Film: New York state of mind

LAST YEAR, AROUND ST PATRICK'S Day, as auspicious a time as any for a writer with Irish blood to start telling a story, Michael Patrick King left his house in the Hollywood Hills and drove to a motel in Palm Desert, California, where he spent 16 days thinking about four women whose approach to love, friendship and money defined the manners and folkways of affluent single life at the turn of the new century.

For five of its seven seasons, King was head writer of the HBO series Sex and the City, until it ended in a big, blooming peony of joy and bittersweet sentiment four years ago. Out in the desert, he returned to the characters who had shifted his fortunes, shaping the script for the coming movie based on the series, which marks his debut as a screenwriter and film director at 53.

His age aside, King has always seemed an unlikely voice of the upper-middle-class, post-feminist experience. An openly gay man, a former altar boy who grew up in the coal belt of north-eastern Pennsylvania, he arrived at the pinnacle of television comedy writing (he is also responsible for the brilliant but short-lived HBO series The Comeback) without the security of an Ivy League education and its attendant connections. While the history of modern culture is filled with examples of writers and artists who have found prominence chronicling what goes on behind the velvet rope even if they were reared far away from it, King has spent more time away from the gateways of recognition than most.

His success, though, has led him to inaugurate a new career as a maker of romantic comedies, a genre that has been windswept in recent years by a disgruntled heterosexual male point of view. His interests, as both Sex and the City and a second screenplay currently in progress exemplify, are not in the ways in which 28-year-olds collide into one another, but in the means by which love and identity can be reclaimed, the great theme of the so-called comedies of remarriage in the 1930s. In the film, Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) has returned to the man she had broken up with a thousand times, Mr Big (Chris Noth), whose name, we find, is John James Preston, a nod to Preston Sturges, King's most admired director.

The film reunites Parker, Cynthia Nixon, Kristin Davis, Kim Cattrall and the men who in the final seasons kept their characters enraged, enthralled, becalmed, bemused. Taking place as if four years have actually passed, it is King's effort to illuminate the complications of happiness and the complexities of friendship as they mature. Carrie has remained with Mr Big, but they have yet to get married, and she has kept her old apartment. (For the space to be recreated precisely, Parker had to plead with the directors of the Smithsonian museum to retrieve Carrie's writing desk, which is now part of the institution's permanent collection.)

"I think the worst thing of all would have been to keep the girls frozen in time," King says, "picking things up right where we left off as if we'd just seen them all yesterday."

One aspect of the women's depiction that remains fixed is the sense that they have emerged from nowhere, with no lives to speak of before they were old enough for snakeskin and small dresses with tiny straps. Of all the fantastical elements in the series – the recherché clothing, the ample inventory of good-looking men – none seemed more mythic than the idea that Carrie and her friends existed apart from any notions of genealogy. In its refusal to incorporate parents, Sex and the City always seemed to resemble most closely the classics of children's literature.

While the film revolves around Carrie and Big's wedding, King was insistent that no mother or father of the bride be shown. "My idea always was that these women were purely creations of New York," he says. "The prototype of the series is that these are four grown-ups who make a family of one another."

Also driving King's decision was his fear of falling into cliché. "Who was going to play Carrie's mother? Connie Stevens? It's such a traditional sitcom limb. It's the Thanksgiving episode, and there are Wilford Brimley and Elaine Stritch. I never wanted to do anything like that."

Still, it is hard not to see in King's commitment a more general affinity for narratives of self-invention, for the old-fashioned idea that New York belongs more to the young, hopeful and scrappy than it does to the entitled sons and daughters of privilege. (It is also hard not to see that Carrie seems named for another urban arriviste, the Sister Carrie of Dreiser's creation.)

After dropping out of a small college in Pennsylvania at 20, King, whose mother once ran a doughnut store, moved to Manhattan and found work unloading cargo from Greyhound buses at the Port Authority terminal. "When I was a young person in New York, how many of my friends' parents did I meet?" he says. "Not many."

During the subsequent two decades, King forged a financially insolvent life working as a stand-up comedian, a playwright, a television writer and, for a while, a theatrical producer in Los Angeles, using the money he made from television to finance plays that he banned critics from seeing.

Midlife success is rarely born of serendipity and odd luck. There were stretches of good fortune: he worked as a writer on Murphy Brown, earning an Emmy nomination. But rent was an obligation he fulfilled sporadically even as he reached his mid-thirties.

"Once, I bumped into a friend on the street who was doing well – she was directing Pirates of Penzance on Broadway, and she asked me how I was doing," King recounts over dinner in New York.

"I said, 'Well, do you have $700? Because I can't pay my rent.' She gave it to me, and that's pretty much how I functioned."

The fates who visit other struggling artists, casting doubt, begging them to consider marketing or sales or nursery teaching , never trespassed on King's psyche. "I never, ever thought, 'You're 35 and four months behind in your rent, change direction,'" he says. "I was never insanely confident in any kind of 'I'm it and I'm just waiting for everyone to see it' way, but I thought, I've worked this hard, it's got to pay off, it's just got to, if not in financial terms then somehow."

King's reward came when Darren Star, the creator of Sex and the City, hired him in 1997. When he eventually became the show's chief producer, King wrote the first and last episodes for each season and then guided his staff of writers through the creation of the episodes in between.

"He was the genius behind the plot," says Liz Tuccillo, who was a playwright when King hired her as a writer for Sex and the City, despite her lack of television writing experience. "He always knew what would save us and where the story was going."

As a child, King observed his mother's affinity for words. (He was the only boy among four children.) "I grew up with the sense that my mother wanted to be a writer," he says. "Not in the Joyce Carol Oates sense. She would have never said, 'I want to write a slim novella with birds on the cover,' but she knew she could tell a story, and she understands a market."

King's mother is also a practising Roman Catholic, and his history has left him with a vexed relationship to his own faith. "I'm happiest in an empty church," he says. "I love the smell of a church."

In the opinion of his closest friend, the novelist Adriana Trigiani (with whom he shares a house in Greenwich Village), his Catholicism is also a constant presence. "He loves the pageantry and the drama," Trigiani says. "He took the structure and holiness of the Mass and I think it's informed anything he's done."

She noted that her friend writes with a sharp eye toward consequence. When Carrie broke Aidan's heart she suffered for a long period with loneliness and rejection. In what always seemed a highly improbable move, Miranda, the corporate lawyer who had never expressed any desire to have children, found herself pregnant and single and decided to keep her baby.

For much of his tenure on the show, King, who has been in a relationship with a Los Angeles shoe salesman for the past seven years, was the only male writer on staff. He approached his work journalistically, culling the most buoyant, absurd and heartbreaking stories of the women who surrounded him.

"Michael is incredibly curious about the pursuit of love," Parker says. "He has a wonderfully smart and funny mother who is clearly influential in his comedy, and he is interested in what is funny about intimacy."

"The writing room worked in a very old-fashioned way," she continues. "In the beginning, the women weren't married, and many of them didn't have men. Miranda and Charlotte and Samantha were archetypal, but Carrie represented different points of view. She absorbed the experiences of the writers. There was a lot of comedy in the dating lives of these women, and there was a lot of disappointment and even failure, and Michael took this all in."



By the time the series ended, its four heroines had been taken from their frothy, protracted adolescence and submerged into the adult world of anguish and aggrievement: Carrie in her stultifying relationship with the arrogant and self-isolating artist played by Mikhail Baryshnikov; Miranda in her obligations to her de facto husband's ailing mother; Charlotte in her struggles with infertility; Samantha in her confrontation with breast cancer.

The inauthentic atmosphere remained – the staggeringly high heels on cobbled streets and the bills for the shoes that never materialised – but the emotional honesty deepened and prevailed.

While Sex and the City will leave a legacy that is largely sociological – easing, as it did, thousands of women from the shackling fears of spinsterhood – it was also one of the rare television comedies that got better and better as it progressed, veering from its initial sexual slapstick into a more meditative look at the readjustment of romantic expectation.

It is either the seriousness that King displayed in the final seasons of Sex and the City or a general sense of bleakness among his fans that has led some to speculate that he might have a taste for a particularly morose strain of melodrama.

"You don't know how many people came up to me when I was making the movie and said, 'So is somebody going to die?'" he says. "Yup. Happy summer. Thanks for your $10. Enjoy your Diet Coke. Someone's going to die. Like that's what I'm going to do."

• Sex and the City is out on 28 May.

Why do I love 'SATC'? It's a treat for my inner slut...

THE simple truth about Sex and the City is that it lays bare every woman's secret fantasy life. And it's not very complicated. You live in Manhattan. You have a great job. You are gorgeous. Everyone you know is gorgeous. You own hundreds of pairs of shoes and change designer outfits a dozen times a day. You have had loads of great sex with loads of extremely attractive men (and no-one ever judges you for it).

Even better, despite your renowned voracious sexual appetite, you are not some sort of nasty bitch on heat. Oh no. You're also modest, generous and sisterly. You are always free for cocktails the very second your girlfriends want to see you.

In this magical world there is time for everything: looking great and perpetual shopping while maintaining a fabulous career, loads of promiscuous sex while also being madly in love, simultaneously having babies and whatever else you want. It is a beautifully styled dream – multiple orgasms, non-stop shopping, lifelong friendships. It's like a debauched Jim'll Fix It for grown-up women.

SATC-land might not be somewhere any of us could ever live in reality (Samantha's sex schedule is logistically impossible). But that's the whole point of a fantasy: it's not real. And by portraying our deepest, darkest desires, SATC made itself into the best women's television since Cagney and Lacey. Whereas that show sold itself on grit, SATC's selling point was escapist chic. Yes, the characters were completely over the top, but as long as they looked great we didn't care. It was almost drinkable: an instant shot of drop-dead, addictive glamour, preferably consumed in binge doses.

Reality rarely intervened – and rightly so. Let's be honest: who really cared about Miranda's baby or Samantha's cancer? The storylines were just excuses to feature designer maternity wear and Kim Cattrall looking weird in a short wig. Of course, every series needs a plot – but the real pull was always who was wearing what and, more importantly, who was doing whom.

SATC was all about letting your inner slut out for a ride. For me, this is even truer now than it was ten years ago when the show first aired. Back then I was at least familiar with Manolos and mojitos. Now, with a husband and children in tow, that world is pretty much closed to me and I need my SATC fix all the more. Of course I'll be first in the queue when the film opens. Where else will I find women who still wonder about their G-spot, talk about men like 17-year-olds and run for taxis in five-inch heels? Thank God someone, at least, is still living the dream.