George Clooney Previews Saturday’s Live Telecast Of ‘Good Night, And Good Luck’ on CNN: “Some Networks Aren’t Really Up For Doing This Right Now”

Decades before CNN agreed to Saturday’s live telecast of Broadway’s Good Night, and Good Luck, George Clooney had originally envisioned it as a special for CBS, not a movie for theaters and a play on Broadway.

“But then there was that mishap with Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake at the Super Bowl,” recalls Clooney to Deadline. “And suddenly I got a call from the head of CBS saying, ‘We’re out of the live TV business.’ So we wrote it as a movie.”

Clooney’s vision has finally come full circle. For the penultimate performance of Good Night, and Good Luck — which opened in April and has since become the highest-grossing production in the history of the Shubert Organization — Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre will be equipped with 21 cameras for the live broadcast that’s set to kick off at 7 p.m. ET Saturday on CNN and CNN International. It will also stream live on CNN.com and via CNN’s apps on connected TVs and mobile devices, without requiring a cable login, as well as on Max across all subscription plans.

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“This is just the natural gestation,” says Clooney of Good Night, and Good Luck‘s trajectory from a 2005 film to a first-ever live telecast of a Broadway play. “Obviously some of the networks aren’t really up for the idea of doing this right now. I think they’re all a little shell-shocked from tariff talk and lawsuits and everything else.”

That’s where Warner Bros Discovery came in. In early May, Clooney called CEO David Zaslav about finding the right platform for the play that recently received five Tony Award nominations, including Best Performance by a Leading Actor in a Play for Clooney.

“I have a little bit of a history with doing live television,” says Clooney. “I talked NBC into doing ER as a live show, and then I did a live movie called Fail Safe for CBS. Saturday is a good night for us because it’s our last evening performance. Our run is over so it’s not costing the play anything anymore. Why don’t we open it up and show people how fun it is to come to New York to see a play?”

CNN anchors Anderson Cooper and Pamela Brown will lead special live coverage Saturday that begins at 6:30 p.m. ET outside the Winter Garden. Immediately following the broadcast, Cooper will host an special to discuss the production and state of global journalism.

Den of Thieves is producing the live show. Executive producers are Clooney, Grant Heslov, Deena Katz, Jeff Skoll and Todd Wagner, as well as Jesse Ignjatovic, Evan Prager and Barb Bialkowski.

The plan isn’t to infringe on the audience who bought tickets a long time ago, insists Clooney. Cameras with long lenses will be perched in the back of the house while others will be hidden in speakers and TV monitors so viewers can get up close and personal shots of the action.

“We’re not re-blocking the play,” says Clooney of the drama that he co-wrote with Heslov, who will serve as co-director of the telecast with Micah Bickham. “We made this play from a movie. We don’t need to do another movie. We’re not doing that kind of coverage. It’s still a play and we want people to see the audience and we want people to see big wider shots, to see how sets are changing and then to get in closer. So it’s a bit of everything. We want it to feel like a very unique theater experience.”

The only instructions for the theater audience that night will be to get their butts in the seats before curtain.

“It’s going to get a little ugly if you come walking in once the show starts. There are no commercial breaks or anything,” says Clooney. “It’s a funny thing that happens in a live show. I remember the Obamas were here the other day and everybody was so excited. The play was four minutes shorter than it normally is. So having done live television before with ER and with Fail Safe, I expect the show will pick up a little pace. But we’ll get into a groove.”

If there’s one message Clooney hopes to get across to viewers, it’s the importance of a free press and speaking truth to power — one of the key tenets of the Clooney Foundation for Justice that the actor has run with his wife, Amal, since 2016.

“[Edward R.] Murrow was taking on McCarthy at a time when people were afraid. And you could see fear permeating in the law firms and in the networks and in the universities,” says Clooney. “It’s a good thing to remind ourselves that we’ve been afraid before and we survive these things and we will get through it. The most important thing you can do is to constantly challenge people in power. You have to or they win.”

Good Night, and Good Luck closes its theatrical run with a matinee performance Sunday. There is talk about taking the show to London — which Clooney addressed recently on Late Night with Seth Meyers — but it doesn’t sound like the actor plans to keep his hair tinted black for a new run across the pond.

“We have a home there and it might be fun to do something in London, but I think there should be someone else involved in it first and then maybe I could come in for a while afterwards,” he tells Deadline. “It’s fun to see other people take a turn with it to see what they do with it.”

Until then, he’s sorry to say goodbye to Broadway but looking forward to putting his feet up and getting back to normal. “I feel very lucky to be part of the person giving that message out, and I will miss that terribly,” he says. “But I’m ready to grow some gray hair out, that’s for sure.”