Pret-�[euro]-Portray.(social life in movies)

Byline: EDITOR: ALEXANDRA KOTUR

A TIDE OF FILMS AND TELEVISION SHOWS COMING DOWN THE PIKE DEPICTS SOCIAL LIFE PAST AND PRESENT. WILLIAM NORWICH WONDERS IF ANY WILL GET IT RIGHT.

Are you researching a movie?" asked a guest at the baby shower and luncheon Tory Burch gave earlier this winter for Samantha Boardman Rosen, M.D., at Swifty's. (In keeping with the rigors of Manhattan's hectic pace, baby Vivian, Samantha's second child, arrived several days before the shower.) "You really should. Everyone is writing a movie, or at least a book, about social life this year."

Indeed, from TV's Cashmere Mafia and Lipstick Jungle (page 414); to Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day, about a middle-aged London governess who becomes social secretary to an American It-girl; to summer's big-screen versions of Sex and the City and Brideshead Revisited; the remake of The Women come fall and Plum Sykes' s The Debutante Divorcee (to be made by HBO), there is an abundance of entertainment in the Zeitgeist this year that casts its lens on social life. Which, if any, will get their depictions of the rich, right?

I had never been to a baby shower before, so in the interest of anthropological study, not screenwriting, I had invited myself. Among some 40 others, here are Eliza Bolen; Kimberly Kravis Schulhof; the artist Rachel Hovnanian; Samantha Gregory, recently wed to writer, director, and producer Roberto Benabib; Aerin Lauder, who is off later this year to bring Estee Lauder to a wider audience in India; and Renee Rockefeller, whose husband, Mark, just brilliantly organized her surprise birthday party at the Rockefeller compound in Pocantico Hills. They are the ruling (younger) set of New York socials leading luxurious lives, yes, but no visible displays of excess at Swifty's today--it's doubtful anything about this gathering would fly in a pitch to studio suits.

Reality vs. fantasy, that is Hollywood's question. "If 'get it right' means reflects reality, I'm not sure that is exactly what I want from a movie," said Bolen. "I prefer they deliver the fantasy, where strong wardrobes reinforce the message. The way Stanley Kubrick shot Barry Lyndon seems to me what Gains-borough would have come up with if he had had a video camera."

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