Her screen alter ego was known for endlessly musing on life’s big questions,
but Candace Bushnell was more concise when questioned about her career
aspirations. “I want to teach single women everywhere how to party,” she
once told students at Stanford University.
Like it or not, Bushnell has taught everyone from single women to cinema money
men far more than the finer skills of socialising — and continues to do so.
The cultural juggernaut inspired by her Sex and the City newspaper columns
shows no signs of putting on the brakes, whatever the barrier thrown in its
path.
Back in the old days, the closest women got to television role models was
Cagney & Lacey: a single girl with a weakness for whiskey and a
mother-of-two who juggled crime with the car pool. Then along came Sex and
the City, and screens in more than 50 countries were lit up by four women
who revolutionised viewing habits.
The influence of SATC on fashion and sex has been well documented — Manolo
Blahnik and Rampant Rabbit became generation watchwords — but the effect
extended far wider. For the first time, women drove a television show in
which men had only bit parts; most didn’t even get a character namecheck as
the credits rolled. Tossing aside sexual taboos, celebrating women’s
spending power and leaving a trail of dating debris, the SATC women were a
phenomenon referenced in everything from The Simpsons to Jay-Z’s lyrics.
What really translated into ratings gold, however, was the show’s vulnerable
heart, which beat as characters struggled with everything from falling in
love to fertility problems. “SATC was about far more than just fashion,”
says Michelle Davies, assistant editor of Grazia. “For a generation who
sometimes found it hard to combine a career with finding the love of their
life and starting a family, it made it okay to sometimes fail at having it
all.”
Unsurprisingly, the success of SATC spawned a new era in television, as
programme-makers came up with a slew of replacements. In America, there was
Desperate Housewives (think SATC married and monogamous, with a picket
fence), while in the UK there was Mistresses (leafy backdrops and white wine
replace Times Square and cosmos). It was only a matter of time before
someone decided to try to turn television takings into box-office gold.
Memories, though, are short in the goldfish bowl of popular culture, and
expectations for the film’s box-office success were guarded. Women might
have ruled on the small screen, but it had been four years since SATC ended
on TV, so could they be trusted to bring in the dollars? Industry Cassandras
whispered that it would flop, and even the most optimistic projections
estimated a take of $40m on its opening weekend in America — respectable,
but nothing like the megabucks boys’ films command. Then the film confounded
all expectations, taking an unprecedented $55.7m in its debut weekend and
becoming the top-opening romantic comedy of all time. Quite simply, SATC
blew its predecessors out of the water: its closest contender in terms of
female-led romantic comedy was Reese Witherspoon’s Sweet Home Alabama, which
took $35.6m in 2002. Perhaps more important, SATC toppled the latest Indiana
Jones adventure off the No 1 spot, heralding a hit that caught Hollywood
unawares.
Coincidentally, the film version of the stage musical Mamma Mia! was released
soon afterwards and likewise proved a huge success. SATC has taken more than
£26m at the UK box office — and was still in the top 10 here and in Germany,
Spain, Australia and Russia after two months — and Mamma Mia! is snapping at
its heels on £24m. Both should have set number-crunchers pondering: these
were event films, seen by groups of women from across generations — and that
meant bigger box-office takings.
Original SATC fans might be pushing 40, but twentysomethings, aware of it, saw
the film too. Similarly, Abba first had a hit three decades ago, but Mamma
Mia! is based on their songs — and the group’s greatest-hits CD, Gold, made
history last week as the oldest album to reach the top spot.
Radically, at least in Hollywood terms, these money-spinning movies showed
middle-aged women in all their glory, something studio execs would
traditionally choose a double kneecapping over trying to market. Sarah
Jessica Parker looked a million dollars for most of the SATC film, but
didn’t veto an unforgiving close-up in the wake of being jilted. Meryl
Streep in Mamma Mia! did more for a jump suit than most twentysomethings
could hope for, but the passage of time is clearly marked in the laughter
lines around her eyes. Women voted with their feet, and the box-office tills
rang.
Maybe it’s a hint of things to come, as Hollywood homes in on a new audience
with money to spend even in today’s uneasy financial climate. “We know there
are wider trends at the moment for women to give themselves small treats
even at a time of potential economic worry,” says Rachel Crosby, associate
director of the media agency MediaCom. “So, while they might not stretch to
an expensive holiday, they will buy lipsticks and cinema tickets.”
The latest research from the British Film Council shows that women made up 52%
of the audience for the UK’s top films in 2007. Yet all this seems to have
taken the film industry by surprise. “Studios like to think they are
progressive, but there seems to be a reluctance to release films that are
totally female-based,” said Grazia’s Davies. “For instance, Charlie’s Angels
had female leads, but, in order to entice a male audience, was full of the
kind of action sequences you’d see in a John Woo film. There was nothing
like that in the SATC film, and the studio wasn’t expecting much. Then it
outperformed all expectations. Executives suddenly took notice and the
sequel is inevitable.”
Meanwhile, reverberations from SATC’s box-office success continue. Hopes are
high for the film of a book based on a memorable episode in which Miranda is
told her that date hasn’t called because “He’s just not that into you”. A
hit book with the same title was penned, and the film will be released in
October, with Jennifer Aniston and Drew Barrymore. Yet Hollywood has been
slow to cannibalise a potential market that other industries have long since
been targeting. “Women are incredibly important to the entertainment
economy, and the gaming industry is a good gauge of that,” says James
Kirkham, director of the digital-entertainment agency Holler. “It has been
targeting women in an effort to move gaming away from something done by
geeky boys to an acceptable pastime for women with disposable income, in the
form of fitness and brain-training consoles. Women are being catered for as
consumers in a way they never have been before. It’s a matter of time before
the film industry starts treating them just as proactively.”
So, while Bushnell perfects the formula for a great party, Hollywood might
soon be throwing her one.
Megan Lloyd Davies is a contributing editor for Grazia
