![]() ![]() Her attorney, Bob Johnson, who she was quite close to, became ill with Aids. An important part of that story is how drastically Julia changed her mind on the matter. It was a common attitude back then, and we didn’t want to shy away from that fact. We start off, unsurprisingly for someone with Julia’s relatively sheltered background, in a pretty homophobic state of mind. “Truthfully, Julia’s change of heart on gay issues felt like an important part of this. “Our whole goal is to tell an engaging and fascinating story that’s also fun to watch,” Cohen says. In time, she would come around and make amends by speaking out during a moment of grave crisis, her ignorance spun into a testament to her newfound open-mindedness. That social conservatism also extended to the emergent gay population, whom she could be heard referring to as “homos”. The film conveys that as unconventional as she may have been, Child had a rather traditional stance about a woman’s place in the home, touting the three Fs of good wifeliness: to feed, flatter and fuck your husband. They consider her in all her humanity, which eventually means confronting the odd flaw, in this instance her evolving attitude about the queer community. The documentary exists in no small part to give Child her due, but West and Cohen were mindful not to drift into full-blown hagiography. She didn’t let that deter her as she pushed forward, but it took her quite a long time to get the respect she deserved.” And then, the executives’ response isn’t that they have a superstar on their hands, it’s giving her three shows for $50 a week. It’ll be too complicated for their brains.’ But then she shows up on TV, makes her omelette, and the station gets a pulse. “And not just her, but her audience too she writes this extremely complex, comprehensive, encyclopedic and yet very readable book, puts down on paper how to make French food in an approachable way, and the publishing industry thought women wouldn’t be interested! ‘It’s too hard. “At every turn, people wanted to question, dismiss, trivialize or roll their eyes at what Julia Child was up to,” Cohen says. While she wasn’t the first person to bring these talents to broadcast, she paved the way for a generation of personalities putting their own skills and unique charms over the generic primped-and-pressed quality that supposedly makes a person telegenic. ![]() Yet her “authority, knowledge and authenticity” were too much to deny, and she quickly amassed a wide following by marrying those virtues to a casual relatability. Standing at 6ft 2in, her voice in a distinctive singsong suggesting the image of a large bird, she was anything but the typical domestic goddess. Simply by sharing her enthusiasm for just how good food could be, Child defied the commonly held perception that men create cuisine while women merely put dinner on the table. I love the scene in the film when Julia holds up an artichoke and tells the audience not to be afraid of it.” If you wanted mushrooms, you’d have to go to the canned food aisle. “Things were pretty paltry, especially in produce. “We’ve got interviews with French people recalling visiting America in the 60s and just being appalled at the state of the grocery stores,” she laughs. “Both Julie and I grew up in the pre-Julia Child era, or at least experienced that food, and we knew first-hand how much she changed this world of American eating,” West says.Ĭohen recalls the highlight of her girlhood diet being the weekly Spaghetti Day on Wednesdays, describing this era as a “desert” for creative, flavorful meals. And she arrived not a moment too soon, lighting up a gustatory dark age of Jell-O molds, mayonnaise-based “salads” and tinned pineapples. She brought French cooking from the height of exclusive elegance to a more accessible pedestal, demystifying the steps to constructing the picture-perfect omelette or roasting a chicken to optimal brownness. Child launched her first TV series, The French Chef, for which she was paid a lowball rate of $50 a show by the Boston-area station WGBH, at a time when the American culinary palate desperately needed a shake-up. ![]()
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