The Morning Feed: Real-life Maid Loses Case against ‘Help’ Author Kathryn Stockett

Real-life maid loses case against 'Help' author.

Ablene Cooper, a maid in Jackson, Miss., claimed the character of the wise maid Aibileen (Viola Davis) in Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling novel The Help was based on her and sought $75,000 in damages over the unpermitted appropriation.

Mississippi Judge Tomie Green dismissed Cooper’s case based on a one-year statute of limitations that elapsed after Stockett gave Cooper a copy of the book and when the maid filed her lawsuit.

Stockett wrote the book about a recent Ole Miss grad (Emma Stone) interviewing black maids for a tell-all book about their mistreatment in pre-Civil Rights era Jackson and Stockett’s childhood friend Tate Taylor wrote and directed the hit film adaptation for DreamWorks.

Just like the character Aibileen, Ablene Cooper also lost a son before she began working as a maid for Stockett’s brother.

“She’s a liar,” Cooper told The Hollywood Reporter, hinting that she planned an appeal. “She did it. She knows she did it.”

The collaboration between writer and director Michael Patrick King and author Candace Bushnell resulted in the blockbuster HBO series Sex and the City, a hit movie adaptation in 2008 and a less-than-successful sequel in 2010.

Bushnell began plans to create a new series based on her new books The Carrie Diaries, and Summer and the City: A Carrie Diaries Novel, telling the story of Sex and the City heroine Carrie Bradshaw as a high school girl coming to New York City for the first time.

Deadline reported that work began with Gossip Girl executive producers Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage and former Sex and the City writer and producer Amy Harris prepping a Carrie Diaries series for the CW.

Fans hoping for creative continuity were disappointed to learn that Sex and the City producer Darren Star and King both declined to work on the show.

“I’m not working on any Sex and the City prequel,” King said at the Television Critics Association panel for his new series Two Broke Girls. “My Carrie Bradshaw started at 33 and I took her to 43. I didn’t even want to know who Carrie Bradshaw’s parents were because I thought she only existed in Manhattan. So for me, the idea of going backwards and making her less evolved is something that I don’t imagine.”

Fans continued to keep the fingers crossed that Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker will play some role in the new series.

Weekly programs, screenings and events continued at the BMW Guggenheim Lab, the pop up urban think tank at the corner of East Houston and Second Avenue in New York City through Oct. 16.

  Hyperallergic writer Erin Lindholm was unconvinced that the traveling lab could innovate and improve city life through its programs. However, she did celebrate the arrival of the popular Bushwick pizza parlor Roberta’s as the BMW Guggenheim Lab’s on-site café operator, making the case that one needs to feed the stomach before feeding the urban mind.

   The Days Off Festival wrapped up its eight-day-run last month at Cité de la Musique and Salle Pleyel in Paris but Pitchfork reminded music fans about the incredible performances they missed.

Radiohead’s Colin Greenwood, Air’s Nicolas Godin, the Austrian experimental music group Soap&Skin and The HotRats, a cover band made up of former Supergrass members Gaz Coombes and Danny Goffey and producer Nigel Godrich paid tribute to the Velvet Undergound and Nico as part of the The Velvet Underground Revisted show at the festival.

Canadian singer-songwriter Feist, best known for the songs Mushaboom and 1234, sang lead on the classic song Femme Fatale.

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