LAST January Candace Bushnell was feeling ebullient. The author
of Sex And The City had just heard her latest novel,
Lipstick Jungle, would be made into a television pilot. If
all went well a series would be headed to US network NBC, with her
as an executive producer.
Bushnell was clinking champagne glasses with her husband when it
occurred to her she had not received a congratulatory call from old
friend Darren Star, producer of Sex And The City. He was
not involved in the new project but knew she had been working
toward this for two years. She had written part of the novel at his
house and he even bid for the TV rights to it.
So Bushnell decided to phone Star. “His voice sounded weird on
the phone,” she recalls. “He said, ‘I got a show picked up, too.’ I
said, ‘What is it about?’ He said, ‘It’s a similarly themed show;
it’s similar to Lipstick Jungle.’ I said,
‘Ooo-kaaay.”‘
Star’s show is called Cashmere Mafia and has many
superficial similarities to Lipstick Jungle. Both feature
a group of high-powered female friends in New York, balancing
careers and messy personal lives. Both are expected to air early
next year in the US.
“Candace got wronged,” says Eileen Heisler, an executive
producer of Lipstick Jungle. “She was hurt and shocked, as
anyone would be. Every year you can say, for instance, ‘How weird
there’s ER and there’s Chicago Hope in one year.
This is different. When ideas are out there in the ether, there’s a
risk of two hospital dramas in the same year. But this is
brazen.”
Star declined to comment for this article, although more than a
dozen friends and associates of his and Bushnell’s offered
insights.
That the two shows are similar is not important to the ABC
network, which is broadcasting Star’s Cashmere Mafia. “No
one has jurisdiction over an entire genre, like ‘Oh, there’s one
working woman thing so we can’t touch it,”‘ says Suzanne
Patmore-Gibbs, executive vice-president for drama development at
ABC.
Together, Bushnell and Star once made magic. With a dash of
flesh and jiggers of vodka, Sex And The City conjured a
vision of Manhattan as a chic fantasyland for economically and
sexually empowered single women. It was a post-feminist sensibility
that had barely been seen in popular culture.
Television executives hoped lightning would strike again with
Lipstick Jungle, Bushnell’s tale of three powerful women a
decade older than the foursome on Sex And The City. Those
executives once included Star, who tried to develop the novel for
television after it was published in 2005. He was outbid, however,
by NBC. Bushnell then wrote a script for the pilot with a partner
but NBC executives were dissatisfied and hired another writer. They
didn’t like that draft, either, and the show rolled over to the
next year. Some of Star’s associates suggest he may have thought
Bushnell’s show was stuck in development and, like most such shows,
would never be made.
17
Dec
Copyright © 2008 Tour Novel. All Rights Reserved.
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