Clooney Takes On Challenge

George Clooney, dream lawyer.  

Variety reports that George Clooney’s production company, Smoke House, has bought the rights to Jonathan Mahler’s nonfiction legal tome, The Challenge.

Mahler, best known for writing Ladies and Gentlemen, the Bronx is Burning, writes this time about the efforts of two lawyers, Charles Swift of the US Navy and Neal Katyal, a Georgetown law professor, to get a fair trial for Salim Hamdan, the imprisoned former driver and guard for Saddam Hussein. Swift and Katyal took their case to the Supreme Court in 2006 where they argued successfully that the military tribunals originally envisioned by the Bush administration took away too many of the Guantanamo Bay detainees’ legal rights, including those that they were entitled to under the Geneva Commission. Hamdan was tried under a revamped system and was convicted this month for giving material support for terrorism, but was cleared of conspiracy to commit murder. He was sentenced to 66 months in prison, including time served.

If you want to know more about the book, the estimable Bryan Burrough wrote a review of it in Sunday’s New York Times. In short, he was lukewarm on it–he thought it was well-researched and earnestly detailed, but perhaps only exciting to lawyers.

Clooney had apparently gotten word about Mahler’s project early on and had been courting Mahler. I suppose that if George Clooney is batting his eyes at you, chances are good you’re going to sign with him.

No word on what role Clooney will play in the eventual film–writer, director, actor, any combination of two of those choices, or what the heck, event all three. He’s George Clooney, you know.