He truly is a man of exquisite taste. George Clooney has made the extremely wise choice of using a fake TIME magazine cover as the poster for his new movie, The Ides of March.
To be fair to George (and, well, us), the inspiration for the excellent artwork does seem to come from a May 2008 TIME cover (as well as a TV ad campaign for the NBA finals of that year) with the text, “THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE,” which looked at the presidential chances of a certain senator from Illinois who went by the name of Barack Obama. (Clooney has made the cover of TIME, but the studio doesn’t seem to have used any part of that particular photo.)
The imagery for The Ides of March shows the movie’s main stars, Clooney (who also directs) and Ryan Gosling, merged to appear as one (crucially, it’s Clooney’s famous mug that adorns TIME). A spokesman for TIME explained to our sister publication Entertainment Weekly that, “We gave the studio permission to use the TIME image. TIME is an iconic brand, we get many of these requests, as you’d imagine, and we turn many of them down. But, in this case, the use of the image is consistent with our brand, and it’s so visually compelling that we were delighted to allow them to use it.”
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And the movie looks like a potential Oscar darling. Clooney plays a presidential candidate, and Gosling plays his press secretary who, semi spoiler-alert if we take the synopsis at its word, “finds himself involved in a political scandal that threatens to upend his candidate’s shot at the presidency.” Rounding out the cast are the always reliable Paul Giamatti and Marisa Tomei, and Philip Seymour Hoffman, who specializes in stealing scenes.
The Ides of March is set to open the Venice Film Festival at the end of August, and Clooney is already having to deflect criticism that it’s politically skewed in favor of the left (which would then, of course, mirror his own views). He explained to USA Today that he wanted to wait for the supposed love-in surrounding Obama’s 2008 election win to subside and hopes that he’s subsequently struck the right tone. “Republicans hate the beginning of the movie, the Democrats hate the end. So we’re good,” he said. So long as nobody hates the poster, NewsFeed doesn’t mind how it shakes out. (via Huffington Post)
Glen Levy is an Executive Producer at TIME. Find him on Twitter at @glenjl. You can also continue the discussion on TIME’s Facebook page and on Twitter at @TIME.
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