Parker was enjoying a quiet day at her family's Hamptons beach house in the spring of 2006 when she suddenly got the ''crazy notion'' that it was time to revisit the Sex movie. She knew that the syndicated episodes airing on TBS since 2004 averaged nearly 2 million viewers and had spawned a whole new generation of fans. So she floated the idea by her agent, and a few months later, when The Devil Wears Prada's $125 million gross proved there was an audience for quality, female-driven films, she started talking to HBO. She held off on contacting King, though. ''I knew that if we spoke to Michael, we'd better be ready to pursue this in a real way,'' the actress explains. ''He had gone to these efforts before, and I wanted to make sure it was worth his time.''
No one wanted to relive the disappointment of the first attempt at a feature, which fell apart in 2004 when Cattrall declined to commit. At the time, the trade newspapers reported that her reasons had to do with salary demands and script approval, which sent the tabloids into gossip overdrive, rehashing the same theories of catfighting that had plagued the series from the beginning. The costars vehemently deny those rumors. ''What kind of uncivilized people do they think we are?'' Parker fumes. For her part, Cattrall maintains that she based her decision on more than just a paycheck. ''My dad was diagnosed with dementia and I was going through a divorce,'' says the actress, 51. ''I really needed to take a break and be with my family.'' But in late 2006, when HBO's then CEO Chris Albrecht — one of the guiding forces of both the series and the film — called to say the project might rise from the ashes, she was ready to return to Samantha's hedonistic pleasure dome. Laughing, Cattrall says: ''That's how I am like Samantha — I just want to do it again. Insatiable!'' Perhaps not coincidentally, Nixon and Davis also responded to Albrecht's proposal like their respective alter egos might. ''When they said, 'We're going to do the movie,' I said, 'Yeeaah. I'll believe it when I see it,''' says Nixon with a laugh. Davis, on the other hand, never lost faith in the project — even if she was, as she says, ''down to a tiny shred of optimism.'' Still, ''I really believed it was going to happen because I play Charlotte, the hopeful one!''
When 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.''
NEXT PAGE: ''On my first day, we all had to walk down the street together, and there were hundreds of people on Park Avenue, watching us. It's flattering that anybody still cares about these characters. But it's like an amoeba — ever-growing and out of control.''
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