Mom, Is That You With George Clooney?

If some of those people up there on the big screen getting fired by George Clooney in the new film Up In the Air look like friends and family, that's because they just might be. Writer/director Jason Reitman used real people who had recently been laid off when he shot his latest film.

That's what he told viewers at a special screening of Up in the Air held, appropriately enough, for mostly "aspiring" (aka: looking for work) writers held at a branch of the Motion Picture Academy in Hollywood. "When we were shooting in Detroit and St. Louis, we put an ad in the paper for people who had recently lost their jobs, like you would do for a documentary," said Reitman. "We ended up interviewing about 60 people, and 22 of them you see in the film."