George Clooney and Ethan and Joel Coen have decided to team up for a third time, as Clooney has signed on to play a major role in the new Coen-movie, "Burn After Reading", according to the site Production Weekly.

The new film is a semi-comic movie about a former CIA operative who, in the process of writing his memoirs, a book detailing some of his missions, loses the disc with the manuscript. The disc then passes through the hands of various people, who all end up dead because they've seen what's on the disc.


The Coen Bros. script, is loosely based on the novel “Burn Before Reading: Presidents, CIA Directors, and Secret Intelligence,” by former Admiral Stansfield Turner, who served as director of the CIA from 1977 to 1981.

Clooney will not be taking the lead role of the disc-misplacing agent, but he will play a hitman, bumping off the people who've read the contents of the disc in the film. It's a bit of a turn to the dark side for Clooney. He has played a CIA agent before, in "Confessions of a Dangerous Mind" and most recently in "Syriana", but never as a through and through assassin. There's still no word on the other members of the cast.

The Clooney/Coen-team has made for some good movies in the past. Might this be one to top them?

The shooting is scheduled to start in August 2007.