George Clooney Set To Direct THE TENDER BAR For Amazon Studios
George Clooney, fresh off directing Netflix’s Midnight Sky, has found his next film project. He will be directing and producing The Tinder Bar for Amazon Studios.
The film is based on the book by J.R. Moehringer and the story is about a “boy growing up in Long Island who seeks out father figures among the patrons at his uncle’s bar.” The description of the book offers some more insight. It reads:
J.R. Moehringer grew up captivated by a voice. It was the voice of his father, a New York City disc jockey who vanished before J.R. spoke his first word. Sitting on the stoop, pressing an ear to the radio, J.R. would strain to hear in that plummy baritone the secrets of masculinity and identity. Though J.R.'s mother was his world, his rock, he craved something more, something faintly and hauntingly audible only in The Voice.
At eight years old, suddenly unable to find The Voice on the radio, J.R. turned in desperation to the bar on the corner, where he found a rousing chorus of new voices. The alphas along the bar--including J.R.'s Uncle Charlie, a Humphrey Bogart look-alike; Colt, a Yogi Bear sound-alike; and Joey D, a softhearted brawler--took J.R. to the beach, to ballgames, and ultimately into their circle. They taught J.R., tended him, and provided a kind of fathering-by-committee. Torn between the stirring example of his mother and the lurid romance of the bar, J.R. tried to forge a self somewhere in the center. But when it was time for J.R. to leave home, the bar became an increasingly seductive sanctuary, a place to return and regroup during his picaresque journeys. Time and again the bar offered shelter from failure, rejection, heartbreak--and eventually from reality.
In the grand tradition of landmark memoirs, The Tender Bar is suspenseful, wrenching, and achingly funny. A classic American story of self-invention and escape, of the fierce love between a single mother and an only son, it's also a moving portrait of one boy's struggle to become a man, and an unforgettable depiction of how men remain, at heart, lost boys.
There’s no word on if Clooney will star in the film, but there’s always the possibility. Clooney is also looking at helming another project for MGM titled Boys in the Boat, which is an adaptation of the Daniel James Brown book about the 1936 University of Washington rowing team that won gold at the 1936 Olympics.
He is planning to direct The Tinder Bar before he jumps on to that other project. I like Clooney as a director. I’ve enjoyed the projects that he’s made and these all sound like wonderful projects for him to take on.
Source: Deadline