The first show in this series will be on Sunday, and I will be watching. Can they bring it off? I doubt it. TWT.
Senate Doors Are Closed to a TV Show
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG - [The New York Times]
September 12, 2003
WASHINGTON, Sept. 11 - The producers of "K Street," a new Home Box Office series that makes its debut on Sunday and depicts a firm of Capitol Hill lobbyists, have promised to blend fiction with reality. Now reality, in the form of the rules of the United States Senate, has intruded.
The Senate rules, it turns out, bar the use of Capitol and Senate space for commercial or profit-making ventures. That means the producers of "K Street," George Clooney and Steven Soderbergh, will be unable to film inside the Capitol or lawmakers' offices.
The two got the news on Wednesday, when the Republican chairmen and senior Democrats on the Senate's rules and ethics committees circulated a "Dear Colleague" letter, the same type of letter an aggressive lobbyist might beg a senator to write to drum up support for a bill.
"It would be very chaotic if we had film crews set up all over the place," Senator Trent Lott, the Mississippi Republican who is the chairman of the rules committee, told Roll Call, the Capitol Hill newspaper, which broke the story this morning.
"K Street" centers on a fictional lobbying firm, but blends in real politicians and lawmakers to try to give an insider's feel of how Washington works. A test episode showed actors mingling with senators, including Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrat of New York. James Carville and Mary Matalin, the husband-and-wife team who are, respectively, Democratic and Republican strategists, will also be featured.
To give "K Street" a flavor of current events, the producers have set an ambitious schedule of writing and filming each episode the week before it is to be shown. The Senate edict may make that more difficult.
The best place to catch lawmakers on the fly is in the corridors of the Capitol. But the Senate rules mean that busy lawmakers who elect to appear in "K Street," named for the Washington street where many lobbying firms have their offices, will have to be filmed elsewhere. Some Senate aides say that is unlikely.
But Stuart Stevens, a Republican media consultant and co-producer of the show, said there were plenty of places to run into lawmakers."We care about the people, not the places," he said.
nytimes.com |
