Based on the novel by Walter Kirn, the film Up in The Air starring George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, is a fiction despite its underlying truths and attempts by director Jason Reitman to ground it in reality. Along with screenwriter Sheldon Turner, he embellished Kirn’s novel about a man who spends most of his life “up in the air,” traveling from one city to another as a “career transition counselor” firing people for corporate executives who are too gutless to do the dirty job themselves. For the roles of people being told they are being laid off, Reitman cast real people who had recently lost their jobs.
