Julia (2021)

Year 14, Day 215 - 8/3/22 - Movie #4,216

BEFORE: Welcome back, it's Chef's Week here at the Movie Year, a special foursome of movies devoted to famous chefs - two living, two not so much.  I don't think I've covered any chefs before in past versions of the Rock & Doc Block, I'll have to check.  This was a last-minute addition, I saw a way to put three docs about chefs together, but I didn't see the way to work them into this year's chain, I tried very hard, it was just not possible.  Then the fourth film came my way, and based on the credits listed on the IMDB, I suddenly saw the way - that's how things tend to work out for me, quite often.  

Chef is something of a unique title, we've grown accustomed to adding it quite liberally to the names of people who cook our food in restaurants, to the point where it feels a little weird to NOT say "Chef José Andrés", as if the word is part of his name.  But we don't do that for other jobs, like you don't talk about your friend by callng him "Accountant Frank Smith", not unless you know two guys named Frank Smith, I guess, and you need to distinguish him from "Barber Frank Smith".  The only other people we do this for are the President and maybe the Supreme Court Justices.  Oh, and doctors.  I can get doctors, but why are chefs so special?  

José Andrés carries over from "We Feed People". I left out the word "chef" because maybe there's more to him than just being defined by his profession, maybe he's a complex guy and I don't want to belittle or pigeonhole him. 

THE PLOT: The story of the legendary cookbook author and television superstar who changed the way Americans think about food, television and even about women. 

AFTER: Yes, there's more to the story of Julia Child then you may be aware of, because your memories of her probably started whenever you first watched her TV show, and she'd lived a whole life by then, being a TV star was her second, no wait, third profession.  That's a bit of a running theme this year, whether you want to be the next Betty White or Rita Moreno or Rick James or Sparks Brothers, keep at it, but also keep re-inventing yourself until you land on something really good or successful.  Dick Gregory started out as a comic but ended up as a civil rights activist and healthy lifestyle advocate, while Jacques Cousteau was a free-diving fanatic who became an inventor and a filmmaker. Mel Brooks and Jerry Lewis started doing funny voices in clubs, and look how far they went from there. Robert Evans, Rita Moreno and Bob Einstein also possessed this power of longevity - hey, remind me about all this the next time I watch a documentary about a dead celebrity, which will probably be on Saturday. 

Julia never cooked when growing up, she was born into a wealthy family in California, her mother was the daughter of a lieutentant governor of Massachusetts, while her father was a land manager who invented foreclosure or something. Julia attended a polytechnic junior high and then played sports at Smith College - she was a big girl, after all. After a short stint as an advertising copywriter, she tried to enlist in the Women's Army Corps when World War II broke out, but she was too tall, so she worked as a typist for the OSS, which later became the CIA. She worked her way to become a researcher for the head of the agency, but she was NOT a spy as rumors have suggested. Instead she kept track of the names of German officers on index cards, and later helped develop a shark repellent when too many underwater explosives were being set off by sharks.  Yeah, right - and actress Hedy Lamarr helped a guidance system for torpedoes that became Bluetooth, sure...

Julia (McWilliams at the time) met her future husband, Paul Child, when they were both stationed in Sri Lanka (Ceylon at the time).  He also worked for the OSS as a mapmaker, and after the war ended, they got married in Pennsylvania, and moved to Washington DC before the State Department assigned him to Paris, and there he introduced Julia to fine French cuisine, and that's when her life got a lot more interesting.  One meal at La Couronne in Rouen, France, consisting of fine wine, oysters and sole meuniere was enough to spark her inspiration, and she wanted to learn everything about French cuisine, graduated from the Cordon Bleu cooking school and joined a women's cooking club, where she met Simone Beck and Louisette Bertholle, who were working on a French cookbook for Americans.  Child offered them insight into the American palette and sensibility, plus she was a darn good typist - and anyone who can keep track of a multitude of Nazi officers can probably also keep track of the many ingredients necessary for a recipe.

It took a decade of traveling around Europe, tasting food and translating recipes, to put the cookbook together - nice work if you can get it, huh?  But the first U.S. publisher rejected the manuscript for "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" because it was a giant 726-page encyclopedia-sized book, and it was felt that most Americans would find that too large, too much of a challenge, meanwhile in post-war America people were cooking with instant mashed potatoes, mixing powdered drinks and discovering this thing called "fast food", so why would they want to cook in a much more difficult and time-consuming manner, as the French chefs do?  But the women authors persisted, and the second publisher printed the book and created a best-seller - known for its helpful illustrations and attention to details, that book is STILL in print, after 60 years. Along with what was essentially the first best-selling cookbook in America came the invention of the book tour, with Julia and her co-authors traveling across the U.S. to speak about the book and pimp more copies in every city.  It's hard to imagine a time when authors didn't go out on tours to promote their books, right? 

It's also hard to imagine a time before the Food Network and the Cooking Channel, but before Julia came along, chefs didn't appear on TV, certainly not female ones - all of this came about because Julia and Paul Child lived in Cambridge, MA and she was scheduled to appear on a PBS show about books to promote her cookbook.  The Public Broadcasting System at the time was pretty much used for hurricane warnings and college professors ranting about Shakespeare's works, this was pre-Sesame Street, pre-Great Performances, pre-Nova and whatever the hell else people watch on PBS.  I only check the listings because the PBS station in NYC runs one semi-obscure "indie" film every Saturday night, and it might be one that I've seen but aired on Netflix or a cable channel that runs that signal that prevents me from dubbing it to DVD. (PBS does NOT run that signal, so gotcha!). Oh, and I recently discovered "American Masters", that's my new favorite PBS show, they aired the Sammy Davis Jr. and the Rita Moreno docs just when I needed to see them - thanks, PBS, there may be a little something extra for you this year when pledge week rolls around.

Anyway, that appearance on the book review show was a success, because Julia made the host an omelet, right there on camera, and he loved it.  Then somebody at the station put two and two together and thought, "Hey, what if there was just a show with this crazy lady cooking something delicious, there's nothing else like that on television!"  Fast forward sixty years and then somehow you get four people forced to cook with pig intestines on "Chopped", you can all see how we got there, right?  Child's cooking show was produced quite cheaply, in a demonstration (fake) kitchen somewhere in the Boston area, with the cameras and lights held together with chewing gum and string, no scripts, and no editing - Julia's "mistakes" had to be left in the show, and thus began the process of having the finished dish prepared beforehand, which is common practice now just to save time. That line where a TV chef says, "OK, this meat needs to marinate for 17 hours, but I have another roast right here that I started marinating yesterday..."  Yeah, she invented that. 

"The French Chef" ran on PBS stations around the U.S. for 10 years, it was like the "I Love Lucy" of cooking shows, because just as Lucille Ball went on to produce "The Lucy Show", "Here's Lucy" and "Life with Lucy", Julia had "Julia Child & Company", "Dinner at Julia's", "Baking with Julia" and at the age of 87, co-hosted "Julia & Jacques Cooking at Home" with Jacques Pepin. Plus she appeared on darn near every talk show made during the 1980's and 1990's, which is very considerate of her, as if she knew someday someone would need to link a bunch of documentaries together based on those talk-show bookings. 

It wasn't all butter and sugar, though her husband became her greatest supporter, always ready to chop onions or wash dishes - hey, everyone who retires from the intelligence agencies needs to keep busy, right?  The couple had no children, and Julia Child was an advocate for Planned Parenthood - perhaps she felt that she couldn't accomplish as much as she did if she had to raise children, or who knows, maybe she felt that kids would kill the great romance she had going.  If you watch this documentary you WILL see a glamour shot of a nude Julia Child in their Paris apartment, don't say I didn't warn you.  But she was young and needed the money...

By the 1990's, Julia's cooking shows were based in her home, though sadly her husband had to live in a nursing home after he suffered a series of strokes in 1989.  He passed away in 1994, but Julia kept living in their house until she moved to a retirement community in 2001 and donated her house to Smith College, and her kitchen to the Smithsonian.  Julia herself passed on in August 2004, two days before her 92nd birthday.  OK, maybe she didn't win the EGOT but she had three Emmys, a Peabody, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom, France's Legion of Honor, a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and she's in the National Women's Hall of Fame. Not bad for her third career...

Also starring Paul Bogaards, André Cointreau, Susy Davidson, Barbara Fairchild, Jane Friedman, Ina Garten, Charles Gibson, Daniele Mazet-Delpeuch, Russell Morash, Sara Moulton, Jacques Pepin, Alex Pirie, Alex Prud'homme, Ruth Reichl, Cecile Richards, Marcus Samuelsson, Francois Simon, Jean-Francois Thibault, Stephanie Vachon, Anne WIllan, Dorothy ZInberg

with archive footage of Julia Child (last seen in "Recorder: The Marion Stokes Project"), Paul Child, Dan Aykroyd (last seen in 'Brian Wilson: Long Promised Road") Simone Beck, Dick Cavett (last seen in "Lucy and Desi"), Johnny Carson (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Jay Leno (ditto), Phil Donahue (last seen in "Bob Ross: Happy Accidents, Betrayal & Greed"), Jacqueline Kennedy (last seen in "Sammy Davis Jr.: I've Gotta Be Me"), John F. Kennedy (ditto), Emeril Lagasse, David Letterman (also carrying over from "We Feed People"), Rachael Ray (last heard in "The Emoji Movie"), Fred Rogers (last seen in "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood"), Tom Snyder (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream")

RATING: 6 out of 10 ways to cook a whole chicken