LAST year, around St. Patrick's Day, as auspicious a time as any for a writer with Irish blood to start telling a story, Michael Patrick King left his house in the Hollywood Hills and drove to a motel in Palm Desert, Calif., where he spent 16 days thinking about four women whose approach to love, friendship and money defined the manners and folkways of affluent single life at the turn of the new century.
For five of its seven seasons Mr. King served as head writer of the HBO series "Sex and the City," until it ended in a big, blooming peony of joy and bittersweet sentiment four years ago. Out in the desert he returned to the characters who had shifted his fortunes, shaping the script for the coming movie based on the series, scheduled to arrive on May 30, which marks his debut as a screenwriter and film director at 53.
Beyond the matter of his age, Mr. King has always seemed an unlikely voice of the upper-middle-class postfeminist experience. An openly gay man, a former altar boy and a child of Scranton, Pa., he arrived at the pinnacle of television comedy writing (he is also responsible for the brilliant but short-lived HBO series "The Comeback") without the imprimatur of an Ivy League education and the connections attending it. While the history of modern culture is filled with examples of writers and artists who have found prominence chronicling what goes on behind the velvet rope even if they were reared far away from it, Mr. King has spent more time away from the gateways of recognition than most.