George Clooney Backs Out Of White Jazz

It’s not been a great week for Joe Carnahan. First, Chris Pine jumps ship to star in JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, and now George Clooney is leaving the White Jazz camp due to some ‘scheduling issues’.

Carnahan was scheduled to start production for the movie next year. With Clooney currently shooting the Coen Bros’ Burn after Reading, and trying to finish his football movie, Leatherheads it’s clear to see this man has a lot on - but the exact scheduling problems aren’t very obvious.

Grant Heslov, Clooney’s producing partner has assured everyone that, “George continues to believe in the project and in Joe.”

So what will become of White Jazz now? Will the producers/studio still want to go ahead with the film despite the loss of their lead star? Can they replace Clooney before the strike next year?

Carnahan is a great director and I’ve no doubt that he would do a great job on White Jazz with or without Clooney.

White Jazz is based on the James Ellroy novel, which is set in 1950’s Los Angeles and follows a vice cop Dave Klein who senses he’s being set up by the police commissioner and sets out to expose a decades-old network of corruption engineered by the LAPD.

Joe Carnahan posted a comment on his blog which said:

Rough weekend. I had a bad feeling after they pushed ‘Leatherheads’ to April ecause of the extensive post on that film that something was going to have to give. Also, George is neck deep in the Coen bros. film at the moment and trying to do ‘Michael Clayton’ press which will likely carry over into Awards season…SO…they wanted to see about pushing White Jazz back, which I really don’t want to do. I’ve been waiting awhile to make this one and I wasn’t content to sit on my hands.

Right now, (actually it began on friday) we’re in the process of trying to plug a guy into this movie that, if it works, would be pretty f*cking amazing. No, INCREDIBLY f*cking amazing, so we’ll see what happens.

No tears kids. This is the business. It happens all the time and you’ve got to have the balls and the ability to push past in spite of the setbacks. We march on.

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