HBO announced it was moving forward with a pilot for Washingtonienne, based on the book that lightly fictionalized Senate staffer Jessica Cutler's adventures as an anonymous blogger who took money from politically-powerful men for sex including, famously, for lots of ass fucking. The show, whose development has been previously reported, is to be a half-hour comedy. Cutler sells her body, wacky hijinks ensue, presumably. Sarah Jessica Parker is executive producing, so it sounds like it will basically be Sex And The City, but in DC. Filming is set to begin soon. Does this mean casting has already occurred? Who will play Cutler? Who will play Gawker Media alumna Ana Marie Cox (who publicized Cutler's online diary in 2004)? Vote on this critical civic issue in the comments, even if it's the only vote you cast all year! [Variety]

As the official site describes it, HBO's Tell Me You Love Me offers "an unfiltered look at three couples as they navigate critical periods in their lives." By "unfiltered," of course what they mean is, "boldly ushering slapping balls into the premium cable landscape." And no one's slapping balls were more closely scrutinized than actor Adam Scott, whose Cruiseian good looks made up one-half of the couple you would have most eagerly TiVoed through the boring stuff to see knock prosthetic uglies. Talking to BlackBook, Scott reveals what went into making the "banging for real" illusion come alive:

Sloane Crosley, author, popular publicist, self-effacing autobiographer, HBO series subject, gossip monster assembler, big ass chronicler, partygoer, and etiquette specialist has a new video interview out, and damned if she's not commenting on us and the rest of the "snarky urban jungle." Whoa, you write about somebody 27 times and all of a sudden it's like they can't stop talking about you. It's okay though—she thinks all this vicious online gossip is a net positive(!), a view that I tried to get across to Keith Gessen at his party, without success. Perhaps he will be persuaded by listening to his pal Sloane! Watch Crosley explain why she tolerates Gawker and its commenters, but Village Voice readers made her cry, below:

Dan Klores is the smartest man in PR. That's because he's not in PR any more. He founded his eponymous agency, which made (and still makes) him a ton of money, and then decided, "You know what? Fuck this shit. I'm gonna make movies." Now he spends all his time making (actually good!) documentaries and hosting soirees for various power brokers, without ever having to deal with the actual PR industry much. And he's about to move further up the entertainment industry food chain, because HBO has signed him to direct a movie version of his Believe-it-or-not psycho documentary Crazy Love. This, I will watch.

· Disney may have another "bankable tyke-and-tween franchise" (why does that phrase sound vaguely offensive and child-pornish?) in Camp Rock, says Variety, with 8.9 million viewers tuning in to watch the Jonas Brothers sing their newest hit, "(Yuck!) There's A Mosquito in My S'mores." [Variety]
· DreamWorks bought a comedy pitch called Home Schooled, about a 30-year-old man who was home schooled and is now heading off to college. The clash of cultures is sure to yield hilarious results! [THR]
· Tom Hanks sides with AFTRA in the escalating SAG-AFTRA feud. [Variety]
· Plastic pony fetishist Sloane Crosley's book of short, personal essays, I Was Told There'd Be Cake, was purchased by HBO for development into a possible series. [Variety]
· Supernatural EP Eric Kripke has signed a two-year deal with Warner Bros.TV, which—get ready to be spooked out—secures his showrunner duties on the shows upcoming fourth season on The CW. [Variety]

If you're a diva with an image problem (like, say, Monica Lewinsky or Hitler), there's no friendlier filmmaking duo than Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbato. In fact, the World of Wonder partners have such a reverence for tarnished camp that they once began an interview with your guest blogger by pointing to a half-drank Evian and solemnly intoning, "That? Was Nicole Richie's." However, former Hollywood Madam Heidi Fleiss didn't quite see eye-to-eye with the pair, despite their attempts to flatter her in the new HBO doc Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal. Says Page Six:

We're not sure if Variety editor Peter Bart has simply found his stride as a blogger after years of loathing the medium or if his recent dispatch about the new HBO documentary Heidi Fleiss: The Would-Be Madam of Crystal simply shilled a little too hard to make it as a print story. BUT! Either way, we are more than a little intrigued by Fleiss's latest predicament, the latest in what HBO Docs boss Sheila Nevins calls the "opera" that is the former madam's life:

Entourage star Kevin Dillon ran into some of New Jersey's finest at an appearance at The Pool in Atlantic City over the weekend. Not being a neophyte in the often perilous club-going-for-pay circuit, Dillon made sure that his rider contained a section which stipulated that he must be secluded from a majority of the club either behind a velvet rope or sequestered in the V.I.P. area. However, these precautions did not prove to be ironclad enough to prevent him from interacting with a few overzealous fans of the HBO series, who knocked down the red velvet rope and demanded to have their pictures taken with Dillon. One fan said, "How often is Johnny motherfucking Drama in the A.C.? Not that fucking often. No stupid rope is going to stop me and Frankie and Kari and Mary and Frankie #2 from getting our picture with him! We would've done the same thing if it was Derek Jeter or one of those Gossip Girls."

Jeremy Piven is important, he will have you know. He can pick up girls in a hooptie. He can cut Stephen Dorff in bathroom lines. He can tell Billy Bush to fuck off on the red carpet and his own mother to fuck off over brunch. And, as Janet Charlton reports today, he can also cast wildly eccentric and ill-suited stars in cameos on Entourage based solely on fun chatter he has with them on airplanes. As the piece claims:

Time Warner is in many ways a self-sustaining media ecosystem: Their intermittently functioning cable networks and motion pictures wing create celebrities and cultural trends, which then wind up on the covers of their top-tier glossies, migrate online via their internet porthole AOL, and eventually float amidst the other sewage runoff filtered by bad-seed web-holding, TMZ, at which point the entire cycle begins anew. The only pie Time Warner has yet to stick a chubby little finger into is the business of network TV, and recent rumors have indeed suggested that they were hungrily circling NBC Universal. Addressing a media conference yesterday, CEO Jeff Bewkes issued a standard non-denial denial:

Here we go again! VH1 (who else?) has just greenlit Scream Queens, a reality show in which 10 unknown actresses desperate to be the next Jamie Lee Curtis or Janet Leigh will compete for a starring role in an upcoming “major” Lionsgate film. And boy are they excited — one Lionsgate rep tells THR that “discovering new talent is always exciting,” while another chimes in by teaching us that “VH1 has had a tremendous track record in launching alternative programming that captures viewers' imaginations.” Yes, yes it does! Our brains have been expanded by Viacom's ongoing carnival featuring women degrading themselves in hot tubs and music execs attempting to Make A Band, Any Band Will Do quarter after quarter. But with a reputable horror studio behind Scream Queens and the fact that scary movies have launched more than a few major careers, this one may put its You’re The One That I Want and It Factor predecessors to shame. We look back at five recent Next Big Thing reality shows in an effort to place our bets:

Sex and the City star and perpetually naked old lady Kim Cattrall will continue her illustrious career of pretend-fucking on camera for HBO. The positively ancient fiftysomething coital acrobat has signed on to play the lead in a new series, copied of course from a British show, about a middle-aged woman who has a sexual reawakening, leading to major life changes. It's essentially about fucking to terms with things. No word yet on whether she'll have three shrill, shoe-worshiping friends, but you can bet there will be puns. So very many puns. [EW.com]

So. Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich has a sweet creative consulting deal with HBO. They give him a paycheck, and he will sometimes call them up if he has a great idea (and Frank Rich has thousands of great ideas every day). He will maybe read some scripts and give notes. Did we mention he gets a paycheck? We don't begrudge him this cushy gig, but he should BEWARE. Another respected cultural thinker once went down this road, Frank!

• Say goodbye to CBS2's Jim Rosenfield. He's been axed as part of cutbacks at the network, and today will be his last day. The belt-tightening also claimed the jobs of Andrew Kirtzman and Scott Weinberger.

Avuncular Times columnist and former theater critic Frank Rich just signed a deal making him HBO's "creative consultant." Which means, according to Nikki Finke, "a consulting fee combined with payments for projects that get made." What it also means is that now he can get all his kids jobs on television too. (Zing!) [Deadline Hollywood Daily]

Recount, the HBO film about the 2000 presidential election mess in Florida, premiers on HBO soon. It looks fiendishly entertaining if you are a nerd, like some of us. Primarily because OMG Laura Dern as Katherine Harris. The make-up! They even recreated the horse photos. Some people, though, are not so excited about this movie. Because they are characters in it. Specifically Warren Christopher, a respected elder of the Democratic party, who is portrayed as a spineless pussy. He is played by John Hurt in goofy (but accurate) prosthetics. Christopher was the "public face of the Gore team" and the film basically shows how he played fair while Bush's fixer, James Baker, waged war. All of this is public record, but Christopher's pissed anyway, saying the filmmakers distort the story. Baker, on the other hand, is hosting a damn screening of the film at his think tank. He says the film makes him out to be "a little more like Don Corleone" than he really is, but that is actually a dark and depressing joke. He's worse than Don fucking Corleone, because Don Corleone was pretend. Oh hey, the trailer's after the jump.

As a a part of a deal to bring HBO shows to the iTunes store, Apple will allow a content producer to break its $1.99-per-show price structure for the first time, HBO employees involved in the deal told Portfolio. Last summer, Apple CEO Steve Jobs refused to allow NBC to do the same, so NBC boss Jeff Zucker took his shows elsewhere — to Microsoft and the Zune, specifically. Why did HBO get the deal while NBC didn't?

In a continuing creative victory for horse-geezered men around the world, HBO has brought Alexander Payne on board as the director of its new series Hung. Picked up by the network less than a month ago, the dark comedy is about "a well-endowed man ... who was once a high school sports legend, but is now plodding along in middle age as a struggling father and high school basketball coach. His luck begins to change, however, when he figures out a way to use his best asset." Or, as we hear creators Colette Burson and Dmitry Lipkin pitched it, "Kind of like Sideways, but with a huge dick where the pinot noir goes."

Yet another auteur filmmaker is making the jump to television (well, HBO). This time it's the brilliant Alexander Payne (About Schmidt, the lovely final segment of Paris, je t'aime) who will be directing (and exec-producing) for an idiot box series. The show, unfortunately, is something called Hung, and is about, sigh, a well-endowed man muddling through middle age. Well, at least half of that is familiar territory for Payne. [Variety]

The curious path of the documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired took another bizarre turn this week when HBO hosted an actual red-carpet "premiere" for the film in New York — the same city where it had attempted to secretly screen the doc for a week-long Oscar-qualifying run last month. Then, as Vulture noted today, things got even weirder when Polanski's 1977 statutory rape victim, the then-13 Samantha Geimer, showed up as one of the guests: