KIM’S RIGHT!
She’s been blamed for killing off Sex And The City and enraged her cast mates, but kim cattrall’s stand is good for women
Goodness, what an almighty storm erupted last week around the news that the third Sex And The City film will not be happening. First came Sarah Jessica Parker’s announcement that the project had been cancelled. ‘ We had this beautiful, funny, heart-breaking, joyful, very relatable script and story,’ she announced on the red carpet at the New York City Ballet, ‘it’s just so disappointing that we don’t get to tell the story.’ Kristin Davis echoed her friend’s sadness with an Instagram post saying the news was ‘deeply frustrating’. Next came unsubstantiated reports that it was Kim Cattrall’s ‘diva demands’ over money and other projects that forced the studio to shut down the project just weeks ahead of filming. Like any publicist worth her salt, the woman who played PR supremo Samantha Jones immediately used an interview on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories to deny all allegations, claiming that she had already said no to the film last year and describing her relationship with her former cast members as ‘toxic’. Quite the row, eh?
WHO HASN’T FALLEN OUT WITH A WORK COLLEAGUE? WE DON’T CHOOSE THEM AFTER ALL
Aside from the fact that the majority of discerning fans will be relieved that there will be no repeat performance of the semi-racist monstrosity that was the second 2010 film, there’s a bitter taste left that Carrie Bradshaw and Samantha Jones appear no longer to be the against-all-odds, till-death-do-us-part, life-affirming friends. For, forget Big and Aidan, Steve, Harry and Smith Jerrod: the enduring love between Carrie, Miranda, Charlotte and Samantha was the real love story of SATC.
As a recent piece in The New Yorker noted, ‘It [ SATC] was sharp, iconoclastic television. High-feminine instead of fetishistically masculine, glittery rather than gritty, and daring in its conception of character, Sex And The City was a brilliant and, in certain ways, radical show.’ And it was all these things no less because of its depiction of female friendship. For the very same reason, we worshipped Carrie because she dressed for women, we were devoted to the show because it portrayed the reality of female friendships and all their intimacies and intricacies.
All too often we, the viewers, got to thinking that SATC was our lives, could be our lives, because on the one hand it felt so familiar, yet on the other so aspirational. We projected our hopes, fears and lives on to these four fantasy women. But that’s the trick of brilliant entertainment, isn’t it?
So yes, this bitter falling out off camera hurts. But it shouldn’t, and here’s why. I am writing this piece because as I chimed up in Grazia conference when all this brouhaha was erupting, ‘I could have told you this nine years ago.’ As Grazia’s SATC correspondent, I attended the premiere of the first Sex And The City film in London in May 2008 and saw with my own eyes the brutal reality of the long-rumoured rift between SJP and Kim Catrall.
I was given one edict from the editor that night: ‘ You WILL get into the after-party Emily.’ Because in 2008, the Sex And The City world premiere happening in London was THE most exciting EVENT to have happened in Grazia’s history. Truly. To gatecrash the after-party was a perilous journey that involved stake-out, subterfuge and stamina, but when I finally made it into the high-security shebang on the banks of the Thames it was immediately apparent why there had been a total press ban. The whole place was decked out like a garden party, with white trellises festooned in flowers dividing up two very distinct VIP areas. One for Sarah Jessica Parker, Kristin Davis and Cynthia Nixon and one for Kim Cattrall. SJP’S was ram-jammed with the fawning and adoring, clinking champagne flutes; Kim’s was distinctly less populated aside from her old friend Paul O’grady. Only the actor Mario Cantone, who plays Charlotte’s gay best friend, Anthony Marentino, was scuttling between the two camps, clearly at a loss to know where his loyalties lay. We chatted and he seemed very nervous about the palpable tensions between Kim and Sarah. I didn’t see the two exchange one word all night. This was the reality of Sarah Jessica Parker and Kim Cattrall’s relationship, not Carrie Bradshaw and Samantha Jones’s.
How clear it was that the big studio bosses wanted to keep the reality of the animosity behind the scenes under wraps, so as not to undermine the franchise. The fans could not possibly know that these four women were just great actors forced to get along for the sake of the multimillion-dollar juggernaut.
So. It’s been nearly a decade since then, 13 years since the show ended and why still all the fuss about these women not being actual real-life friends? Why does Kim get attacked for dispelling the illusion and killing the fantasy? Isn’t real equality when we don’t have to bring the myth of the show into real life and just accept that they were great actors? It’s worth noting that when Chris Noth, the actor who plays Big, was asked in July if he would partake in a third movie, he too said no – ‘I don’t think there’s anything left for me to say about that. I want to tell other stories’ – but did he get the mauling Kim did? No.
Of course, we can easily get waylaid in valid feminist arguments about how male actors’ off-screen chemistry rarely gets scrutinised to such levels. Indeed, SJP herself has pointed this out. But let’s get real: these people – women or not – are work colleagues. And who hasn’t fallen out with a co-worker? We don’t choose them after all. Moreover, shouldn’t Kim be respected for her ability to say ‘no’?
Kim knows her own mind and clearly knows that the magic of SATC belongs to a bygone era and a specific set of circumstances that cannot and perhaps should not be resuscitated. We can still love the show and the characters, but let’s not kid ourselves that it’s reali-ty. Let’s celebrate the fact it isn’t. As Kim herself said last week, ‘ This is a different set of circumstances for me. This is a chapter that I am ending, I am beginning a new chapter and I feel very strongly that my future is my choice. That is my right, that’s what, ironically, is what this show Sex And The City was always about.’ Amen to that.