As any dedicated fan will know, Sex And The City was based on Candace Bushnell’s dating column in The New York Observer. Now, in a first person piece for The Hollywood Reporter, the journalist and author has revealed how the much-loved show came about, and how her life wasn’t quite so fairytale as Carrie Bradshaw’s.
Bushnell, who started out as a journalist on women’s magazines, explained how she had gained a much-coveted position writing for The New York Observer despite the ‘openly sexist’ environment, which in turn led to the new Editor-In-Chief, Peter Kaplan asking her if she could write her own column.
‘I said "Great!" I knew it was my big break. I don't know if there was another woman at the Observer who had her own column, but I was pretty much the only one, and I was really going to make it work,’ Bushnell wrote.
‘I thought about it, and I realized if it was going to be something that I was going to write all the time, I had to be able to do it really well. So I said, "I think it should be about me and my friends, who are all single and crazy."’
Bushnell explained it was actually Kaplan who came up with the title, Sex And The City, and for her first column he sent her to a sex club. However, she quickly realised that that sort of column wouldn’t work on a weekly basis so instead she concentrated on ‘dating and mating rituals, and sexual practices’.
It was not long before Bushnell’s column was a roaring success. ‘Everybody was reading it. People were buying the Observer for my column. They were reading it on the Hamptons Jitney, they were reading it to each other, they were faxing it.’
And just four months in she was being contacted by film and TV execs. ‘I started to get inquiries from Hollywood. People in New York who worked in film and media were faxing it to their friends who worked in film in Los Angeles. I flew out to L.A. and had meetings. I was like, "What the hell?"’
The column quite naturally came to an end after two years when Bushnell decided to focus on fiction as opposed to journalism.
‘Everything I was writing at that time was just a way to give me an entrée into writing fiction, which the column certainly did.’
Not long after she left the paper to write her book, the concept was picked up by HBO, and the rest they say is history.
Looking back now, twenty years on, Bushnell refers to that period in her life as ‘the good old days.’
‘Despite everything, the sexist joking and the hazing, it was really, really fun — although I know that's the kind of thing that one will get into big trouble for saying. But it was.’
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