Duplicity stars Julia Roberts and Clive Owen as a corporate spies involved in a complicated scheme and maybe with each other. What makes all this of interest to many observers who would otherwise have shouted "Check, please!" by the time they got to "corporate spies" is that the movie is the writer-director Tony Gilroy's follow-up to Michael Clayton. Profiling Gilroy in The New Yorker, D. T. Max recounts his journey from wandering soul to aspiring fiction writer to aspiring screenwriter to successful producer of paid-for but unproduced scripts to the man he is today. "One of the first [of Gilroy's scripts] to register with producers was R.S.V.P., written in 1985-86, a comedy about a couple who, as a joke, invite the President to their wedding and find that he accepts. In 1987 came Tempted, a high-concept comedy about a man who steals money from the bank where he works and then tries to put it back. Gilroy found screenwriting easy: 'I knew where the scenes were. I knew when to get in and out. All of a sudden, I had perfect pitch.' He was by now 'making a good living,' though he was frustrated that none of his screenplays were actually filmed.
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