Lights! Camera! Capital!

It is a truth locally acknowledged that director James L. Brooks gets Washington.

Most filmmakers come, pan their camera a few times across the Mall, maybe blow up a police car or two, and then leave. And once again the nation's capital is reduced to either a cardboard cutout backdrop or the geographic equivalent of a Central Casting extra.

But some directors understand Washington from the inside out, most famously Alan Pakula in the 1976 Watergate thriller "All the President's Men." But next to that classic, it's Brooks's 1987 love-triangle comedy "Broadcast News" that is most often credited by Washingtonians as capturing the city's culture most authoritatively and subtly. In that film - a cultural watershed in its depiction of work, intimacy and journalism-as-entertainment - Brooks avoided the congressional walk-and-talks and iconic Mall scenes that serve as little more than set dressing to lend stories gravitas or political-thriller plot points.

After 20 years, Brooks has returned to D.C. with the love-triangle comedy "How Do You Know," starring Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd and Owen Wilson. The film, opening Friday, follows a softball player as she ages out of her lifelong sport and manages dueling romances with a baseball star and an embattled financier. And "How Do You Know" happens to be set in Washington, which the director casts once again as zeitgeist-signifier, metropolitan muse and supporting character in its own right.

Why, District denizens may well ask, does the New Jersey-raised L.A. resident have such an affinity for Washington? "It's the most beautiful city on Earth," Brooks said recently. "We start there."

Brooks's affection for Washington grew when he lived near the Naval Observatory while filming "Broadcast News," set in the frenetic scrum of the city's media culture. In a film that flawlessly captured D.C. tribal rituals as diverse as the White House Correspondents' Association dinner and a suburban Sunday brunch, the Jefferson Memorial wasn't a totemic backdrop for thoughtful speeches on the Constitution or ruminations on the Bill of Rights. It was the backdrop for Holly Hunter and William Hurt's first kiss.

The give-and-take between Washington and Hollywood has been well documented. (Altogether now: "Politics is show business for ugly people." We've heard it.) To paraphrase the famous observation about Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, just as she gave him sex and he gave her class, Washington confers intellectual heft and policy-wonk seriousness to the celebrities who come here to lobby and advocate, just as they sprinkle otherwise drab bureaucrats and politicians with a little stardust and borrowed glamour.

Most movies approach Washington with the stock stiffness of "The Day the Earth Stood Still," when a flying saucer passed all the familiar landmarks (Washington Monument? Check. Capitol? Check. Smithsonian? Check.) before landing on the Ellipse. But once in a while, filmmakers escape the edifice complex and deliver textured portraits of Washington as a living, breathing city. William Friedkin did it in "The Exorcist," where even in a story of wildly imagined horror, he captured the feeling of walking down a Georgetown street and wondering what really lies behind its well-tended doorsteps.

A real sense of place

Billy Ray did it twice, in "Shattered Glass" and then again in "Breach," about FBI mole Robert Hanssen, in which Ray depicted life in the bureau not as endless feats of derring-do and dead drops, but in all its linoleum-tiled, windowless banality. More recently, Doug Liman captured both the messy home life of a typical two-career Washington couple and the faceless institutions they routinely navigate in "Fair Game," which toggles between Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame Wilson's cozily well-appointed Palisades home and scenes where the White House looms menacingly, a silent, impenetrable fortress of monolithic power.

"Broadcast News" and "How Do You Know" deserve pride of place on the (short) list of films that mine Washington not for its majesty or monumental iconography, but as a lived-in place. In Brooks's case, these oblique moments glow with the added enchantment of his own relationship to the city. Where some see monotony and blandness, when Mr. Brooks comes to Washington, he sees broad, inviting streets. Where some see Deep Throat in every parking garage, he sees a verdant mix of city and suburb, stately built environments and rolling parks. What some deride as entrenched bureaucracy, Brooks extols for its sense of stability and permanence other cities don't have.

With "How Do You Know," which takes place primarily in Logan Circle, Adams Morgan and the Bowen Building downtown, Brooks once again infuses Washington with his distinctive brand of romance. And again, he avoids the most predictable tropes and themes of Official Washington to nibble at its edges, in this case the world of professional sports and investment banking.

Rather than predictable shots of the Washington Monument or the Capitol, Brooks pays gratifying attention to the details of the city's street life, from the security badges the extras wear to a brief shot of commuters on Segways. In Brooks's enchanted D.C., even the city bus becomes an improbably lyrical deus ex machina.