A third “Sex and the City” movie has never been seriously discussed, Sarah Jessica Parker, star of the television series and movies, said Thursday night in New York.
“It’s not that I’m inhospitable (to the idea). We just haven’t felt it’s the right time to talk about it,” said the actress, who played the role of newspaper columnist Carrie Bradshaw on the HBO series for six years. The series, which won seven Emmy Awards, continues to air in syndication.
When a “Sex and the City” movie was proposed, Parker said she and Michael Patrick King, who directed both films, had talked about the story as acts in a play. “There is a third story, but whether or not we tell it has never been discussed.”
“In my head, it’s a small movie,” she added.
The first “Sex and the City” film became the highest-grossing romantic comedy of 2008, and the second, though it earned less than the first, held the same title for 2010.
Parker, 49, was interviewed by Jonathan Tisch, chairman of Loews Hotels, at the 92nd Street Y. The discussion was distributed on the Internet through Livestream. In addition to her work on Broadway, TV and movies, they discussed her fashion business and her philanthropic work.
Parker, the fourth of her mother’s eight children from two marriages, started performing when she was a child. Her first TV work was in 1974 on an NBC “Young People’s Special” called “The Little Match Girl,” which was shot in Cincinnati, where her family had moved when she was about 5.
While making that show, she missed five days of school and earned $500—and also managed to take home $20 in spending money, the result of spending only $1 of the amount she was allotted for lunch. That money “was a really, really big deal,” she said, adding that she also enjoyed acting. “I loved the experience of being someone else.”
Two years later, she and her brother Timothy were cast in a Broadway revival of a play, “The Innocents,” directed by Harold Pinter.
The family moved to New York in 1977, and Parker appeared in the Broadway musical “Annie,” eventually taking on the title role.
She was appearing on Broadway in “Once Upon a Mattress”–and planning her wedding to actor Matthew Broderick—when she agreed to make the pilot for “Sex and the City” despite her concerns about nudity and language in the script.
Both Broderick and her older brother Pippin thought the pilot script was “wonderful, different from anything they had read,” she said.
After she made the pilot, she forgot about it until she ran into a friend who complimented her on the show. She resisted HBO’s offer to do the show, raising many objections, but eventually agreed to shoot two episodes.
From that first day, “I didn’t regret one moment spent” on it, she said.
Asked what she learned from the “Sex and the City” experience, Parker said she learned about friendship. The show’s plotlines often dealt with her character’s close ties with three other women living in New York.
“It changed the way I looked at my friendships. That’s the emotional reward that I reaped from it,” in addition to the professional rewards and the chance to become a producer.
Parker started in the fashion business by creating fragrances, noting that since she was a girl, she had kept a list of possible names for perfumes. She also was involved in the creation of a lower-priced sportswear line called Bitten in a partnership with the Steve & Barry’s clothing chain.
“Unfortunately, they expanded too quickly” after initial success, she said.
Her latest business is a line of shoes for Nordstrom created with George Malkemus, president of Manolo Blahnik USA. Their first products were launched in February, and they have added bags and overcoats and expanded the number of stores where the line is sold.
“I would like it to grow in a smart and prudent way,” she said. “I’ve seen lots of emerging designers grow too quickly and it kills them.”
Asked about her use of social media, Parker said she had resisted using Twitter and other online forums until six or seven months ago, when she sent her first tweet about a documentary series she is producing about the New York City Ballet. She also is a member of that organization’s board of directors.
She said she has an easier relationship with Instagram, which allows users to share photos or videos with their followers, than with Twitter because of the former’s lower potential for vitriol.
Parker, who lives in Manhattan with her husband, son and twin daughters, said she sometimes is nostalgic for the New York of the 1970s despite the financial crisis and crime that the city was experiencing then. “The city used to offer more possibilities. People could come here with a dream and live in Manhattan.”
Today, high rents are making even some of the outer boroughs prohibitive for young artists, she said. “I don’t know how that can be corrected.”
May 16, 2014
