Fox honcho says no one dies in 'Sex and the City'

BY LIZ SMITH | Baltimore Sun

May 19, 2008

People keep asking me if someone dies in the Sex and the City movie? The answer is No. No one's even sick, for that matter. This is an urban myth. All the characters remain alive and breathing ready for a sequel, or a sequin. Is there a happy ending? You better believe it. Warner Bros. is counting on at least two."

So writes Fox maestro Roger Friedman, just in case you missed him on the Internet. He has seen the movie and doesn't want to tell us too much else about it. But since we recently printed a story from England speculating that someone does die, we want you to have it right from the horse's mouth. Sex and the City's girls and their men all live!

A Broadway monster

Theater insiders say the voting for the Tony Awards was biased against Young Frankenstein because the dynamic producer Robert F.X. Sillerman refused to give the American Theatre Wing facts and figures. Whatever you believe about the quality of this Mel Brooks' musical, no one can deny what Brooks and Sillerman have done in giving The Great White Way a shot in the arm via popular and controversial productions of The Producers and Young Frankenstein.

Morrison interview

Do look up the 10 questions Time put to Nobel/Pulitzer winner Toni Morrison, literature's great gift to many generations. You can see her interviewed on time.com. And treat yourself to her new book, What Moves at the Margin.

Fantastic 'Girls'

I started reading the new book Girls Like Us: Carole King, Joni Mitchell, Carly Simon - And the Journey of a Generation and can see why it became a best-seller its first week out. We have all learned more than we needed to know about poor Britney, Lindsay and the troubled Amy Winehouse, but Carole, Joni and Carly are the real deal - classy survivors! Author Sheila Weller has given us a story of grown-up women. They fell for wrong guys in their starry youth, but they took risks their mothers never dreamed of.

Joni, a pregnant folk singer so destitute she lived on free apples, became a world-class talent. A widowed Carole King lived snowbound in an Idaho cabin with no electricity or plumbing but rose to be the most important popular songwriter of the last century. Carly, caring for her ailing son, Ben, and later battling breast cancer, fought depression by recording songs in her bedroom. She became a legend.

These women learned lessons from adversity. They didn't sink to self-destruction or self-pity. Don't miss this wonderful book! The artists may seem passe to our young folks, but they remain giants.

No blinding fun

We expect fun stuff to come from the Cannes Film Festival but not from the first day. They bowed with Julianne Moore and Mark Ruffalo in director Fernando Meirelles' Blindness, his version of a generic city where the people are all losing their sight. The film was adapted from Jose Saramago's Nobel Prize-winning novel. Saramago turned down the Weinstein brothers and Whoopi Goldberg when they tried to buy it but gave in to Meirelles.

[Tribune Media Services