George Clooney
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Despite the fact that many have labelled him as one of the hardest working men in Hollywood, actor/director
George Clooney is showing absolutely no signs of burnout - in fact, he's just added yet another project to his schedule! The project was announced by writer
David Bianculli on his website
TVWorthWatching.com, and will be based on his 2009 book "
Dangerously Funny: The Uncensored Story of The Smother Brothers Comedy Hour".
For those of you who aren't familiar with The Smother Brothers, it was a forerunner to the likes of
The Colbert Report and
The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, in that it sought to build current affairs into its sketches, poking fun at the establishment and pushing the envelope as far as possible at the time. The show ran from 1967 to 1969, before being cancelled by
CBS following a number of takes on controversial subject matter such as the Vietnam war.
In his announcement, Bianculli said
"First, I'm thrilled on behalf of Tom and Dick, whose story deserves to be told and retold, and whose efforts to inject topicality into scripted TV comedy in the 1960s led very directly to the sort of thing Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert and Bill Maher are doing today.
"But I'm also thrilled because, when the book was still in galleys and I was asked by the film-division agent at my literacy agency to name my dream filmmaker for a Smothers Brothers movie, I said two words. One was George. The other was Clooney."