George's Washington

In one respect, at least, the culture and politics of the United States have achieved a perfect yin-yang balance. At a time when Arnold Schwarzenegger is trying to break into west-coast politics, politicians on the other side of the country are climbing over each other for bit parts in a new TV drama. Stranger still, this is not your average, predictable, feelgood, prime-time show. It is a peculiar, unscripted experiment in which well-known senators and even a presidential candidate improvise unpredictable scenes with paid actors in front of wobbly handheld cameras.

The show's makers, HBO, claim that K Street portrays politics "from the inside out". It follows a semi-fictional firm of DC lobbyists (a sub-species that dominates K Street, a concrete-and-glass boulevard dissecting the city centre). You see deals being done and politicians being primed and prepped before going into battle.

"The word we keep using is 'process'," says one of the show's producers, Henry Bean, who directed the 2001 film, The Believer. "The show is really about showing the process. How the deals are done, how provisions are put into bills."

So why should politicians with enough savvy to get themselves elected in the first place make themselves such hostages to fortune? The answer comes in two words now sending a thrill through the nation's capital: George Clooney. Hollywood's hottest star is not only co-producing the show alongside his favourite director, Steven Soderbergh, he is wandering the streets of Washington and wielding a camera himself, in pursuit of inner political truths.

"Everybody in town is buzzing about it," says Howard Kurtz, the Washington Post's media correspondent who was recruited for a brief K Street cameo performance last week. "But also wondering whether anyone in the other 50 states could care less."

That is the dilemma now facing Clooney, Soderbergh and HBO as K Street enters its third week. The Hollywood-Washington love affair is a tale of mutual fascination, dating back to the days of JFK. The only people who really impress successful movie stars are powerful politicians, and politicians with the fate of nations in their hands still covet the near-hysterical worship that only show business celebrity can inspire.

"People love these guys around town," says Ronald Brownstein, chief political correspondent of the Los Angeles Times, and the author of The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection. "People love the fact that what they are doing is glamorous and sexy enough that George Clooney should be there in a $2,000 suit filming it."

"I think he does open a lot of doors," says producer Henry Bean. "But George is also extremely knowledgeable and sharp. He wears his fame very lightly. Every Monday morning we sit in a room and we generally have a few ideas and we pick one to be the topic of that week's show. There are maybe a dozen people there, and George is one of them."

K Street's launch party at the Palm Restaurant was packed with Washington power-brokers. And the list of participants is fast becoming a Who's Who of national politics. Hillary Clinton appeared in the pilot episode. Howard Dean, the Democratic presidential contender from Vermont, was in the first screened episode, being briefed before a debate.

Even K Street's stars are real people, or at least they used to be real people. They are Michael Deaver, a former Reagan aide and Washington's extremely odd couple, James Carville and Mary Matalin. Carville is the cantankerous "Rajin' Cajun" from Louisiana who orchestrated Bill Clinton's electoral triumphs. His wife, Matalin, is a rightwing Republican who was, until recently, Dick Cheney's press advisor. Now they both play loose approximations of themselves, running the consulting firm at the heart of K Street's action.

Swapping lines with the professional actors who play their employees, Carville and Matalin even give a good impression of their testy marriage. After an onscreen row, Matalin tells someone looking for her husband: "James Carville is not here, And he may never be here again."

"That is exactly how they really talk about each other. I've heard them," marvelled an acquaintance.

This is what Clooney and Soderbergh - who directed Sex, Lies and Videotape, Erin Brockovich, and Traffic - are aiming for: fiction improvised by real people so that it edges into the realm of docudrama until the viewer starts to question what is fact and what is fiction.

After the Monday morning meeting to discuss the theme of the week, the writers put together a loose structure and some dialogue for the actors, and the next two-and-a-half days are spent shooting mostly improvised scenes. The results are edited almost up until the last minute before the Sunday night screening. Kurtz was called up at short notice to play himself, as the doyen of Washington's media journalists, in a testy Starbucks encounter with a lobbyist trying to place a story about music piracy favourable to the industry.

"It was a gas," he admits. "The show is much more seat of the pants than I expected. I got a call the day before saying would I like to play a scene. Steve Soderbergh told me he likes to do everything in one take. So I got one shot at this. They said I could have played it any way I wanted. I could say yes to the pitch or no, or tell him to get lost."

On this occasion, Kurtz tells the lobbyist, played by a professional actor - also improvising - to get lost, and walks out, dignity intact, with the classic Washington sod-off line: "It's great to run into you - let's do it again real soon."

Not everyone in Washington has been prepared to play along. Congress got Clooney and the K Street crew locked out of the Capitol, on the grounds that they were pursuing a commercial venture. However, the stream of willing politicians has continued to flow. Two well-known senators, Charles Schumer and Chuck Hagel, appear in this week's episode.

It is without doubt Washington's favourite parlour game this autumn. The question mark remains, however, over whether it is of much interest to the rest of the country. The first of the 10 episodes in the series were savaged by the critics.

The review in the middlebrow national paper, USA Today, was fairly typical. "Not quite fact, not quite fiction, and not at all entertaining," it sneered, describing K Street as "a pointlessly rambling inside look at Washington's spindocracy - a self-contained, self-satisfied group of political hangers-on who are fascinating to each other and of no interest to anyone else."

The improvised scenes are indeed often jerky, disjointed and hard to follow. These problems are easy to overlook in fly-on-the-wall documentaries, but they are harder to ignore when you know the action is being guided by unseen hands.

Bean concedes that K Street is still trying to feel its way to a new genre as it goes along, and that the producers are now struggling to redress the balance between realism and plot.

But even if it can be turned into compelling drama, what will it do for US politics? Not much, Ron Brownstein fears. The LA Times journalist believes it will serve only to deepen the national cynicism about politics.

"It's not a great idea for politicians when people don't believe a word they say to start blurring the lines between politics and Hollywood. You're asking for trouble," he says.

There have been other attempts to mingle political fact and fiction, such as Tanner '88, co-produced by the cartoonist, Garry Trudeau, which followed the campaign of an imaginary candidate against the backdrop of the actual 1988 presidential contest. But Brownstein argues that K Street has gone much further to blur the lines, and he points to an extraordinary incident in the first episode, in which Howard Dean, the former Vermont governor, is fed a jokey line about politics and race by one of the K Street "consultants", which he then used in a real debate in the Democratic primary contest, scoring points with the audience.

"It was incredible. It was like The Matrix, when the agent comes out of the matrix into the real world," says Brownstein. "I don't want to overestimate the risk to democracy, but we have to be careful not to give the impression that politics is this cool political game where everybody knows everybody, and they're all in it together."

Bean acknowledges the problem, and insists that K Street is working on it. "I actually think Ron's put his finger on something that is a real danger for the show. One of the things that are wrong with American politics is that so many people are doing it for money," he says. "We have to show that people are into it for other things. There are very idealistic and ideological people, and it is extremely important that we convey the depths of passion there. That is something we are in danger of missing."

The sincerity behind this star-studded effort to lift the lid off the political machine is obvious, sometimes painfully so, from the quirks and wobbles of the first few episodes. But the producers, under intense suspicion from the Bush administration for being west-coast liberals, have been careful to remain controversial rather than explosive. There has been nothing so far hinting at the corporate interests at play behind the scenes in the "war on terror", for example.

But there are seven more shows to come. The problem facing Bean, Clooney and Soderbergh, is that by the time they get this risky formula right, there may no longer be anyone outside Washington still watching.