The line-up for Screen on the Green is as follows:

July 20: "Close Encounters of the Third Kind"
July 27: "Dog Day Afternoon"
Aug. 3: "On the Waterfront"
Aug. 10: "Rebel Without a Cause"

Screen on the Green to Return This Year
By Dan Zak
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, June 10, 2009 1:29 PM

Screen on the Green has been saved, thanks to the efforts of Washingtonians who were devastated when HBO announced last month that it would not continue its sponsorship of the free, five-week outdoor cinema series. HBO, Comcast and the Trust for the National Mall will now jointly bankroll the 10th year of the series on the Mall this July and August, after fans sent hundreds of e-mails.

"There was an outpouring of people concerned that this wasn't happening," Quentin Schaffer, HBO's executive vice president for corporate communications, said in a phone interview from New York. "When you start something like this, at some point it becomes a tradition. And unless you take something away, you have no idea how people count on it."

Comcast and the Trust for the National Mall, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service, approached HBO to talk about participating last month, and the final arrangements were sewn up in the past week. The series costs hundreds of thousands of dollars to put on each summer, and the three entities will share the burden.

"There was such an overwhelming outcry from the public to keep Screen on the Green going," said Comcast executive vice president David L. Cohen in a press release. "We listened and are excited to help make the event happen this year."

"This event will allow us to reach out directly to tens of thousands of viewers about their role in protecting 'America's Front Yard,' " Trust for the National Mall Chairman Chip Akridge said in the same release. "Each film will be preceded by the broadcast of a Trust for the National Mall public service announcement."

The series will premiere July 20 with "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," and continue every Monday until Aug. 10 (one week shy of its usual five-week run, a compromise resulting from the last-minute nature of the arrangements). The rest of the lineup has not been confirmed, though it might consist of movies already slotted for Screen on the Green's New York counterpart held in Bryant Park, like "Dog Day Afternoon" or "Rebel without a Cause," according to HBO.

On one of the three "Save Screen on the Green" Facebook pages, which have over 6,000 members, Capitol Hill resident Steve Pearcy posted a laundry list of memories from the series, including that time when a guy came dressed in a gorilla costume and holding a Barbie doll for "King Kong," when the crowd sang along with Judy Garland to "Somewhere over the Rainbow," when people gradually started to adopt and perfect the "HBO Dance," a hopping, flailing jig that accompanies the symphonic music of the vintage HBO feature-presentation sequence that plays before the movie.

"It's always been one of the little rituals, where you go with a groups of friends, and you run into other friends you haven't seen all year," says Pearcy, 47, who's attended Screen on the Green since its inception in the District. "It's a reunion sort of thing. . . . Some people were saying, 'How about these [other outdoor cinema series] out in the 'burbs?' and a couple of us tried going to the one out in Bethesda. But it doesn't have that kiss of excitement that being on the Mall does. You are at the center of things."

Expect July 20 to be a major reunion for a tradition that never had a chance to disappear. And expect a lot of hopping and flailing for joy as soon as the HBO music starts.