Movies: The Wiz Of Show Biz

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Because Clooney thinks of celebrity as something that is happening to him rather than who he is, he's able to exploit the power of fame for creative control. Since forming the production company Section Eight in 2000 with director Steven Soderbergh, with whom he had worked on Out of Sight, Clooney the producer has used Clooney the actor as barter. He did it to get Warner Bros. to make next year's Good Night and Good Luck, a movie about Edward R. Murrow's battle with Joseph McCarthy that CBS, Murrow's old network, had passed on as a TV movie. "It's hard to shoot something in black and white," Clooney says. "If I say I'll be in it for scale and direct it for scale, it helps a lot."

The downside to putting on passion projects is that they rarely make any money. Section Eight has made 23 film and television projects in the past four years, but none besides Ocean's Eleven has made a profit. "Steven and I are massively in the hole for Section Eight. Massively. We figured the other day that we are each $850,000 in the hole," Clooney says of the partnership, in which they have agreed to finance any project the other feels strongly about. Nevertheless, it's a relationship that he believes more star-director combos should attempt. "I think it's really irresponsible to make really crappy movies for the up-front money," he says. "If you need a job or are just coming up, by all means take the job. I was in Return of the Killer Tomatoes. But if you have the ability to green-light a script, I think it's wrong."

Clooney and Soderbergh don't get much in acting and directing fees, owing to their willingness to swap cash for creative control. "I got paid more on K Street as a union camera operator than as a producer," Clooney says of the political-drama series they did for HBO. But on Ocean's Eleven, Clooney the actor made such a phenomenal amount on his percentage of the gross that he's still living off it. "We're basically living Ocean's to Ocean's," he says.

Although it's the company's only profit source, Clooney says the Ocean's franchise is finished, partly because corralling all the actors and stringing together the intricate plotline are too hard on Soderbergh and partly because capers, Clooney learned firsthand, are trickier than they look. During shooting, his Lake Como house was broken into four times by the same guys, who were after a safe. "The second time they came, they put Jergens lotion all over the hardwood floor to slide it out. At least I hope that's all they were using the lotion for," he says.