Photo by voteprime.

It’s been a week since D.C. received the sad news that HBO was pulling its sponsorship of Screen on the Green, the popular outdoor summer film festival on the National Mall. In that time, there has been a flurry of activity by devotees attempting to salvage the festival for this summer and hopefully into the future. Two Facebook groups sprung up almost immediately looking for support for saving SotG, and late last week the two merged into one, now over 1700 members strong. Of course, creating and getting members into a Facebook group is easy and largely a symbolic gesture taken on its own. What’s pleasantly surprising is that the group’s organizer, D.C. Council staffer Jesse Rauch, is taking real and substantive steps to find a new sponsor. After speaking to HBO, Rauch was able to find out the budget necessary to put on the series — $150,000 — and has been in contact with movie studio representatives and the MPAA about sponsorship, all thanks to contacts within the Facebook group.

Additionally, Rauch has initiated a letter writing campaign to demonstrate the volume of local support and interest in the series to over 30 local corporations in the hopes of finding one that will pick up where HBO left off. Of course, convincing any corporation in the current economic climate to commit $150K to something like this is no easy feat. The value of this kind of PR is dependent on the number of people they can reach with what amounts to a goodwill gesture (and the amount of press they think they can generate out of pictures of their logo on a screen with the Capitol in the background). Rauch is encouraging DCist readers who love SotG to get involved in the campaign.

The daily “Wake Up Call!” email sent out by The National Journal‘s (subscriber-only) Hotline reported yesterday that the Kennedy Center is currently “working on a bailout plan for Screen on the Green”. The Hotline reports that Kennedy Center officials have already been in talks with some sponsors themselves, and want to nail down funding before making any kind of announcement. The catch is that if the Kennedy Center does get sponsorship, they would look to screen movies on their terrace, overlooking the Potomac. How this amounts to a bailout of Screen on the Green is unclear, since part of the essence of that experience is, well, the “green.” Additionally, can they even fit anything approaching the number of people who come out to movies on the Mall up on the terrace? Watching movies on top of the Kennedy Center with the Potomac as a backdrop surely has its own appeal, but it’s hardly SotG. Sounds more like taking advantage of the disappearance of one high profile outdoor film festival to start a new one of their own. Hopefully if the Kennedy Center does manage to land a sponsor, they’ll reconsider the location and D.C. audiences will again get to enjoy movies on the Mall. Granted, without the HBO dance, but if a new sponsor comes up with some theme music to play before the movie, I think we can all promise to do the Comcast dance, or the Discovery Channel dance, or even the Booz Allen Hamilton dance.