Last weekend, Sunday Styles's  Alex Williams explored a complaint that New Yorkers have had for as long as they have occupied the island: that the city is not what it used to be, that it's no longer this because it's becoming too much of that.

To acknowldge the ubiquity and timelessness of such a thesis, Mr. Williams referenced an episode of Sex and the City in which a former party girl named Lexi Featherston declares New York "Over -- O-V-E-R," when told to blow her cigarette smoke out the window at a house party. According to Mr. Williams, the statement was made more definitive as Ms. Featherstone proceeded to jump out the window.

But on Sunday, the Times issued a correction to the article:

Perhaps Mr. Williams should sit through the DVD box set before he writes about SATC again.

It looks like the Sex and the City sequel is actually going to happen. We're not sure where the plot will take the three non-single ladies (at the end of the first SATC movie, Carrie, Charlotte and Miranda were all paired off), but according to Us Weekly, all four stars are planning to close the deal shortly. 

An unnamed source tells the magazine, "Not all the contracts are signed, but everyone is on board. It just happened."

The last of the many SATC promotional events that the Daily Transom attended was the DVD release party in September. On the red carpet that night, Ms. Cattrall didn't deny the possibility of a sequel or confirm it. She simply told the Daily Transom, "Samantha is single so the sky is the limit! I love Samantha single."

Meanwhile, Charlotte's gay wedding planner Mario Cantone said at the time,  "In the sequel, I want Brad Pitt to play my boyfriend! Why not? He gave $100,000 to turn over the California gay marriage law. So, there! He should play my boyfriend."

But perhaps we should have known that a sequel was a done deal even then, especially after speaking with Willie Garson, the actor who plays Stanford Blatch, Carrie's gay best friend.

"We are so grateful!" said Mr. Garson. "To take a $60 million movie and make it into $500 million, I'll give the fans whatever they want. That's why we're hustling out this DVD, we're done torturing them."

But it seems that the torture was far from complete, because even Mr. Garson was already thinking of plot points for his character.

"I'd like Stanford to find a life partner or at least find a very old woman to take care of him," he said.

You have to wonder why Fox would even go through the motions of developing a new series like the unfortunately titled Bitches. From Michael Dougherty, the esteemed writer of such cinematic classics like Superman Returns and Urban Legends: Bloody Mary, the potential show was expertly described by Ain't It Cool as "Wolf-meets-Sex and the City" To wit: four female friends live in New York and, when the moon is full, they turn into werewolves. Seriously. No one has been cast yet, as the project is still in its infancy, but expect to see it on the Fox schedule at some point in 2009.

We're simply shocked a television series like this could even get off the ground. For starters, with the tanking economy and disastrous ad sales, television shows that are expensive to produce get jettisoned at an alarming rate (see: Dirty Sexy Money). And transforming characters into (believable) werewolves seems well beyond the reaches of a normal series budget. They might blow up cars on 24, but they do it on cardboard sets. (Did you ever look at CTU and think that it was an actual building?) But even if Fox is able to handle the special effects on an efficient budget (ha!), there is the little matter of the show airing on network television. We know that vampires and werewolves go together like oil and water (hey, we've seen Underworld!), but still, if True Blood is any indication, monsters of any kind love sex and violence. They crave it. And while television sex has gone off the reservation in recent years, it seems a little far-fetched to think that Fox would allow a lady werewolf to rip off some dude's arm in post-coital bliss. Though, wait. Since the network did allow Fringe to show a headless body during an episode this year, maybe we're giving them a little too much credit.

Anyway! With no cast and not one frame shot yet, it is hard to get too riled up about Bitches--incidentally, we'd be shocked if the show goes to air with that title. In the end, we think Fox's heart is in the right place. The idea of creating a show about four strong-willed women is good for network television; the problem is wrapping it up in a totally unattainable package. If they wanted something like Sex and the City to broaden their audience base they should just pick up Lipstick Jungle.

When asked about the Sex and the City sequel that Kim Cattrall recently confirmed, Sarah Jessica Parker said, "I'm thrilled to know Kim is excited but all the deals are not yet done." [Vogue UK] 

Marc Jacobs has cast model Raquel Zimmerman for his spring women's campaign and downtown artist Ryan McGinley for the men's collection. And former Marc Ronson-dater and daughter of Gavin Rossdale, Daisy Lowe, has been selected for the Marc by Marc campaign.  [WWD] 

Diane von Furstenberg is blogging about The Standard Hotel and her travels through Asia on her website. [DVF.com via Cityfile]

Takashi Murakami will wrap the Louis Vuitton store on Fifth Avenue in a colorful vinyl print for the holidays. [WWD] 

Bergdorf Goodman's fashion director Linda Fargo received a lap dance from designer Christian Cota at the preview of a new eatery from the owners of Geisha and Safina, Vittorio Assaf and Fabio Granato. [P6] 

From the Least-Surprising-News-Ever file: looks like there will be more (yes more!) Sex and the City coming to movie screens sometime in our future. After SATC: The Movie made more than 153 million dollars last summer, we could practically hear these wheels get set into motion. Now, the question is – what’s left for these ladies left to do? It seemed like a lot of loose ends got tied up in the last one, but we suppose there’s always more to go. Will Carrie and Big break up and make up again? Is there a way to show Kim Cattrall’s Samantha character, in her ‘50s, be a sassy single gal beholden to no one without the audience feeling just a little bit like killing themselves? Maybe Charlotte’s adopted kid Lily will turn on her biological child? And, we assume, Miranda and Steve will move to Jackson Heights.

So here's a question: Will there ever not be Sex and the City-themed public-relations extravaganzas in New York City?

Last night marked roughly four months since the release of the undead franchise Sex and the City: The Movie, which means it was time for the release of the DVD, and therefore time to stretch a pink carpet the length of a city block down which stars Sarah Jessica Parker, Cynthia Nixon and Kim Cattrall—even Lynn Cohen, who plays Magda the maid--could march to the bloodcurdling screams of their obsessed fans.

Such was the scene last night outside of the New York Public Library to celebrate the fact that we can now go home and watch the movie over and over again. Magda was popular! And she and the rest of the girls seemed cheerfully resigned to signing yet more pieces of Sex bric-a-brac.

"What did you think of the fashion?" the red-carpet reporters belted out to the actresses as they made their way up the pink carpet, just as though they could still break news about the movie everyone has seen. "What was the set like when you were filming?"

Towering over the steps of the library as you entered the party was a model on stilts dressed in a 12-foot-tall version of Carrie Bradshaw's Vivienne Westwood wedding gown. She greeted the guests pretty much for the duration of the party.

So, do the stars of the movie ever get sick of this?

"No, we are so grateful!" said Willie Garson, who plays Stanford Blatch. "To take a $60 million movie and make it into $500 million, I'll give the fans whatever they want. That's why we're hustling out this DVD, we're done torturing them."

Or are they? Fans twittered--well, they probably Twittered, but twittering existed before Twitter!--about a sequel that either hopefulness or movie-studio publicity canniness had catapulted into full-on rumor status. The latter, probably, since the actresses happily engaged in counterfactual speculation about the "future" of their characters.

"Samantha is single so the sky is the limit!" squealed Ms. Cattrall, outfitted in a purple velvet pantsuit that made her look a little bit like Prince. "I love Samantha single."

"I'd like Stanford to find a life partner or at least find a very old woman to take care of him," said Mr. Garson.

"In the sequel, I want Brad Pitt to play my boyfriend!" said Mario Cantone. "Why not? He gave $100,000 to turn over the California' gay marriage law. So, there! He should play my boyfriend."

But even more of a topic of conversation was perhaps the young-adult novels that Candace Bushnell has just signed on to write for HarperCollins' children's division. It's the prehistory of Carrie.

"It's too soon to talk about it," said Ms Bushnell rather sensibly when Daily Transom stopped her on the carpet last night.

But Mr. Cantone already had some idea of who should and shouldn't play the young Carrie.

"I hope it's not Miley Cyrus. I don't get her, but I'm like 90 and I'm not a little girl," he said. "I think Lindsay Lohan is really, really talented. It's upsetting that she's clumped in with those other girls. She's a really good actress. I mean it!"

One reporter asked if Mr. Cantone might find his way into the prequel.

"I'll be too old, they'll have to animate me," he said. "Maybe I'll play my father. Ha!"

There’s an episode of Sex and the City, about halfway through the first season, in which Carrie learns that Mr. Big used to be married. His ex is a publisher, and Carrie decides to check her out by scheduling an appointment with her under the pretense that she has a book to pitch. When she gets to this lady’s office, Carrie realizes that she only does children’s books, and finds herself having to improvise. After stammering for a second, she makes a half-hearted pitch for a book about a girl who has magic cigarettes that let her “go anywhere in the whole wide world, like Arabia or New Jersey.” “It’s a children’s book … for adults!” Carrie explains when Big’s ex suggests that maybe this wouldn’t be totally appropriate for kids.

Art, meet Life; Life, Art. You two should really get to know each other, because Candace Bushnell, whose mid-’90s New York Observer column was the basis for Sex and the City, has signed a deal with the children’s division at HarperCollins to write a young adult novel about Carrie Bradshaw’s high-school years. Hello! 

Publishing the book—and the sequel—are Alessandra Balzer and Donna Bray, stars in the children’s book world who created an eponymous imprint at HarperCollins this past spring after spending 12 years together at Hyperion. According to several people in the children’s industry, Ms. Balzer and Ms. Bray are two of the most well-regarded editors in the game, and are responsible for a stack of award-winning titles for kids and teenagers, such as Avi’s Newbery Medal-winning Crispin: The Cross of Lead and National Book Award finalists The Birchbark House by Louise Erdrich and Sold by Patricia McCormick.

According to Ms. Bray, Ms. Bushnell’s book will be set partly in New York and partly in whatever suburb Carrie is supposed to have spent her childhood.

“It hasn’t all been resolved yet,” Ms. Bray said. “I think she’ll come here the way Candace did, with her friends, to hang out in the city on the weekend, and have a lot of social interaction there, and then eventually she’ll come to college here, as Candace did.”

Asked if Ms. Bushnell was planning to write about Carrie losing her virginity, Ms. Balzer and Ms. Bray said they weren’t sure. Pub Crawl checked it out, though, and there’s a story for the telling. If the universe of the books is consistent with the universe of the show—and it very well may not be—readers should anticipate a scene featuring an 11th-grade Carrie sharing “half a joint” with one Seth Bateman and then doing it with him on the Ping-Pong table in his “smelly rec room.” At least this is how Carrie describes her origin story to Charlotte in episode 38, “The Big Time.”

“I mean, the kids will be doing what teenagers realistically do, but it’s not going to be provocative for the sake of that,” Ms. Balzer said. “I would never put something in just to put it in. But if it was organic to the story and it was something that felt real, then it would be in there.”

The book will be called The Carrie Diaries, by the way, unless they think of something better before the fall 2010 publication date. (May we suggest Sex Ed?) Ms. Balzer, who will edit Ms. Bushnell, said she’s confident it will be a crossover hit, appealing as readily to the teen audience it’s ostensibly written for as it will to older fans of the show who “love [Carrie] and just want to know more about her.” 

Ms. Balzer said that the idea for the book came from Ms. Bushnell herself, and that she learned about it from Ms. Bushnell’s agent over lunch.

“[Her agent, Heather Shroeder of ICM] said Candace has been thinking of doing a teen project, and my eyes just lit up and I said, ‘Oh, really!’” Ms. Balzer said. “She said she’s always wanted to explore what Carrie would have been like in high school, and I was just so thrilled and saw immediately, you know, that the possibilities are endless, and we just jumped on it and immediately made an offer and kind of scooped everybody.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

Remember that book we urged you to hurry up and write? The one retroactively endorsed and publicized by the Sex and the City movie?

Well, it seems that in a mere six weeks someone has already beat you to it. Entertainment Weekly is reporting that the fictitious titled called Love Letters of Great Men, from which Carrie read love letters from Napoleon and Beethoven to Mr. Big in one of the film's scenes, has been thrown together by UK publisher Pan MacMillan to be released August 15th.

In June, after seeing SATC, hordes of loyal fans stormed Amazon.com, but were not able to find the book that didn't exist. The closest sounding title was Love Letters Of Great Men and Women: From the Eighteenth Century to the Present Day, published in London in 1924 and reissued last year by Kessinger Publishing. Needless to say, it did not satisfy.

According to the publisher, the book will includ, "all of the letters referenced in the film," which must make it a pretty quick read since Carrie only mentions a few of the letters throughout the film. 

It's just like a cat teetering in a state of anamnesis between lives four and five! One: Sex and the City, the newspaper column (right here in The New York Observer); Two: Sex and the City, the book by Candace Bushnell; Three: Sex and the City, the television series; Four: Sex and the City, the motion picture! But its next reincarnation may be a little less dramatic: Sex and the City, the Second Movie!

At the Television Critics Association press tour yesterday, HBO seemed to indicate that a sequel could be in the works, the Times reports.

According to Michael Lombardo, president of the HBO programming group, “there is enormous interest” from Warner Brothers. “And I think, in fact, they’re trying, with our help, to put that together now. When that happens, how long between, can’t say. But there’s absolutely interest.”

Also, a movie version of The Sopranos is still up for discussion. "It’s obviously totally up to David [Chase],” HBO president Richard Plepler said. “But if David wants to do it, we’d be delighted to explore that, absolutely.”

It's too bad James Gandolfini and other cast members have already sold their wardrobes in a high-end garage sale!

Things went much as predicted this Fourth of July weekend. New Yorkers fell in love with a homeless wino with a penchant for busting road signs and throwing live whales into the ocean. Hancock landed on top of Manhattan's sales charts with an $850,956 box office showing. It was the same story nationally. Sony's film scored $66 million in ticket sales, putting it way ahead of Wall-E ($33.4 million) and Wanted ($20.6 million). Since first hitting theaters on July 2, Will Smith's jaded superhero has made a total of $107.3 million.

Much like his alky antihero, Smith is a force to be reckoned with. According to the Times, this marks the eighth consecutive time Smith has opened the July 4th weekend with a No. 1 film—beginning with 2002's Men in Black II.

Back home, Wanted continued its dominance over the critically indomitable Walle-E (apparently, Frank Rich saw the film over the weekend and now the guy's got a new favorite presidential candidate) by collecting $433,108, though that was still less than half Hancock's's take, and a 58 percent drop from last week. Our little bug-eyed trash man did manage to trim Wanted's lead to just over $27,000—a significantly better showing then last week's $396,000 drubbing. Next weekend, we predict Wall-E will finally pull past Angelina Jolie and co., especially if another Times columnist comes out for Pixar's film (we bet green-friendly Friedman's a fan).

And finally, a distinctly hometown battle seems to be upon us. Stubborn Sex and the City ($108,966) remained in the top five this week just behind No. 4 Get Smart, while The Wackness—the story of a young Upper East Side pot dealer in 1994—managed an impressive $96,023 box office draw from just three theaters citywide.

Which decade will New Yorkers prefer? Will Carrie's glamorous millennium-era New York weather the rise of precocious 90's nostalgia? Will it be martinis or joints? Glitz or grime? With Sex and the City already in theaters for six weeks, Jonathan Levine's hazy coming-of-age tale seems to have the advantage. But who knows—we're not so sure about a long-haired Ben Kingsley in a Hawaiian shirt.

List of theaters: Paris, Zeigfeld, Oprheum, East 85th St., 86th St. East, 84th St., Lincoln Plaza, 62nd and Broadway, Lincoln Square, Magic Johnson, 72nd St East, Cinemas 1, 2 &3rd Ave, 64th and 2nd , Imaginasian, Manhattan Twin, First and 62nd St., Angelika Film Center, Quad, IFC Center, Film Forum, Village East, Village Seven, Cinema Village, Union Square, Essex, Battery Park 11, Sunshine, 34th Street, Empire, E-Walk, Chelsea, 19th Street East, and Kips Bay.

Manhattan Weekend Box Office: How moviegoers in the multiplexes of middle America choose to spend their ten-spot is probably a big deal in Hollywood. But here in Manhattan, the hottest movies aren't always the ones making the big bucks nationwide. Using Nielsen numbers for Manhattan theaters alone and comparing them to the performance of the national weekend box office can tell you a lot about our Blue State sensibilities. Or nothing at all! Each Monday afternoon, we will bring you the results.