If you haven't already, check out Gambit Weekly's cover story this week — "Post-K-ville" — about David Simon's pilot for Tremé, which just wrapped up shooting in New Orleans. There's also this Q&A with Simon.
It was the final hours of filming for Tremé, the pilot episode of David Simon's prospective HBO drama, and already the show had run up against questions of realism — i.e., it was due to wrap almost on schedule. Despite threats of rain and hail, the planned 17-day shoot finished on April 2 with a scene at The Times-Picayune's Howard Street offices.
The location was a fitting sendoff for Simon, a former crime reporter at The Baltimore Sun. As creator of The Wire (2002-2008), HBO's universally praised, ratings-deficient supernova, Simon's presence in New Orleans throughout the month sparked a media firestorm about the potential of this follow-up, and for good reason: He brought with him a formidable crew, both in front of the camera (a cast led by film veteran Steve Zahn and The Wire alums Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters) and behind it (the award-winning [Agnieszka] Holland and an all-star team of scribes, including co-producers and frequent collaborators Eric Overmyer and David Mills, Washington, D.C., crime novelist George Pelecanos, and local writers Tom Piazza and Lolis Eric Elie).
And though the New Orleans setting is a graveyard for televised fiction — as the authors of Fox's unintentional comedy K-Ville (2007), canceled after just 11 episodes, can attest — Tremé's assemblage of literary talent presages the same multilayered, novelistic approach that endeared The Wire to its small-yet-fervent fan base. There is also the man at the helm, whose surname now carries the weight of TV production greats like Bochco, Ball, Abrams and Chase, and whose collaborators believe his passion for New Orleans culture and his journalistic approach to narratives make him the perfect man for the job.
David Calhoun and Elizabeth “EB” Brooks are the first two employees of Lafayette Central Park Inc., the nonprofit charged with turning Lafayette Consolidated Government’s 100-acre Johnston Street Horse Farm property into a passive public park. Calhoun was named executive director, and Brooks is director of planning and design.
Is it a crime for citizens to photograph, video, or take notes of a police officer in the line of duty, or a right protected by the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution? Locally, such activity, as witnessed recently, will at the very least result in a night spent behind bars.
At Thursday's State of the Economy luncheon, LEDA President and CEO Gregg Gothreaux said PXP has already quietly hired 180 people for its Broussard expansion.
There will soon be a whole lot of shakin’ going on at Benny’s Sportshack Supplement Depot, a new concept by Opelousas native Benny Nele. Located at 2002 Johnston St., the supplement shop, smoothie bar and café, featuring hot off the press paninis and wraps, plans to open in late May.
This year’s Cool Town issue is all about people who are not native to South Louisiana but made a conscious decision to be here, to be among us, to participate in our culture and contribute to it.
A shelved ordinance transferring $200,000 from a northside drainage project to a south Lafayette development may not break any laws, but it stinks to high heaven.
An effort to restore a shuttered dancehall and document other vacant or razed honky-tonks could serve as a model for saving an endangered species of entertainment.
Lafayette’s gene pool has been host to a long line of eccentric characters who have blurred the lines between crazy, genius, disturbed and curiously entertaining.
If you haven't already, check out Gambit Weekly's cover story this week — "Post-K-ville" — about David Simon's pilot for Tremé, which just wrapped up shooting in New Orleans. There's also this Q&A with Simon.
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