'700 Billion Man,' George Clooney's TARP Bailout Movie: Star Producing, May Direct Financial Crisis Film
George Clooney is set to produce -- and perhaps direct -- "700 Billion Man," a new film about the 2008 financial crisis and the subsequent government bailout of troubled financial institutions, Variety reports.
Clooney's film will be based on a 2009 Washington Post feature on Neel Kashkari, the former Goldman Sachs executive who put together and helped administer the Troubled Asset Relief Program. A gloomy portrait of a man under pressure from the government, Wall Street, the media and the public at large, the article finds Kashkari in a cabin in Northern California, having resigned after putting the maligned package together.
"We didn't know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn't admit how scared we were, or how uncertain," Kashkari says in the article.
Clooney, a noted political activist, has taken on the financial crisis in film before. In 2009 he starred in "Up In The Air," playing an executive charged with flying around the country and helping corporations downsize employees. He directed and starred in "Good Night, and Good Luck," a feature about Edward R. Murrow's takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and won an Oscar for his role in Middle Eastern-focused "Syriana."
He's now directing and starring in "The Ides of March," playing a presidential candidate whose posters look exactly like those of then-candidate Obama's in 2008.
For more, click over to Variety.
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First Posted: 04/14/11 08:44 AM ET Updated: 06/14/11 06:12 AM ET