Emily in Paris’ Creator Darren Star Wasn’t Going for a Millennial Stereotype

The TV showrunner also talks about his Oura ring obsession, how his routines change from city to city and his favorite ‘White Lotus’ character

Dar­ren Star is one of TV’s great­est ro­man­tics. From “Sex and the City” to “Emily in Paris,” the show­mak­er’s sig­na­tures in­clude love tri­an­gles, lav­ish par­ties, grand ges­tures and, of course, over-the-top out­fits. While film­ing the third sea­son of his Net­flix com­edy star­ring Lily Collins, which is now stream­ing, he found plenty of op­por­tu­ni­ties to feel the magic him­self—such as shoot­ing a scene at the top of the Eif­fel Tower late at night.

“You can’t get up there un­til af­ter 1 a.m. to film,” says Mr. Star, 61. “When you write things, it’s sort of a dream of what you’d like things to be, and in this case, what we dreamed, we were able to get on the screen.”

Mr. Star, who lives in Los An­ge­les, New York and Paris, likes to be­gin each day read­ing hard copies of the news­pa­pers. And like Emily, he loves to in­dulge in a freshly baked crois­sant. Here, he shares the cafe where he starts his days in each city and why pro­cras­ti­na­tion is a key to his suc­cess. 

What time do you get up on Mon­days, and what’s the first thing you do?

I get up at 7 a.m., with or with­out my alarm. I’ve got­ten very ob­ses­sive about all my sleep apps. I wear my Apple Watch and my Oura ring, and the first thing I do when I wake-up is cross ref­er­ence how much sleep I’ve got­ten. They’re gen­er­ally pretty in sync. The Oura ring is nice be­cause if I’ve got­ten a bad night’s sleep, it’ll give me lit­tle en­cour­ag­ing slo­gans like, “You’ll be OK.” 

What do you eat for break­fast? 

I’ll do a cou­ple shots of espresso when I wake up. I love go­ing out to break­fast. In Paris, I love go­ing to Café de Flore and buy­ing the pa­pers [at] the news­stand right there. In L.A., Kings Road Café or Sycamore Kitchen. In New York, I love go­ing to Balt­hazar and sit­ting at the counter there. 

What are your writ­ing rou­tines like? Is there a place where you get your best writ­ing done? 

I’m a big pro­cras­ti­na­tor. I’ll let the stress and ten­sion of the dead­line build up un­til fi­nally I can do it lit­er­ally any­where. I can sit on the Jit­ney go­ing to the Hamp­tons and write. Some­thing clicks where I’m just all in. I can very eas­ily write in bed.

What’s a vice of yours?

A great al­mond crois­sant. 

Emily is very mil­len­nial, while “Sex and the City” is known for its por­trayal of Gen X women. How do you think the two gen­er­a­tions are dif­fer­ent? Which gen­er­a­tional stereo­types do you ac­tu­ally be­lieve? 

The re­la­tion­ship to pri­vacy and shar­ing is dif­fer­ent be­tween those two gen­er­a­tions. You can’t make too many broad gen­er­al­iza­tions be­cause a char­ac­ter like Emily is a mil­len­nial, but I don’t know if she fits the stereo­type of a mil­len­nial. She’s an am­bi­tious striver—I feel like that’s a char­ac­ter that’s present in every gen­er­a­tion. She’s some­one who wants to suc­ceed and has a big heart. 

In the show’s love tri­an­gle, are you Team Gabriel or Team Al­fie?

I’m Team Emily.

What are you read­ing and watch-ing?

I have some go-to books I love for in­spi­ra­tion, like “The War of Art.” I love read­ing his­tory and nov­els. I just fin­ished “The Lin­coln High­way” by Amor Towles and now I’m read­ing “The Splen­did and the Vile” by Erik Lar­son. I watched the last sea­sons of “The Crown” [and] “The White Lo­tus.”

Do you have a fa­vorite “White Lo­tus”char­ac­ter?

Well, Jen­nifer Coolidge. I could watch it with the sound off, and I would still be en­joy­ing watch­ing her. 

What were you most look­ing for when you tried to hire the team around you?

You have to feel like you have chem­istry with the peo­ple you’re spend­ing time with. You’ve got to feel like there’s an in­stinct for that. A sense of hu­mor. I’ve been work­ing with a lot of the same tal­ented writ­ers over the years. When you’re hav­ing fun to­gether in the room, that sen­si­bil­ity gets trans­lated into the show. Putting to­gether a writ­ing staff in a way is like putting to­gether a great din­ner party. You want dif­fer­ent voices that all work in har­mony to­gether. 

What’s a piece of ad­vice you’ve got­ten that’s guided you?

Don’t be­lieve every­thing you think. We all get into those cy­cles of neg­a­tive think­ing, and I think that was a nice piece of ad­vice.

My neighbor and friend is Robin Schultz. In May of 2020, her grandson Hunter was diagnosed with Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease (CMT4B3). Her family has started a 501(c)(3) non-profit to save children with this rare-life threatening degenerative neuromuscular disease. Please visit her website to learn more:www.cmt4b3research

Please support the research at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine to find a treatment for children suffering from CMT4B3. We hope we can count on you to help us find a cure for children with CMT4B3 and related neuromuscular diseases.

Many of our neighbors know Hunter, and see him dashing around in his orthotics.Children with CMT4B3 lose the ability to walk, the use of their hands and potentially their sight and/or hearing. Eventually the disease can compromise their breathing, leading to premature death.There is no cure or treatment for CMT4B3 or any form of CMT.

CMT is similar to Muscular Dystrophy and ALS. Untreated, CMT causes the nerves to deteriorate, which breaks down the communication between the brain and the muscles leading to muscle weakness, wasting, limb deformities and paralysis.

In less than 2 years, the Schultz’s have: launched a non-profit, hosted an International CMT4B3 Research Symposium, assembled a renowned Scientific Advisory Board, became a patient resource for the Peripheral Nerve Society, initiated 11 CMT4B3 Research Projects (8 of which we are solely funding), and raised over $1,000,000 funding universities worldwide.

The University of Miami Hussman Institute for Genomics is taking a leading role in their research efforts. They have granted the University of Miami over $340,000.00 for phase 1 of their CMT4B3 Research.These projects aim to develop a gene therapy and small molecule drug to stop the progression of the disease.

Their research efforts are highlighted in the current issue of The University of Miami Miller School Medicine Magazine, “DNA Detectives, a family’s journey to cure a rare genetic disorder.” To learn more please click here:www.cmt4b3research.org/funduofm

If you have any suggestions for us to spread awareness or fundraise for U of M research, please feel free to email or call: rbgschultz@gmail.com914-589-8047

Click here to watch their journey at U of M

The CMT4B3 Research Foundation is composed of volunteers, we work from home and all operational costs are covered by the co-founders, therefore 100% of donations go towards research.

Checkout our other videos:

Saving Hunter – We Won’t Give Up

We were told there’s ‘no cure’ for our son’s rare disease, so our work is to find one | GMA (goodmorningamerica.com)

Scarsdale family races against time to help find cure for son’s rare disease (news12.com)

Fill the Boot Event Raises $76,000 for Rare Degenerative Disease (scarsdale10583.com)

Robin Schultz, Chief Operating Officer 

Hunters CMT4B3 Research Foundation Inc

77 Garden Road, Scarsdale, New York 10583

Phone: 914-589-8047

info@cmt4b3research.org

website: cmt4b3research.org    

Follow @hunt2curecmt on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter

Shop: smile.amazon.com (You shop, Amazon donates at no cost to you!)

Please click here to set Hunters CMT4B3 Research Foundation as your Charity!

Rare Disease (vimeo.com)

Click Here for Our Story

We were told there’s ‘no cure’ for our son’s rare disease, so our work is to find one | GMA (goodmorningamerica.com)

Scarsdale family races against time to help find cure for son’s rare disease (news12.com)

Thank you very much

Mimi Kilgore, Arts Patron and de Kooning Muse, Dies at 87

A well-connected Texan, she made a significant mark supporting the visual arts and theater, and a lasting one on a master of Abstract Expressionism.

By Alex Williams

Dec. 23, 2022

In the summer of 1970, the painter Willem de Kooningwent on a curious afternoon date with Mimi Kilgore, a radiant young Houston heiress and fixture in the arts world. The outing, a public tour of notable Hamptons homes, was an unlikely way to spend an afternoon for de Kooning. As a titan of 20th-century art who had a house and studio in Springs, an enclave of East Hampton, he was something of a local attraction himself.

But he and Ms. Kilgore, 34 years his junior, had met at a party just weeks before, and already he was smitten. At one house Ms. Kilgore came upon a frog that had been flattened by a car tire. Finding that it reminded her of an abstract shape from one of his paintings, she presented it to de Kooning as a quirky gift. But he saw it as something more. He kept the frog for the rest of his life, a symbol of his devotion to a friend, lover and muse who would remain a source of inspiration for years and who would, by many accounts, help reinvigorate his career.

“It was a classic story of an older artist falling in love with a younger woman,” said the art critic Mark Stevens, who, with his wife, Annalyn Swan, wrote “de Kooning: An American Master,” a Pulitzer Prize-winning 2005 biography. “And in this particular case he seemed to fall in love with painting all over again when he fell in love with Mimi.”

Ms. Kilgore, who died on Nov. 24 in Houston at 87, certainly didn’t need a relationship with a famous man to define her life or career, those who knew her said. Still, her powerful and lasting effect on de Kooning was a testament to the charm, drive and seemingly boundless energy that made her an influential arts patron with a knack for bringing together the art world elite and the moneyed class.

“What really set her apart was her vivacious spirit and sense of humor,” her son Alexander Kilgore, who confirmed the death, said in a phone interview. “She was very passionate about ideas and connected a lot of artists — she connected just a lot of people — that wouldn’t necessarily be connected.”

In Houston, Ms. Kilgore served on the boards of the Museum of Fine Arts and the Contemporary Arts Museum and was twice the commissioner of the Municipal Arts Committee of the City of Houston. On Long Island, she was on the board of Guild Hall, a vibrant arts center in East Hampton.

Ben Love, the chief executive of Texas Commerce bank, hired Ms. Kilgore to build an art collection for the company’s newly built 75-story office tower, which opened in 1982. And for decades she managed the art collection of Fayez Sarofim, a billionaire Houston money manager.

She was also a presence in theater. As a board member of Stages repertory theater in Houston, she helped save its building from developers by arranging for it to be declared a landmark.

And following the death of her sister Susan Smith Blackburn, an actress and writer, from breast cancer in 1977, Ms. Kilgore and Susan’s husband, Bill Blackburn, created a prize in her name, given to English-speaking female playwrights; 10 of its finalists have won Pulitzer Prizes for drama. “She believed that society urgently needed more help from talented women,” her son Alexander said.

Emilie deMun Smith was born on Nov. 13, 1935, in Houston, one of three children of C. Cabanne Smith, a banker who served in Gen. George S. Patton’s Third Army during World War II, and Lucy (Thompson) Smith, an arts patron.

Ms. Kilgore grew up in the wealthy Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, made her debut at the Houston Country Club and attended the private Kinkaid School before heading to Smith College in Massachusetts, from which she graduated magna cum laude in 1957 after a year abroad in France.

Following college, she moved to New York to pursue a career in the art world, taking a job as an art librarian at the Frick Collection. “She studied art at Smith and was wildly excited by the art happening in all mediums in New York,” Mr. Kilgore said. “It was the place to be.”

In 1958, she married William S. Gilbreath III, a financier, and had a son with him, Cabanne Gilbreath, in 1959. The marriage ended in divorce in 1963. Two years later, she married John E. Kilgore Jr., a lawyer from Wichita Falls, Texas, and had her son Alexander with him. In 1970, her father decided to start an oil royalty business in Texas, and she and Mr. Kilgore, along with her two sons, moved to Houston. (The couple divorced in 1985; Mr. Kilgore, who remarried, died in 2005.)

Summering in East Hampton as well as in Pointe aux Barques, Mich., an affluent cottage community on Lake Huron that her great-grandfather had helped found, Ms. Kilgore seemed the embodiment of what Mr. de Kooning called a “classy dame,” Mr. Stevens and Ms. Swan wrote in their biography.

The two met at a party at the Bridgehampton home of the Iranian painter Manoucher Yektai in August 1970. “I was sort of transfixed,” Ms. Kilgore recalled in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “I think I was unaware of anything else going on. And we just talked, looking straight at each other for a long, long time. And then he was leaving, and he said, ‘Am I ever going to see you again?’”

He would, frequently, for decades. She visited him until his death in 1997, even after he had slipped into dementia in the 1980s. While the two were never a couple in the formal sense (Ms. Kilgore lived primarily in Texas), they attended art fairs, like the Venice Biennale, and mingled with other artists in New York at the nightclub Max’s Kansas City and Fanelli Cafe, a venerable pub in SoHo.

In the Bohemian art world of postwar New York, appetites for self-indulgence tended to be large, and sexual mores loose, with relationships and romantic partners ever shifting.

For de Kooning, the relationship with Ms. Kilgore proved transformative. Prone to melancholy and given to epic benders, he was in a difficult period in life when he met her, Mr. Stevens said in a phone interview. For starters, he was entangled in stressful relationships both with his wife, the artist Elaine de Kooning, and Joan Ward, the mother of his daughter, Lisa.

Ms. Kilgore provided an escape. “He loved show tunes,” she said in an interview with Mr. Stevens. “We would sing songs together. I loved dancing, so I would dance. And do cartwheels outside the studio near a gazebo.” She tried to teach him to tango, she said, but “his feet were too big.”

Her joie de vivre mesmerized de Kooning. “I love you wherever you are forever,” he wrote in a letter to Ms. Kilgore. “You made me over …. You’re with me all the time even when you’re not with me.”

His joy soon became evident in his work. After a foray into sculpture, de Kooning returned to painting in the 1970s, producing works that were uncharacteristically buoyant and colorful, even lyrical. “They were remarkable for being so rich, luscious and sumptuous — everything you should not have been doing at a time when conceptual art and minimal art were in vogue,” Mr. Stevens said.

His 1976 painting “East Hampton Garden Party,” for example, captured a summery optimism, with its deeply saturated blues and yellows and exuberant brush strokes. It was one of many works that de Kooning would present to a woman he beatified over the years as “Santa Emilia.” With one such gift, he included a letter that said, “I dedicate all my paintings to you.”

In 1975, de Kooning asked her to marry him. Ms. Kilgore, who was still married, demurred, telling him that “so many lives would be affected” and pointing out that their time apart had actually enriched their relationship.

In addition to her son Alexander, Ms. Kilgore, who died in an assisted living facility, is survived by her son Cabanne, who is known as Cab, and two grandchildren.

“The relationship lasted because of what it was,” she told Mr. Stevens. “He could have me the way he wanted me, in his head.”

Alex Williams is a reporter in the Style department. @AlexwilliamsNYC

The words “Utopian” and “Dystopian”always fascinated me. Do they really exist? My art collector friend, Leslie Weissman, who I know through Fountainhead Arts, is also an artist. I kind of knew that but I never really explored her art. Then we went to Paris together with Fountainhead in October, and I had the opportunity to look at it on Instagram. I was hooked immediately. Every aspect of her art made me feel like she was inside my head hearing my thoughts. Each piece reminded me of subjects that I have repeatedly thought about over the years. That doesn’t happen very often. I bought four paintings on the spot. They are the first four below. The remainder are either owned by other collectors, or are still available. I can’t hog all of Leslie’s work, but I would, if I could. —LWH

It’s also very unusual that an artist can verbalize what his or her work is all about. Leslie has no trouble doing that. All the copy below was written by Leslie to explain her paintings.

“Representing a thought, a moment in time or a relationship that needs exploration, my work balances the Utopian and Dystopian environments that surround us. Constantly trying to balance the dichotomy in our world; anonymity and extreme presence, broken and perfect parts, personal histories and current circumstances, my work evolves from an initial view of my environment to an abstract depiction of relationships.

“Currently exploring the suburban landscape and the real and imagined boundaries that prevail in our daily life; a thought about social, economic and political status. Approaching this from two vantage points; through the abstract and ghost like figures and the boundaries of our landscapes I am hoping to initiate a dialogue about how we relate to each other and function as a community. I am interested in personal intrigues and how those struggles and background stories impact our reactions and relations to those around us.

“The use of trees, natural landscape elements and forms are my way of depicting the boundaries we erect for ourselves and how we need to constantly adjust them to perform, survive and grow beyond. Our boundaries are often self-imposed or obtained from a desire to be part of a collective group. So long as we know our boundaries, we can live within them or push beyond.

“Life is rife with individual struggles of belonging and wanting to standout. No longer does our world provide anonymity derived from a standard way of life and uniformity. In the midst of neighborhoods and developments is a modern social revolution where individuals are looking to be known for something greater than being part of the whole.

“The dichotomy of many of us face is rich with age old questions regarding our place in the universe and what entails a perfect model for truth in our lives.”

.”

Steve Martin and Martin Short Monologue – SNL

https://youtu.be/JEBX9JYco-4

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By Lois Whitman Hess, Miami Life Editor

The new Pelican Hotel and Restaurant , the new restaurant at Tiffany’s in the Design District, Burlesque, The Underline – The Three Tomatoes

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Re-entering the world as a single person after the death of a spouse is definitely a test of resiliency. Everyone reacts differently, and no one should be judged on how they want to conduct their future. It’s a very personal decision. 

 

I would like to explore with Susan her experiences because what she experienced was very difficult and Susan had to overcome two devastating events, the loss of her son six months before the death of her husband. No one has to tell Susan how defeated a person can feel, and how overwhelming it was to move forward with her life. But she did it. Now I want Susan to share it with you. Let’s explore how you jumped into the social world.

 

Listen to episode 16 of Susan’s podcast here –https://susanswarner.com/podcast/episode18/

 

The Susan is Suddenly Single Podcast is also available on popular podcast sites:

 

Amazon Music – https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/40b861c5-ffe5-4154-9100-546ee878dd74

Apple Podcasts – https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/susan-is-suddenly-single/id1614156310

Google Podcasts – https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9zdXNhbnN3YXJuZXIuY29tL2ZlZWQvcG9kY2FzdA

PocketCasts – https://pca.st/pan920jg

Spotify – https://open.spotify.com/show/1E9r3nWgusLU2gTMhRMtky

Audible – https://www.audible.com/pd/B09VFZZLHX

 

 

Contact:

Lois Whitman-Hess 

(917) 822-2591

loisw@hwhpr.com

 

Happy Thanksgiving from Rene, Howard, Eliot and Lois at the most amazing place to celebrate the holiday. #BartonG puts on a show like no other. We are forever grateful. Join us next year. We already reserved a long table in the garden. @Barton Weiss