The “Sex and the City” Movie: Day One
The at-left picture of Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker) was taken this week, on the first day that the “Sex and the City” movie began shooting in New York. I greet this feature-length project with mixed emotions. For those of us who live in New York City, there is Life Before “Sex and the City” and Life After “Sex and the City.” To give you just one example: I used to live in New York’s West Village. One day in the mid 1990s, a small bakery, the Magnolia, opened at the corner of my block. I used to drop in there every morning on my way to work, to buy a muffin just out of the oven. There was never a line. Eventually, the bakery was written up in the media and suddenly there were lines, especially on the weekend. But the place still retained a neighborhood flavor. That all changed when “Sex and the City” shot a scene at the shop. Lightning-fast, the weekend lines for the bakery’s cupcakes (which are quite average, by the way) were so long you would have sworn I lived in Moscow during World War II. All of downtown, and, eventually, all of Manhattan, experienced the spiffed-up image change that “Sex and the City” represented all over the world. Rudy Giuliani likes to take credit for cleaning up New York and bringing the hordes back to Manhattan. Me, I blame the throngs and the tourist buses clogging our streets (and, yes, the money pouring in to the local economy) on Carrie Bradshaw and friends.
