who was right and who was wrong in the struggle between the Red Scare and people’s civil rights and freedom of speech. Good Night, and Good Luck was more a role-play of how Murrow and his team beat McCarthy at his own game, turning his own words back on him, than it was the presentation of the case for why the fight had to be fought.
One reviewer of the stage play (as distinct from both the 2005 film, to which many reviewers compared the play, and the CNN telecast) made my point via the extensive video montage at the end of the performance.
The play ends with a montage of TV news clips, starting with Milton Berle descending a staircase in a dress and images from the ’50s, ’60s (including the JFK assassination and Walter Cronkite’s reporting his death), ’70s, ’80s, etc.—right up to today with the penultimate images of various figures stating that democracy is in danger (voices from the left and right!) with the final image of Elon Musk’s Nazi-like salute as a voice intones, “Please raise your right hand and repeat after me . . . .”
David Gordon of TheaterMania asserts that the video is “ultimately distrustful of the audience’s ability to connect the events of the play and the events of today,” because “[e]veryone who’s spent $799 a ticket to be in this building understands the contemporary parallels.” The review-writer points out, “We don’t need a clip show to do the work for us, we’re smart enough to consider it ourselves.” Gordon observes, as I have, that “the people who don’t [understand] aren’t coming to see it.”
(Milton Berle [1908-2002; actor and comedian, known nationwide as “Uncle Miltie” and “Mr. Television”; host of NBC's Texaco Star Theatre [1948-53]; first major American television star. [In 1953, the show became known as The Buick-Berle Show, changing to The Milton Berle Show in 1954.]
(In the play, Murrow, after having See It Now, his serious news program, scaled back by William Paley, reflects to Fred Friendly: “Did you know the most trusted man in America is Milton Berle?” This is followed by Friendly’s response, “See? You should have worn a dress”—which Berle frequently did in his comedy routines—often while smoking a big cigar—for comedic effect and as a nod to vaudeville tradition [ca. early 1880s-1930s], of which many early TV comedians were veterans. This exchange highlights the struggle Murrow saw between serious journalism and popular entertainment at the time.
(Walter Cronkite [1916-2009] was a broadcast journalist and anchorman for the CBS Evening News, 1962-81. Seen as the successor to Murrow, a 1972 opinion survey pegged him as “the most trusted man in America.”
(South African-born billionaire Elon Musk [b. 1971] is the richest man in the world. On 20 January 2025, while speaking at a rally celebrating Donald Trump’s second inauguration, Musk twice made a gesture interpreted by many as a Nazi salute. It was widely condemned and many Jewish organizations denounced it, though the Anti-Defamation League said it was not a Nazi salute.
(Musk dismissed the accusations of Nazi sympathies, and American public opinion was divided on partisan lines, but Neo-Nazi and white supremacist groups celebrated the gesture as a Nazi salute. Multiple European political parties demanded that Musk be banned from entering their countries.)
Many reviewers, as I observed, held the play up to the film for evaluation and most found the stage adaptation lacking. As I’ve acknowledged, I haven’t seen the movie, so I have no basis for comparison—but I wonder if it’s really fair to either version to do that. I suppose, given that the writers are the same for both scripts and, according to the review-writers who went this route, the stage text retains a good deal of the language and structure of the screenplay, it’s an understandable impulse.
In the Wall Street Journal, Charles Isherwood asserts, in a common assessment, that “for those who saw the movie . . .[,] the theatrical version offers little that’s fresh, or even more fully fleshed out.” On TheaterMania, David Gordon found, “Elements that worked in the movie—a jazz singer with a live band whose performances underscore the action—are copied and pasted to less successful effect, basically just padding the length.”
In Time Out New York, Adam Feldman remarks that in the film, “the camera fills in a lot of blanks,” but “Clooney and Heslov have made no effort to translate those moments into language and ideas.” Vulture’s Sara Holdren complains that stage director “Cromer has to enliven a still highly cinematic script in a wide-open theatrical space; the result is that [the play] Good Night almost immediately starts to diffuse.”
Perhaps the harshest critique of the film-to-stage transfer comes from USA Today, where Patrick Ryan lays a charge of hubris on the writers:
Clooney and Heslov’s play is an almost word-for-word duplicate of its big-screen predecessor, with little interest in probing Murrow’s interior life or deepening the relationships between characters. . . . Sure, you could argue that the movie’s script is unassailable, or that any significant expansions to the story would just be putting a hat on a hat. But the cynic in us suspects a lack of imagination; that Clooney and Heslov were merely too precious and hubristic with their original work, knowing that theatergoers would turn out regardless of what they threw up on stage.
Now, as for the performance:
The production, and especially the CNN telecast, was pretty much sold as “event theater.” This was due, for the most part, to the presence of George Clooney at the head of the cast, and the facts that Good Night, and Good Luck was his Broadway début and his first stage role in 39 years.
Then there’s its tie-in to the 2005 film, which had been a box office hit and had garnered critical praise. Furthermore, the CNN broadcast was greatly touted as a first-ever and not-to-be-missed occurrence. After all, they did entitle the broadcast Good Night, and Good Luck Live: CNN Special Event. To ensure that this wasn’t overlooked, the network surrounded the performance with supplemental programming that expanded the production’s stance as a news event in itself.
“George Clooney’s ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’ is about to make theater history,” pronounced WNBC-TV news on 16 May, the day after CNN announced the broadcast. In that same newscast, Clooney averred, “I can’t tell you how exciting it is to do something that’s never been done. . . . Live TV. No net. Buckle up everyone.”
The New York Times quipped that when Good Night, and Good Luck aired on CNN, “you could say that the news made the news.” The Los Angeles Times declared that “George Clooney’s . . . tribute to CBS newsman Edward R. Murrow, became a Major Television Event,” even as “the ‘live’ element of Saturday’s broadcast was essentially a stunt.” National Pubic Radio TV critic David Bianculli dubbed the broadcast “the TV event of the season and not to be missed” on Fresh Air.
Without saying that the play’s producers, which included 2929 Entertainment and Warner Bros., who also backed the film, or the telecast backers, did anything untoward—marketing is, after all, part of the business of show in all its forms—all this promotion became part of the theater event and its TV adjunct.
And, after all, I watched it on television because of all this; if it hadn’t been that way, I would have missed the play altogether. Aside from its limited run (which contributes to the “event” nature of the production), making it hard to get seats, I don’t tend to see shows with an average ticket price of $310 or so. Being curious about this particular show, the TV broadcast was probably my only chance to see it.
All that being true, at least from my point of view, what I watched that Saturday evening wasn’t simply a stage show—or even just a Broadway show. It was an event, and I couldn’t put that aside (though I tried). In fact, the reason that this report is so delayed—I had intended to write the performance up and post the account within a week. Instead, it’s taken me a year and 3½ months to write this, largely (though not entirely) because I had trouble sorting the play and performance from the “background noise” of the hype and promotion.
(I wonder if having seen the play in person in the theater would have somehow shielded me from this distraction? I would likely have seen it before the announcement of the CNN broadcast—which the network put out on 15 May 2025 and which the New York Times, the paper I get at home, printed on the 17th—so that I would have escaped that part of the promotion, at least.)
In any case, I’ve expressed my feelings about the play’s begging the question of whether Senator McCarthy’s manipulation of the “Red Scare” had any legitimacy behind it. But putting that aside, what about the performance of the script Clooney and Heslov provided director Cromer, his designers, and the cast? Did they do it justice?
I mentioned in passing that the play is light on “dramatic energy.” I suppose it’s no surprise that a play about a TV show—and GNGL is really about See It Now as much as it’s about Murrow and McCarthy—is mostly talk. After all, TV essentially invented the “talking head.”
As a result, Cromer is faced with the need to enliven the talk without benefit of actual action. In film—and I have to presume the movie version of Good Night, and Good Luck did this—the camera can substitute changing images for movement and action to a degree.
But Cromer doesn’t have that outlet on the stage—though TV director Micah Bickham provides some camera work for the CNN telecast—so he has to rely on moving the actors around the stage enough to give the impression of action. Jesse Green of the New York Times describes Cromer’s blocking as moving the actors “around like a corps de ballet without a soloist, in shifting groupings and sudden massings.”
Fortunately, set designer Scott Pask has given Cromer a CBS newsroom that spans the stage and rises a couple of levels up as well. Pask’s modular set reminded me some of Bunny Christie’s newsroom design for James Graham’s Ink on Broadway in 2019 (see Ink [20 June 2019]), another newsroom play, this one a biographical drama that dramatizes the controversial 1969 rise of the British tabloid newspaper The Sun under media mogul Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931; Australian-born American former business magnate, investor, and media mogul) and editor Larry Lamb (1929-2000; British newspaper editor).
In most of the play, characters are running or pacing around some part of the set, sections of which move as scenes change, mimicking the scene shifts of a movie. (Much of this was lost in the telecast as the TV cameras narrowed the viewers’ scope.)
The TV images—the projected videos that simulate television broadcasts—also substitute for movement because, aside from the flickering of the images themselves, they appear in different parts of the set. Whenever there’s a video in the script, a screen and image emerge somewhere and the spectators have to shift their gaze (except if you’re watching on TV, like I was—then TV director Bickham shifts for you).
I gather from the stage reviewers who made reference to the film version of GNGL, that it makes better use of this tactic than does the stage play. For my part, though, the situation that causes the need for this search for a substitute made it hard for me to maintain focus.
The paucity of action is not just a matter of movement, of course. The dramatic action is almost confined to the tension created by the developing showdown between commie-hunting McCarthy and truth-seeking Murrow. We all know that’s coming (even if we don’t know the history if this era—or haven’t seen the film), since the show was marketed on that confrontation.
But since we do know that’s what’s in the offing, and we do know its outcome, there’s little tension in that central plotline—what’s gonna happen?—and, if we consider Good Night, and Good Luck a sort of political Columbo mystery where we know who dunit and how, but watch how the detective figures out how to catch ’em, history’s already clued us in on that as well.
So, to bolster the drama, Clooney and Heslov stir in two dramatic subplots. One’s tragic and the other’s semi-comical, but with implications. The first is the sad tale of CBS reporter Don Hollenbeck, who committed suicide after a relentless campaign of ad hominem attacks by McCarthyite journalists.
The McCarthyites labeled Hollenbeck a communist or a communist-sympathizer, even though he often criticized of the Soviet Union, the American Communist Party, and American supporters of communism. In the play, his suicide is revealed soon after McCarthy’s response to Murrow’s 9 March “Report on Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy,” McCarthy’s 6 April response and Murrow’s 13 April rebuttal—it came right after one of the Murrow Boys reports, “The Senate is investigating McCarthy” (probably 16 March). In reality, Hollenbeck’s death occurred on 22 June, fully two months later.
(In the commentary on the DVD of the film, Clooney, who also directed, said that this ahistorical juxtaposition was made for dramatic purposes.)
The other dramatic subplot was an office romance. CBS, it seems, had a rule against married coworkers. Joe and Shirley Wershba (1922-2026; Ilana Glazer) were “secretly” married—except everyone in the newsroom knew it, including See It Now producer Fred Friendly. Of the two subplots, the Wershbas’ is the only element in GNGL that’s unconnected to the battle with McCarthy demagoguery.
Friendly’s been charged by “corporate” with laying off members of the See It Now staff in a coming downsizing. The Wershbas, after months of keeping their marriage on the down-low, fret having their open secret outed, ending the employment of at least one of them. Friendly suggests that if one of them leaves voluntarily, they could save the job of a coworker. Joe volunteers so that Shriley and one of their colleagues can stay on at the network.
In both cases, the small dramas don’t do much to heat up the whole play. The Wershbas’ situation was predictable: a poorly kept secret in the face of a known anti-nepotism policy. It was bound to end the way it did—or even worse. Friendly managed to make it a palatable conclusion.
Hollenbeck’s fate was far worse, of course, but his situation was still a sidebar to the main plot. Unlike the Wershbas’ marriage, his trial was connected in the play to the main narrative, the McCarthy confrontation. But, historically, there were possible reasons for the reporter’s suicide other than—or, at least, in addition to—the hounding he got from the anti-communist press: he was known to be hypersensitive, as his little scene with Murrow showed, and his third wife had left him just two years earlier.
(There’s actually a third subplot, but it’s so diffuse, and ultimately inconsequential, that it hardly registers. The character Palmer Williams (1916-96; Fran Kranz), a See It Now production manager, voices concern about his former marriage to someone with communist or socialist ties. Williams, portrayed in the play as nervous and sometimes frantic, is plagued by anxiety about his ex-wife’s political past and the potential for it to jeopardize his status with CBS in the eyes of the network executives.
(Little, however, is made of this except several brief outbursts by Williams, and nothing ever happens with the situation in the play. In reality, Palmer Williams retired from CBS in 1981, having served in the end as a senior producer for 60 Minutes. He worked as a special consultant on the magazine show for two years afterwards, dying of prostate cancer at 79.)
I said earlier that Clooney’s performance of Murrow was “quite fine” and that he “got a lot of close-ups on the TV monitors.” What I didn’t report is that that technique also added to the flattening of the emotional and dramatic content of Good Night, and Good Luck.
The actor captures the newsman’s disinterested and neutral demeanor before the camera, the sincerity and strength of his convictions, both about politics and journalism. (David Rooney in The Hollywood Reporter called it “a vanity-free performance.”) On screen, it’s easy to believe this Edward R. Murrow is unflappable and that he’s speaking the truth.
Cromer, however, staged all Murrow’s monologues (with the exception of his “Wires and Lights” speech) with the actor sitting in profile, facing a camera in the wings that transmits his image to a big screen on stage.
So, Clooney’s Murrow is talking to us through a television camera and a television screen. As many of the reviewers point out, that’s the way the film did it, and it was right for a movie to replicate the way 1950s audiences experienced Murrow (and all such media figures). But we were watching a live performance (even if I was seeing it on television), and wouldn’t it have been more powerful—and significantly different—if this Edward R. Murrow addressed us directly, and not through the veil of a cathode ray tube?
A TV screen on a movie screen is pretty much the same as an actual actor on a movie screen, isn’t it? What’s really lost? But theater’s supposed to be different than a media performance. It’s meant to be communication from live actor to live viewer—even if, I daresay, I was watching by way of a TV screen two miles away.
[Part 3 of “Good Night, and Good Luck (CNN, 7 June 2025)” will be published on Wednesday, 30 September. That’ll be the conclusion of this series and will contain the survey of reviews of the play mostly from April 2025, the opening of the stage production. (There was only one review of the television broadcast of the show, though there was considerable press commentary on the TV event the airing represented.) I hope ROTters will return to this blog to see what the press had to say about Good Night, and Good Luck on Broadway.]
