Thursday, September 10, 2009
Tuesday, September 8, 2009
Writer and Director Michael Patrick King makes his big-screen debut with Sex and the City, the movie
Writer and director Michael Patrick King in Los Angeles.
Bed Fellow
After decades in TV, writer and director Michael Patrick King makes his big-screen debut with Sex and the City, the movie.
By Christine Lennon
Photograph by Sian Kennedy
April 2008
It’s been said that New York was so essential to Sex and the City that it functioned as the HBO megahit’s fifth lead character. If that’s true, then Scranton, Pennsylvania, hometown of the show’s executive producer, Michael Patrick King, also deserves a spot on the credits list. As a boy, King had the unusual hobby of staging elaborate theatrical productions in his front yard. “I’d cast all of the neighborhood girls in these shows,” he says. “My mom would be leaving the house and she’d say, ‘Don’t you pull out all of the old dresses in the attic and put on a show again!’ And the door would close, and that’s exactly what I’d do. The show was calling me!”
Those neighborhood girls didn’t know it back then, but even without the pink cocktails and designer wardrobes, they were King’s prototypes for Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte. And four years after the TV version’s series finale, King is bringing the ladies back. The movie version of Sex and the City, which he wrote and directed, hits theaters in May.
“In the beginning, it was Darren and I in the room, saying things like ‘What if she said, ‘Up the butt’?” says King, recalling his earliest Sex and the City brainstorming sessions with the show’s creator, Darren Star. “‘Mrs. Up-the-Butt!’ When I wrote that, I was like, ‘Nobody ever wrote lines like this.’ There was no template for the series, and there isn’t one for the movie, either.”
Sex and the City is not, of course, the first television show to make the jump to the big screen, but most of the others have been lowbrow comedies (think Starsky & Hutch) or nostalgic spoofs (The Brady Bunch). “I guess The X-Files is the only one with the original cast, but how do you compare this with that?” says King, a fit, salt-and-pepper-haired extrovert who lives in Los Angeles with his boyfriend of six years.
In this case, lack of precedent seems only to have increased expectations. Gossip blogs tipped the public off about the film’s location schedule and hundreds of fans showed up to watch shoots. Add to that the high financial hopes—DVDs of the series have netted more than $300 million—and the fact that this is King’s first feature film, and the stakes couldn’t be much higher. “The first-time director thing is just another label somebody puts on you,” says King, who directed 10 episodes of the show and wrote 16 of them. “The real pressure, for me, is I have these four characters that people care about and know so well. There’s a lot of expectation about what these women should be doing.”
King, 53, moved to New York as a 20-year-old college dropout in order to pursue an acting career. When that didn’t pan out, he started doing stand-up, eventually working the comedy club circuit alongside Ray Romano and Jerry Seinfeld. After a young HBO executive named Carolyn Strauss caught his act, she encouraged him to write sitcom scripts for the fledgling Comedy Central. That eventually led to a job on Murphy Brown. “I joined the show the year the Dan Quayle thing happened,” says King, referring to the then vice president’s 1992 condemnation of Brown’s single-parent lifestyle. “It was a smart, smart place. I remember staying up at night thinking, ‘I’ve got to get my mind to think faster.’”
In 1997, after Murphy Brown had ended, Strauss came calling again, this time recruiting King for Sex and the City, which was just getting off the ground. King instantly felt comfortable with the raunchy subject matter, but the saltier bits of the show came as a shock to his conservative Irish Catholic mother, who complained that one episode left her so embarrassed that she couldn’t even watch it in front of the dog. “And the dog’s a girl!” she added.
Fortunately, the rest of the world was less squeamish: The series won 11 Emmys and eight Golden Globes and was an unqualified international hit. But by 2004 the buzz had dimmed a bit. Samantha was on the mend from breast cancer, Miranda was sponge-bathing her senile mother-in-law, and Carrie was ending a puzzling love affair with Mikhail Baryshnikov to pick up with Mr. Big—again. It seemed that the time had come for the ladies of Sex and the City to hang up their Manolos and for Kim Cattrall, who had spent much of the series naked, to put on some clothes. “When Michael and I decided to end the show, we thought we had told the best stories we could,” says Sarah Jessica Parker. “If he didn’t think he could make the show great anymore, I didn’t want to do it.”
But King had a few Sex stories left in him after all. While he and Parker were in Paris filming the series finale, they started talking about the possibility of doing a full-length feature, and King wrote an outline. “It was a romp,” remembers Parker. “It reminded me of one of those Bob Hope–Bing Crosby buddy movies.”
The film, however, hit some snags: Contract negotiations with the cast fell through, and rumors of tension (mainly that Cattrall wasn’t cooperating) were all over the gossip columns. King claims such stories were “blown up in the press beyond belief” but does admit that “the first time around, Kim said, ‘I don’t know if I want to be Samantha again right now.’”
Not one to sit around waiting for the phone to ring, King jumped straight into another project, directing the mock reality series The Comeback, which he cowrote and cocreated with Lisa Kudrow. The show, in which Kudrow starred as Valerie Cherish, an aging TV sweetheart who’d do anything to stay in the spotlight, was well reviewed, but audiences seemed to find Valerie’s desperation just too cringe-inducing. “It was ahead of its time,” says King, with obvious disappointment, of the series, which lasted only one season. “But there were people who loved it. One day I got a call from David Bowie. He was going out of the country and wanted to know what happened to Valerie.”
King didn’t have too much time to wallow. In 2006 Parker finally decided to throw her weight behind the Sex and the City film, and King, feeling his original outline no longer worked, came up with a new script. “Of course, he went off and wrote a five-hour movie,” Parker says, laughing. “He always goes big. He’s got an ego that way.”
Returning to the world of Carrie and company, says King, feels like a homecoming: “I love these characters. They were always alive for me.” And though he’s tight-lipped about the film’s plot, he’s happy to share the underlying message. “One of the themes is that your 20s become 40s, and you’re still whoever you are,” King says, in a rare moment of quiet reflection—which he quickly turns into a modified stand-up routine, unwittingly demonstrating that the generalization applies to himself. “Only two things change when you get older: the energy in your voice and the time of night you feel it’s appropriate to call someone. In your 20s, people call at 2 a.m. and yell, ‘Are you up?’ into the answering machine. Now, someone calls after 8 p.m., and my boyfriend is like, ‘Who is that? Who could be calling at this hour?’”
Keywords
Michael Patrick King,
Sex and the City,
profile,
directors,
tv,
film
Print E-Mail Feeds Share
Courtesy of New Line Cinema
Monday, September 7, 2009
Paula Radcliffe's training routine
Paula Radcliffe's training routine
Athletics: Paula Radcliffe's gruelling training routine makes her slightly comic, but you still have to marvel at her, says Peta Bee.
There is little you can do but marvel when you watch Paula Radcliffe run. At her bouncebackability, her tunnel vision, her ferociousness and her sweetness. At her laborious running style and her relentless speed. And at how long it must take her to get ready in a morning because, hell, she must be one high-maintenance chick.
From what has been made public of her pre-race routine, Radcliffe gets up, has a bowl of porridge (scientists says it's low glycaemic index) and a sports drink (energy-boosting) before putting on her running kit (ultra-lightweight, heat-dispelling), a Breathe Right nasal strip (increases airflow to the lungs), two adhesive back straps (supports the muscles around her spine), a pair of compression socks (reduces muscle vibration in the calves), specially designed Nike trainers (prevents soreness in the legs), a titanium necklace (wards of stress fatigue and improves blood flow) and sunglasses.
Not that it ends there. When it's over she has an ice bath (heals microscopic tears in muscle fibres), a massage (removes waste products and lactic acid from her legs), rubs on some emu oil (the elixir made from fatty tissue on the emu's back has potent healing properties), drinks a glass of bright green wheatgrass juice (full of nutrients), has a handful of vitamin supplements, eats some ostrich meat (low in fat, high in iron) and, finally one assumes, sits down. It would be no surprise if she chose a chair that cooks her dinner while working on the acupressure points in her feet.
What is happening to Radcliffe is nothing new. There is a point along the continuum of celebrity, be it that of sports stars or otherwise, where a dalliance with odd behaviour becomes troublingly all consuming and when, on the image front at least, things start to veer downhill. Usually, it is a progression so subtle that you barely notice the transition from acceptable to somewhat questionable. But let's just say it is the stage before Jacko went completely wacko, between him having the occasional facial tweak to him adopting a chimpanzee and moving into an oxygen capsule.
David Beckham reached this place after the sarong and before the second tattoo. The Williams sisters are well and truly there. Tiger Woods is on his way. And so, it seems, is Radcliffe. We could forgive her the socks, nose plasters and even the emu oil as endearing eccentricities. But the back support and titanium neckwear were steps too far. Even, it seems, for the adoring fans who log on to her official website.
Apparently they watched in bewilderment as she lined up for the 10,000 metres final in Helsinki adorned with her technological trinkets and tried to make out what exactly it was she was wearing around her neck. A bicycle lock got the majority vote. But there were undertones of exasperation in their chat-room exchange as they pondered what might come next and calculated how much quicker she might run if she ditched the lot. But there can be no turning back.
Withdraw into a world where you devote more and more attention to less and less and eventually all that remains to focus on is yourself. Such self-absorption is necessary to some extent in sport, particularly in individual events like Radcliffe's which require singlemindedness in the extreme. But retreat too far from the ordinariness of daily life, as she appears to have done, and there is the risk that you begin to lose perspective of what's normal and what's verging on crackpot.
When experts in alternative medicine were consulted by the BBC to comment on Radcliffe's Helsinki performance-enhancers they concluded that not one of the props she used had a scrap of clinical evidence to support them. They could offer only a psychological boost to someone who believed that they work, the university researchers said. After Athens she consulted a naturopath who held metal rods over items of food to determine which she should exclude from her diet. As a result she has cut out wheat, dairy, gluten, tomatoes, coffee and grapes.
She now eats wheat-free pasta the night before a race. How Hollywood. It is a slippery slope to celebrititis, and Radcliffe, the nation's darling, appears to be on it. Come back Paula, before it's too late.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 8/21/2005
Athletics: Paula Radcliffe's gruelling training routine makes her slightly comic, but you still have to marvel at her, says Peta Bee.
There is little you can do but marvel when you watch Paula Radcliffe run. At her bouncebackability, her tunnel vision, her ferociousness and her sweetness. At her laborious running style and her relentless speed. And at how long it must take her to get ready in a morning because, hell, she must be one high-maintenance chick.
From what has been made public of her pre-race routine, Radcliffe gets up, has a bowl of porridge (scientists says it's low glycaemic index) and a sports drink (energy-boosting) before putting on her running kit (ultra-lightweight, heat-dispelling), a Breathe Right nasal strip (increases airflow to the lungs), two adhesive back straps (supports the muscles around her spine), a pair of compression socks (reduces muscle vibration in the calves), specially designed Nike trainers (prevents soreness in the legs), a titanium necklace (wards of stress fatigue and improves blood flow) and sunglasses.
Not that it ends there. When it's over she has an ice bath (heals microscopic tears in muscle fibres), a massage (removes waste products and lactic acid from her legs), rubs on some emu oil (the elixir made from fatty tissue on the emu's back has potent healing properties), drinks a glass of bright green wheatgrass juice (full of nutrients), has a handful of vitamin supplements, eats some ostrich meat (low in fat, high in iron) and, finally one assumes, sits down. It would be no surprise if she chose a chair that cooks her dinner while working on the acupressure points in her feet.
What is happening to Radcliffe is nothing new. There is a point along the continuum of celebrity, be it that of sports stars or otherwise, where a dalliance with odd behaviour becomes troublingly all consuming and when, on the image front at least, things start to veer downhill. Usually, it is a progression so subtle that you barely notice the transition from acceptable to somewhat questionable. But let's just say it is the stage before Jacko went completely wacko, between him having the occasional facial tweak to him adopting a chimpanzee and moving into an oxygen capsule.
David Beckham reached this place after the sarong and before the second tattoo. The Williams sisters are well and truly there. Tiger Woods is on his way. And so, it seems, is Radcliffe. We could forgive her the socks, nose plasters and even the emu oil as endearing eccentricities. But the back support and titanium neckwear were steps too far. Even, it seems, for the adoring fans who log on to her official website.
Apparently they watched in bewilderment as she lined up for the 10,000 metres final in Helsinki adorned with her technological trinkets and tried to make out what exactly it was she was wearing around her neck. A bicycle lock got the majority vote. But there were undertones of exasperation in their chat-room exchange as they pondered what might come next and calculated how much quicker she might run if she ditched the lot. But there can be no turning back.
Withdraw into a world where you devote more and more attention to less and less and eventually all that remains to focus on is yourself. Such self-absorption is necessary to some extent in sport, particularly in individual events like Radcliffe's which require singlemindedness in the extreme. But retreat too far from the ordinariness of daily life, as she appears to have done, and there is the risk that you begin to lose perspective of what's normal and what's verging on crackpot.
When experts in alternative medicine were consulted by the BBC to comment on Radcliffe's Helsinki performance-enhancers they concluded that not one of the props she used had a scrap of clinical evidence to support them. They could offer only a psychological boost to someone who believed that they work, the university researchers said. After Athens she consulted a naturopath who held metal rods over items of food to determine which she should exclude from her diet. As a result she has cut out wheat, dairy, gluten, tomatoes, coffee and grapes.
She now eats wheat-free pasta the night before a race. How Hollywood. It is a slippery slope to celebrititis, and Radcliffe, the nation's darling, appears to be on it. Come back Paula, before it's too late.
© Guardian News & Media 2008
Published: 8/21/2005
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
