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3. ART & INDUSTRY
by Amy Taubin
K STREET: WASHINGTON INSIDE-OUT
An exhilarating, short-lived political and televisual experiment is now available on DVD.
By Amy Taubin
A Film Comment online exclusive
K Street's Carville & Matalin
K Street, Steven Soderbergh's excursion into pay-cable episodic television, eluded and provoked. It was heady, easy on the eyes, and over in 10 weeks - the most pleasurable TV affair since Twin Peaks. A Washington political-procedural set inside a K Street lobby shop and starring D.C. odd couple James Carville and Mary Matalin - playing themselves in slightly fictionalized circumstances-the show debuted on HBO last September 14. A second season is not in the offing. A DVD collection of all the episodes is being released by HBO this month.
Although it may have seemed sui generis, K Street was not without antecedents. HBO's comedy series The Larry Sanders Show and Curb Your Enthusiasm made similar use of improvised dialogue and mixed fictional characters with "real" people, albeit in a showbiz realm where confusing fantasy and real life is hardly surprising or threatening. Haskell Wexler's Medium Cool and Robert Altman's Tanner (also an HBO venture) employed actual political landscapes - respectively, the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention/riot and the 1988 Democratic primary - as background for fictive narratives. Robert Redford's underrated The Candidate explored presidential politics as media performance eight years before Ronald Reagan was elected president. Drew-Leacock-Pennebaker's seminal 1960 cinema verite documentary Primary (made for ABC) turned its camera on the opening stages of the presidential race where, for the first time, television would be a deciding factor. But the most direct inspiration for K Street was The War Room. D. A. Pennebaker and Chris Hegedus's documentary went behind the scenes during the 1992 Clinton campaign and made a star of not the candidate but his eccentric, brainy strategist, James Carville, whose romance with Bush staffer Mary Matalin was the stuff of screwball comedy.
K Street intervened in a television landscape overrun with 24-hour news channels and reality-based programs. Unlike TV news, which is written and edited to foreclose the possibility of making connections among stories, K Street presented the viewer with a jigsaw puzzle structure where each piece had to be examined from all angles in order to find its relationship to the others. In that sense, the show critiqued television as an information delivery system more incisively than it revealed how power works in Washington (its ostensible subject).
"There is truth, absolute in its relativity," said Lenin. Some 80 years later, we of the society of the spectacle might elaborate as follows: There is truth, absolute in its relativity to the camera and the power of those behind it. In the films made in his "Silver Factory," Andy Warhol demonstrated that the camera didn't simply record truth, it created its own through the complicity of filmmaker, performer, and viewer. Securing his own immortality with the apercu that in the future everyone will be famous for 15-minutes, he predicted a celebrity-obsessed culture where the camera is the only verification of existence.
Warhol's camera lured a cross section of New Yorkers from the rich and famous to the outcast and criminal, many of whom discovered-as participants in reality-based shows would decades later-that narcissism is no protection against humiliation. One would expect politicians to be more self-protective, but even the flap about the appearance of candidate Howard Dean on the first episode of K Street did not deter Washington luminaries (among them Barbara Boxer, Orrin Hatch, Tom Daschle, Rick Santorum) from making guest appearances, applying themselves to the fictional aspects of their scenes with the earnestness of beginning acting students. K Street's creepiest moments occurred when some of the real politicians exchanged improvised chitchat with entirely fictional characters as if they'd known them for years, thus suggesting a propensity if not for outright lying then for being willing to say anything to appear on top of the situation.
Mary McCormack
K Street's premise had Carville and Matalin as partners in Bergstrom, Lowell, a start-up lobbying and consulting company, financed by a reclusive Brooklyn moneybags named Bergstrom (Elliot Gould). Carville's and Matalin's assistants at Bergstrom, Lowell were fictional characters: Maggie Morris (Mary McCormack) and Tommy Flanegan (John Slattery). Soderbergh violated the codes of narrative television by throwing us into the middle of an ongoing situation and letting us figure out for ourselves who was who and what was going on. The first episode opened with a sequence of an extremely dapper man having his shoes shined. Composed of fragments of odd-angled close-ups, it established a world where power relations are both abstract and perverse. We saw the same man intermittently throughout the episode: getting his nails manicured, buying ties at the posh men's clothing store Pink. (Referencing more hip and pricey stores, hotels, and restaurants than a Judith Krantz novel or Warhol's diaries, K Street suggested that Washington power resides in surfaces as well as labyrinthine depths.) The man who is costuming himself for the role of K Street lobbyist is Francisco Dupre (Roger G. Smith), another entirely fictional character. As eccentric in appearance as Carville but far less readable, Dupre had been recommended by Bergstrom, making him a "must hire" for the firm. "Is he black? Is he white? Is he gay? Is he straight? Is he East Coast? Is he West Coast?" joked Matalin, after meeting this weirdly charming, somewhat dubious character. Viewers encountering K Street might have been similarly bemused.
According to Grant Heslov, an executive at Soderbergh and George Clooney's production company Section Eight and co-executive producer for K Street, there were no scripts or written outlines for the show, and no one took a writing credit. The dialogue was entirely improvised. On the other hand, there was no guerrilla-style shooting (locations and guest appearances were all pre-arranged). At the beginning of each week, Soderbergh, Clooney, and members of the creative team (among them Henry Bean and Mark Sennet, who also got executive producer credit, and consulting producers Carville, Matalin, and Michael Deaver) planned out the episode-including the breaking-news hook-that HBO would present six days later. (Some current events touched on during the series: the Democratic pre-primary debates, the Philadelphia mayoral election, the California recall election, the Saudi-terrorist connection, the music industry's panic about downloading, the energy bill, and Kobe Bryant.) K Street was shot on digital video using the Panasonic DVX-1000, which runs at 24P. Most scenes were covered with multiple cameras. No special lighting was permitted and all sound was recorded direct. Soderbergh was hands-on for all 10 episodes as director and, under his usual pseudonyms, cinematographer and editor. Heslov explained that they tried each week to finish shooting by Wednesday but often they went into Thursday, which meant that Soderbergh would edit all night in order to deliver the show to HBO on Friday. Jazzy and formally subversive, Soderbergh's editing choices focused attention not only on the moments when the improvisations of the performers and the camera people clicked but also on cast fumblings, jerky camera moves, and askew framing. By revealing the ebb and flow of the process of making the show, he gave us a sense of how impulse and thought connected, often imperfectly, to action.
Two mysteries, both suggested in the opening episode, intermittently motored the series. One was the mystery of the couple - specifically, of the screwball marriage of political adversaries Matalin and Carville. "How do they do it?" was the question asked by every other person on the show, prompting viewers with even the slightest romantic tendency to scrutinize the body language of the onscreen wife and husband for signs of whether the off-screen relationship is "for real." (One could not have done the same with Lucy and Desi, whose TV incarnations were ironclad inventions that borrowed only their names from actual life.) The romantic mystery was resolved in the penultimate episode when Carville and Matalin, celebrating a success within the fictional narrative, reminisce about their real-life courtship while enjoying a quiet dinner at the discreetly elegant restaurant Vidalia. The scene was Clooney's idea, but the funny, tender repartee and sense of pleasure in each other's company belonged entirely to the two people on the screen - whoever the hell they may be.
Entwined with the romantic comedy was a noir-like plot line about the manipulation of power and the intangibility of its source. It seemed that Bergstrom may have deliberately set up Matalin and Carville by contracting as a client a Saudi Arabian organization that was under FBI scrutiny for funneling money to terrorists. But was Bergstrom acting out of private malice or was he the tool of some more powerful entity? In what had to be a moment of pure serendipity (or was it?), the fictional FBI investigation of Bergstrom, Lowell coincided with an actual "Drudge Report" story fingering Matalin as a prime suspect in the Justice Department's investigation into who blew the CIA cover of the wife of a former U.S. ambassador who criticized the president for misleading the country into war with Iraq. K Street incorporated the Drudge story so that for a couple of episodes the fictional and the real Matalin's protests of innocence merged, even as a fictional FBI was swooping down on Bergstrom, Lowell for reasons no one yet understood.
A few weeks after K Street concluded, Carville was on a network talk show railing against the energy and pharmaceutical industries and their K Street lobbyists for having virtually taken over the government. That level of power was never evident in Soderbergh's K Street. As a start-up boutique company, Bergstrom, Lowell had few clients and limited access to Washington big shots. The effect of the show, however unintentional, was to trivialize the clout of the real K Street - and that was its great flaw. What K Street did brilliantly, and like nothing else in the history of television, was to tease us into unpacking meaning and making connections - even at the risk of discovering that in the society of the spectacle, there is no there there.
© 2004 by Amy Taubin
