Julia Child knew how to use a sauce like Leonard Bernstein knew how to navigate a sympathy. Patrick Mahomes also knows his way around defenses. This is to say, it was done with panache.
The documentary features the renowned TV personality and cookbook author, as well as the pioneering television personality. JuliaBetsy West directed the film, and Julie Cohen directed it. It is currently up for consideration for an Oscar nomination.
“Julie and I both grew up in a time of frozen food, weird Jell-O salads, mushroom soup casserole, and Julia changed all of that,”Deadline: West speaks out “Julia’s the reason why cooking shows are so incredibly popular, why Americans are much more adventuresome in the kind of food they eat. Julia introduced us to French food, but it just took off from there and America is a very different place after Julia.”
The documentary marks the second collaboration of the directors with CNN Films. This division is overseen Amy Entelis, EVP talent and content for CNN Worldwide, Courtney Sexton, SVP CNN Films. They first collaborated on the huge hit RBGThe 2018 documentary “The Late Supreme Court Justice” won an Emmy Award and was nominated for an Oscar. An upcoming third collaboration between Cohen, West and CNN Films has just been announced – Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down – about the former U.S. Representative from Arizona who was nearly killed in a 2011 assassination attempt.
“They’ve done a great job of taking on strong female characters,”Sexton observes the filmmakers and adds that with Julia, “They also had a really interesting idea on how to attack the food aspect of it and make it feel elevated and cinematic. And when they pitched this idea of the macro food cinematography, alongside this compelling story, we were immediately taken.”
Sexton and Entelis gained a deep understanding of viewers’ expectations from a CNN Films documentary through their own experience.
“Our audience responds to people’s life stories when they are told as well as Betsy and Julie can do it,”Entelis Notes “and when they think that they know something about a subject, but in fact we take them much deeper and we can really reveal things that are not necessarily out in the world.”
Julia, for instance, delves into Child’s World War II experience in the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, and her privileged upbringing. Working with the estate, the filmmakers gained access to home movies of Child (née McWilliams) growing up in Pasadena, California.
“That goes to the point about showing the audience something they wouldn’t have access to,”Entelis claims. “That was really wonderful footage and really emphasizes this notion of [Child] being a trailblazer… Her family wanted to marry her off to the son of the Chandler family, the L.A. Times family. And you think, ‘Oh my God, she just like bolted out of there, she really did something against the grain. And not only did something against the grain, she rose to the highest heights of the field that she chose.”
CNN Films was launched in 2012. Before that, almost every minute of CNN programming had been made in-house. Because it works with filmmakers from outside the network, the Entelis/Sexton division is different. JuliaThis was created in collaboration with Imagine, an entertainment company founded Ron Howard and Brian Grazer.
“The audience isn’t necessarily that aware that this is coming from a different place, and so we can’t be too far out there without a lot of explanation,”Entelis claims. “So, we want to sort of comfortably fit within CNN, but we also want to be different because that’s really what our mandate was. Our mandate was to go out and make great content that comes from a different place and opens up different worlds to our audience.”
Documentaries from CNN Films, however, are not exempt from CNN’s rigorous vetting procedures, which apply to all news pieces as well. A unit called Standards & Practices scrutinizes the content of nonfiction films likeJulia.
“It’s a whole extra layer that we have to navigate,”Sexton admits. “But at the end of the day, they also protect us and I feel grateful for that, even though sometimes we have some struggles because we are a news network… They’ve grown a lot with us as we’ve honed in on how to operate within a news environment. We’re outliers.”
CNN Films could be in Oscar contention with next year NavalnyA documentary about Alexsei Navalny (Russian opposition leader) that was added to the Sundance Film Festival’s late program. The audience award for U.S. documentary was won by Daniel Roher on Friday. “festival favorite”The award was chosen from all Sundance features, fiction, and nonfiction.
“When the filmmakers came to us, they had just secured access to Navalny and there was no pitch deck, no footage. It was just, ‘Hey, we got this access, would you would you want to take the ride with us?’” Sexton explains. “[CNN correspondent] Clarissa Ward has done most of the best reporting on the subject of him already. So, for us to be able to extend that story in a deeper fashion… it felt like a natural sort of extension of the amazing work Clarissa’s already done.”
Entelis and Sexton are also busy developing and acquiring content for CNN Plus, the network’s streaming service that is expected to debut around March.
“We have a film we’ve just announced for [CNN Plus] called The Last Movie Stars, which is directed by Ethan Hawke, the story of the lives, careers, marriage and philanthropy of Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward,”Entelis claims. “It’s a very, very unique project for us. It’s a film of multiple chapters, so it’s a very extensive project. It’s going to launch on the streaming service, which will also have original CNN Films that have not aired on the network.”
There is also the matter of Oscar nominations. JuliaIt is currently one of 15 films that are still up for Best Documentary Feature. Nominations would be “the icing on the cake,”Sexton: “We’re excited either way.”
Adds Entelis “That would be a dream come true, and it would be wonderful, and the time we spent doing that the last time [with RBG], I mean, pinch me, that was an incredible experience to sort of be the final episode of the saga of getting that film out in the world and seeing the incredible reaction to it… Making Julia, collaborating with Betsy and Julie and Imagine, it’s just a wonderful experience and we do it for the joy of bringing a story like that to the viewer. But if it gets to that other place where we are in contention, I’m there, I’m all in.”