It seems as if the producers of the upcoming HBO series based on the Washingtonienne book by Jessica Cutler decided that the pilot really needed some authenticity - the show's crew was spotted by several DCist readers and contributors while shooting scenes last night in Adams Morgan. Apparently, the crew blocked lanes of traffic on 18th Street and a significant portion of the sidewalk. Well, look, I've never backed a large-scale dramedy for HBO (and......

You know, I canceled my HBO subscription when The Wire ended, and even though I was briefly regretting that decision when I started reading about Alan Ball's new vampire show, today's news makes me feel sure I did the right thing. Via Gawker, Variety is reporting that some four years after the Jessica Cutler/Washingtonienne Capitol Hill sex blog scandal first broke, the pay cable network is going ahead with a pilot for a TV series......

Just a few days from now, the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire will kick off its fifth and final season. Considered one of the best and most realistic portrayals of crime and corruption in a struggling city (Baltimore, in this case), the show traces the thin line that divides the good guys from the bad. Whether cops stealing stacks of cash during drug busts or thieving dockworkers pooling together money for a stained-glass window......

Recently we caught up with Washington Capitals owner and former Vice Chairman of America Online, Ted Leonsis, over email. Here's what Ted had to say about his role in the organization, his goals for the team, and his feelings toward the media. Please note that he uses emoticons without shame. DCist: Now that you're completely retired from AOL, how much fun is it to get up every morning and not have to go to work?......

This month marks the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's assault upon the city of New Orleans. The suffering and hardship of that city's citizens no longer makes headlines, but the havoc caused by the storm is something many people still live with on a daily basis. Jazz trumpeter and composer Terence Blanchard is one of those people. A son of the Crescent City and musical descendant of fellow New Orleanians Buddy Bolden, Louis Armstrong, and......

DCist's highly subjective and hardly comprehensive guide to the most interesting movies playing around town in the coming week. Foreign: Ballad of a Soldier The AFI's great Janus Films retrospective continues, and there is probably no title on the schedule this writer is more eager to see on the big screen. Grigori Chukhrai's 1959 classic takes a simple concept — the tale of a Russian soldier making his way home to see his mother during......

As Sommer mentioned earlier this week, I was fortunate enough to have been invited to speak on a panel on D.C. voting rights at the YearlyKos Convention, a huge gathering of progressive activists and bloggers in Chicago. This morning I will be sitting alongside D.C. Shadow Rep. Mike Panetta, Danny Rose from DC Vote and Kesh Luddewhetty of DC for Democracy, all of whom will detail the current fight for voting rights, where it stands......

Night of the Living Theater...by Dead Playwrights largely presents exactly what you'd expect to happen if notable writers from the ages were asked to take their scripts to modern-day producers and pitch them for Hollywood treatment. But while the five works highlighted in the piece may frequently lack surprises, the work as a whole still adds up to enjoyable, briefly-diverting entertainment. The best of the short skits is "A Lot of Talking", which smartly echoes......

Via the tipline and Sam of Leisure, we're reminded of the oddest D.C. ritual of the summer -- doing a little dance as soon as the old school HBO theme music comes on at the start of any Screen on the Green screening. Sam explains: This is my third year coming to SOTG, but I had to have someone explain to me the concept of the HBO Dance. When the HBO music comes on,......

From the tallest skyscraper in the City of Brotherly Love to Canadian tourism copywriting brilliance, here's what you should know from our -ist cities: This week, Phillyist took a gleeful listen to the White Stripes' exciting new release, watched in awe as their new tallest skyscraper was finally completed, found a cheaper way to get to Gothamist, invented a tasty new dessert, and brought back their Craigslist Round-Up feature with a bang. Bostonist watches......

Holy smokes! Giant fish on the MTA, Paris Hilton in jail, then out, then in again, Al Gore, goatses, blumpkins, Matt Damon, and baby art critics! It's been a busy week across the Ist-A-Verse, and here's a smattering of what's been going on. In Gothamist's neck of the woods, they found out that many things are possible: A man caught a 40+ pound fish off the Rockaways and took it home on the subway. Graffiti......

>> As we mentioned earlier in Reader, Meet Author, Vanity Fair editor Cullen Murphy will be at Politics and Prose tonight to read from and sign copies of Are We Rome? As long as we can ruled by Simon Woods, I'm all for saying, yes, please, let's be Rome. 7 p.m. >> Tickets are still available for tonight's performance of Leoš Janáček's Jenůfa at Washington National Opera. Our critic called this production WNO's "best......

We're not quite sure what to make of HBO's Entourage. On the one hand it consistently provides a breezy half hour filled with laughs, wish-fulfillment, and little to no plot to slow things down. On the other, its sensibility seems geared toward the sort of despicable lunkheads who insisted on calling everything "money" in college; and we're pretty sure that if we ever met Turtle in a bar, punches would end up being thrown. Although......

Make sure you grab your popcorn money and that ugly purse you only carry because it's big enough to sneak in a couple of Diet Cokes and a bag of licorice, because the film festivals keep rolling into town. The AFI Silver Theater keeps the momentum going from last weekend's festival with the 17th Annual Washington Latin American Film Festival. Showings start tonight with the Spanish film Princesas (Princesses), featuring prostitutes with hearts of gold,......

You're probably sick of hearing it by now. We're sorry about that. But we're only thinking of your well-being when we say it: you really ought to be watching The Wire. The stunningly complex and believable series about Baltimore's drug trade and pervasive institutional decay is only a couple of weeks into its fourth season on HBO, but the plaudits are already here in force. A 98 out of 100 on metacritic should provide some......

FRIDAY: >> The fine folks at the Black Cat are throwing themselves a 13th anniversary party tonight, and bully for them — it can hardly be an argument that the bar and music venue has become a nightlife mainstay for those of us who like our drinks cheap and our juke boxes funky. The convergence of two unlucky symbols (13 and black cats) isn't lost on the staff, who are encouraging you to go ahead......

Author George Pelecanos has been writing about life in D.C. for over fifteen years, but it's not the Washington you expect. He shuns the overdone political thriller, with the glamorization of Capital Hill and shiny Northwest. Instead, Pelecanos finds the homegrown stories of families who've been here for generations. The author, who also contributes to HBO's The Wire, was born in the city and raised in Mt. Pleasant (but now lives in Silver Spring), and......

Though everyone rhapsodizes about the power of the female friendship these days, there aren't too many works devoted to platonic affection between guys (HBO's Entourage perhaps one exception to the rule). Fringe Festivalgoers, however, have Like You're My Friend and All, which takes a peek at both the comic and darker sides of the male bond. If co-writers and co-stars Andrew Akre and Nathan Holt aren't close friends in real life, we would be surprised.......

That's what we're left to conclude after receiving only a handful of Washington rants yesterday (which were solid, we don't want to take away from those that have entered). That cab post we put up yesterday? Over 40 comments and counting, and none of you took the time to copy your comment into the contest thread. Here's a rant: you guys are lazy. Big time. Lewis Black would be ashamed of you. And along those......

Perhaps it's the steamy weather, or the too-short tease of the Memorial Day weekend but for whatever reason, folks seem to be irked this week, ready to tear into a comment section with extravagant gusto. As always, DCist is prepared to oblige. If you're going to be generally upset, you may as well get something for your trouble. So, for the rest of this week, we'll be running a rant contest. In the comments section......

TUESDAY: Unfortunately, the new book My Father's Houses: Memoir of a Family is not Steve Roberts' attempt to capitalize on all the buzz surrounding HBO's new polygamy series Big Love by coming out with shocking revelations. Instead, Roberts recounts the story of his own life as a young man growing up in New Jersey, attending Harvard, and courting and marrying Cokie Boggs. Just when we though Steve Roberts might have actually written something interesting. At......

Written by new DCist contributor David Sullivan. Blogger beware! Thought things were going well for Jessica Cutler? Not exactly. According to reports in today's Washington Post and on CNN.com, Robert Steinbuch, former beau and co-worker of the Washingtonienne, is seeking unspecified compensation and punitive damages in a lawsuit. For those living in a rabbit hole for the past two years, the two worked together in Senator Mike DeWine’s (R-Ohio) office. Cutler catalogued her sexcapades with......

This post was written by DCist contributor Campbell Roth. Just when you thought premium cable was safe -- -HBO refuses to let Jessica Cutler's 15 minutes tick to an end. The Post's Lisa de Moraes reports today that the pay channel is developing a sitcom based on the exploits of our infamous Washingtonienne (aka Jessica Cutler), whose blog broadcasted her rarely PG-rated dalliances with D.C. menfolk. Details on the show's plot are slim, but those......

August's last weekend has come and gone. We hope you spent it well. We know we did, and we didn't even get to everything we had planned. The photo was snapped by Melissa during Saturday's rain showers. Nothing compared to Category 5 Katrina bearing down on New Orleans as we type. Capital Weather is keeping everyone updated. If you have friends or family in Katrina's path, please encourage them to stay safe and evacuate. This......

Proving to women everywhere that you can turn an, uh, adversarial situation into lots of bling, New York magazine reports that Jessica Cutler, shining star of Capitol Hill, has had the rights to her book, "The Washingtonienne," optioned by HBO. And not only has HBO optioned it, but Sarah Jessica Parker, who graced the channel for six years of "Sex and the City," will co-produce. An insider source says that back in May, Showtime and......

A vigilant reader pointed out to us that the website of the ever-popular Screen on the Green film series has been updated. The series, organized by AOL and HBO, is in its seventh year, and is seen here in a photo from this blog. This year's films are "The Way We Were" (July 18), "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" (July 25), "Suspicion" (Aug. 1), "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf" (Aug. 8) and "The Big......

Yo HBO, didn't "K Street" go off the air sometime in 2003? Sure you can buy the DVD of the entire series, but we aren't sure targeting tourists at the Woodley Park McDonald's, where we took this photo, is the best strategy. Have you seen left-over "K Street" ads around town? Did you watch? (This DCist must admit, we did.)......

Fritz Hahn, who writes about nightlife around the D.C. area for washingtonpost.com and the Weekend section, spends most of his time out on the town, checking out bars, bands, and spinning iPod tunes at Saint-Ex. He was kind enough to answer some of our questions about everything from bartenders to trends to how he reviews a new hot spot in town (hint: it involves remaining anonymous, which is why we can't show you his lovely......

D.C.'s lobbyists aren't leaving town, but K Street could look very different in the coming years if the vision of planning officials is carried out. The AP, via WTOP, reports that the National Capital Planning Commission is looking at a plan to reconfigure the thoroughfare to accommodate a transit-way. That would mean the service lanes, along with parking would be eliminated. Additionally, portions of the reconfigured K Street would cut into parks at Farragut, McPherson......

(From DCist contributor Hemal Jhaveri) Is George Clooney going to the be the next Arnold? We, and every other media outlet, can only speculate. The Reliable Source gives us a heads up that the former ER doc will be hitting the Hill tonight:Washington's favorite celebrity hunk, George Clooney, is back in town. Tonight he'll be at a fundraiser at Lounge 201 on Capitol Hill for his father, Nick, who's running for Congress as a Democrat......