What might have been
Entertainment Weekly: When Michael Patrick King finally got his call from Albrecht, he was shocked. ”I never thought it would come back,” he says. Yet any initial reservations he might have had — a reaction Parker likens to that of ”somebody who is not sure about dating because they’ve been hurt or disappointed” — soon faded when King thought about those healthy TBS ratings. To him, they proved that the show hadn’t ”instantly become dated when it went off the air.” And so, as he lay in bed that night, he sketched out the entire screenplay in his head. Save for a detail here and there, it was a completely different story from what he’d written in 2004. Not only was that one lighter in tone, it also envisioned the girls leading more separate lives. In the first version, ”my creative impulse was to deconstruct the nucleus of the girls, ‘cause we were all so together for seven years,” the writer-director recalls. That film would have kicked off with the wedding of Carrie’s gay best friend Stanford to his main man, Marcus, and then followed Charlotte, accompanied by her lawyer Miranda, as she traveled to China to adopt a baby girl. ”It reminded me of one of those Bob Hope-Bing Crosby road movies,” Parker says. ”It felt like a fling, like a Chevrolet driving into the sunset.”
