George Clooney is sort of like the Prom King of Hollywood: He’s got lots of friends, endless charisma, and probably a deep existential angst about his own self-worth, about what it all means, about whether any of it’s real, about whether he should renounce it all and hurl himself into the roiling sea. But to those first points, Clooney’s proving his unmatched popularity by rounding up some of his most famous pals to star in his latest directorial effort, the Coen brothers-scripted Suburbicon.
According to Deadline, at least three BFDs are in negotiations to star in Clooney’s film: Matt Damon, Julianne Moore, and Josh Brolin. All three have worked with Clooney before in some capacity: Brolin and Clooney just wrapped filming the Coen brothers’ Hail Caesar; Moore starred in the Clooney-produced Far from Heaven; and Damon’s appeared alongside Clooney in The Monuments Men, the Ocean’s Eleven movies, and in the Prom Court analogy I just made up, where he is a Prom Prince (is that a thing?) pretending not to be vaguely bitter and resentful.
A little background on the movie itself, which has been in development limbo for more than a decade: Written by Joel and Ethan Coen, Suburbicon is not the story of a suburban prom gone horribly awry when the Prom Prince is revealed to be professional con artist. Rather, Suburbicon is a “noir drama in the vein of the Coens’ breakout film Blood Simple,” a “small crime drama set in the 1950s.” (Though, come to think of it, those opaque descriptions don’t entirely rule out my fake plot summary.) Robert Elswit, the man behind There Will Be Blood, Nightcrawler, Magnolia, and many other wonderful movies centering on high-school proms, has signed on as director of photography.
Suburbicon will start shooting in October.
