From Clooney to Clinton, who could negotiate WGA/AMPTP peace?

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-et-strikemediators11jan11,0,5342123.story?coll=la-home-entertainment

Rating the strike's maybe mediators
From Clooney to Clinton, who could negotiate WGA/AMPTP peace?
By Deborah Netburn, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
4:45 PM PST, January 11, 2008

Intrepid reporter Nikki Finke blasted the news from her Deadline Hollywood Daily blog early Friday morning: Clooney is coming! Clooney is coming!

Apparently the good and just Clooney -- he who makes movies with messages, cares about Darfur, doesn't want paparazzi hurting innocent bystanders -- has looked down from his watchtower in celebrity space (or his spread in Italy) and seen that once again, a troubled world needs him.

He has let it be known that he is willing to help the squabbling writers and producers of Entertainment Land work out a deal before any more of the good people of Hollywood get hurt.

The daring Clooney, reportedly building a coalition of super-friends with Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg and John Wells, Finke reports, will gather the warring factions in a room with a locked door and not let anyone out until a deal has been struck.

(To break briefly from our super-hero metaphor, Clooney's publicist Stan Rosenfield e-mailed this note on Clooney's real intended involvement: "George has and would offer to help, including putting a group of people in a room that know both the CEO's and the writers personally. And that of course he would do anything to get this over. He didn't use any of the rhetoric that's being attributed to him.")

Will Clooney be successful? Will his super-suave skills and powerful A-list aura allow him to triumph where Jeffrey Katzenberg and the Mighty Association of Talent Agents have failed? And what other leaders have been called upon, rumored or offered to help negotiate a settlement between the writers and the producers?

For answers to these and other questions, tune in. No, wait, click here: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/business/la-et-mediators-pg,0,1099667.photogallery?coll=la-home-entertainment