On August 1st 2006, the Ocean’s Eleven (2001) star will open his own motion picture production company, Smoke House, with the help of his business partner Grant Heslov. Hence his separation from the production company Section Eight, and ipso facto from his other business partner Steven Soderbergh. Nevertheless, the company will still produce the next two Clooney movies, Ocean’s Thirteen (2007) and The Good German (2006), both directed under Soderbergh.
The Section Eight production company was set up 6 years ago. Smoke House will be directed by Clooney and Heslov, both screenwriters for the success movie Good Night, and Good Luck (2005). The studio takes its name from a chic Burbank restaurant in California, located two blocks from the Warner Bros. parking lot.
Soderbergh says he wants to concentrate more on movie creation than on development and production. George Clooney seems ready to meet new challenges and one of them is his job as executive producer of the mysterious and futuristic feature A Scanner Darkly (2006).