Cover Story: Sarah Jessica Parker
The Dry Spell’s Over
After four years of missing it, hoping we’d have it again, waiting and then waiting some more, Sex returns. Star Sarah Jessica Parker and director Michael Patrick King say Sex and the City: The Movie should satisfy fans, and not just because it lasts longer
By Bob Strauss
People just can’t go without their Sex and the City.
The bawdy cable-TV comedy ceased production in 2004, but a less-graphic version of the series has enjoyed even wider success in broadcast syndication and fans have been clamouring for more.
Well, the show’s four sophisticated but romantically frustrated girlfriends are finally back together, and on the big screen this time. Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis and Kim Cattrall all reprise their beloved roles, as do many of the men in Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha’s lives. But will it be everything women — both those of a certain vintage and the second generation of rerun Sex addicts — have been dreaming of?
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Sarah Jessica Parker as Carrie Bradshaw
in Sex and the City: The Movie
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“I like to say it’s not the movie that people are expecting,” says
Parker over the phone from New York, the city she calls home. She is
also the film’s executive producer. “It’s funny and it’s cheeky, with
plenty of salty, ribald language in the conversations. But it’s really
a story about forgiveness and being a grown-up and being complicit in
your own disappointment.”
Set three years after the show’s final episode, the Sex and the City
movie finds the four friends well into their own separate lives and, in
some cases, living in locations far-flung from their old Manhattan,
Manolo Blahnik-treaded stomping grounds.
“Charlotte has adopted her Asian child, who is three years old,” says
Michael Patrick King, the series’ key producer and writer/director of
the film. “Steven and Miranda are still married. Carrie and Big are
together. And Smith and Samantha live in Los Angeles, where he’s an
actor and television star.
“They’re all in relationships with the varying degrees of happiness
that that entails from day to day. An interesting point of the movie is
how often are you happy? There’s always going to be some exciting drama
because people are not perfect, and relationships make people who think
they’re perfect clear that they’re not.”
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Beyond that, neither Parker nor King is revealing whether any of the
rumoured turns in the story — A marriage? A death? — will actually come
to pass.
We’re lucky enough that the movie even got made. The show’s initial success, though impressive for cable, wasn’t enough to really convince financiers that a costly theatrical sequel was a good bet. Along with that, Cattrall wanted to wait awhile before returning to the role of voracious vixen Sam, and Parker swears that the movie never would have happened without all four original cast members’ participation.
“I’m thrilled that people are enthusiastic, stuck with it and still have a relationship with it,” Parker says, noting that the enduring popularity of the cleaned-up reruns eventually convinced everyone of a film’s viability. “Obviously, it’s what allowed us to do the movie, and I hope we’re worth the wait. Many times, I never thought we would get it up and running. There were so many fits and starts since I first started trying to put it together two years ago. It’s been a long time and a lot of dead ends and obstacles — but let me tell you, for me it was worth every second.”
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Big (Chris Noth) plants one on Carrie
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For King, who spent many long hours extrapolating Candace Bushnell’s
source columns and book into uproarious, dramatically satisfying screen
misadventures, preparing for movie Sex required a whole new approach.
“It’s a very big movie,” he says of his first feature film. “It has a
lot of story and a lot of emotion and, hopefully, a lot of comedy. And
I knew when I was telling the movie story that it had to be deeper and
more full and have a bigger journey because you’ve got the audience
there for two hours. So for me as a writer, it was a real challenge and
a real thrill to not do three episodes of a television series
back-to-back. Not that three episodes of the TV series wouldn’t be
appreciated; it just needs to be a movie. I think of it as less like
television and more like Sense and Sensibility or something bigger. It’s not so much talking heads, but a talking world. Let the pictures tell the story.”
While maybe not quite in Jane Austen’s league, the show has definitely
had a distinctive take on the romantic mores of its time and culture.
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“It was a new voice,” Parker reckons. “I don’t think anybody ever spoke like that before, I don’t think the observations had been made, I don’t think you’d ever seen women talk so candidly and intimately about their lives, whether it was their sexual lives or their personal lives. And, obviously, it was a time and a place in the city that was very exciting.”
These qualities, more than anything, are the factors to which Parker attributes Sex and the City’s devoted following. But they are also the qualities that this new, somewhat different take on the material will have to not just replicate, but reach beyond if both the fan base and a wider audience are to be satisfied. After all, for the movie gamble to work, it can’t just be about all the old girlfriends getting back together for some laughs, hugs and tears.
“That’s true, and it was very daunting when I was writing the movie,” admits King. “I mean, it was a very daunting expectation — for myself, too, because I care a great deal about the level of work we did in the series. When I opened up the door and went back in, I thought, well, I hope I have something. But y’know, you always take risks, and the series wouldn’t have gotten to where it got to if I didn’t shape it differently every season.”
Pleased as she is to have pulled off such a dearly anticipated project at all, Parker just humbly hopes to win some people’s approval.
“I feel so lucky that I got this movie together and feel very proud of our efforts to this point,” she says. “Obviously, it will be for everyone else to say whether we fell short or hit the mark, but it’s been a real privilege to get it this far.”
Bob Strauss is an L.A.-based entertainment writer.
Sex and the City Style Quiz
1. In the Season Four episode where Carrie takes part in the “real people” fashion show and falls on the runway, whose clothes is she wearing?
a) Dolce & Gabbana
b) Versace
c) Vera Wang
2. While on a trip to L.A. in Season Three, Carrie and Samantha go in search of cheap handbags copied from a certain designer and sold from the back of a car. Which designer’s bags are being ripped off?
a) Louis Vuitton
b) Fendi
c) Kate Spade
3. A pair of Carrie’s $485 shoes is stolen while she’s at a friend’s baby shower in Season Six. Who were those shoes made by?
a) Manolo Blahnik
b) Jimmy Choo
c) Christian Louboutin
4. Patricia Field is the costume designer responsible for all four ladies’ looks. She’s only worked on two movies since SatC went off the air. One was the 2007 flop Suburban Girl, what was the other?
a) The Devil Wears Prada
b) Mean Girls
c) Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street
5. Which of the following was not a Carrie Bradshaw fashion staple?
a) The big flower
b) “Carrie” necklace
c) Pink Birkenstocks
answers: 1. a 2. b 3. a 4. a 5. c