MOVIES

'Julie & Julia' based on Austin native's blog project

By Addie Broyles
AMERICAN-STATESMAN FOOD WRITER
Friday, August 07, 2009

Austinite Julie Powell hated her secretarial job in Manhattan. The theater junkie, who'd honed her acting chops on Zach Theatre and Austin High School stages during her youth, aspired to be a writer, but her life wasn't heading down the road she envisioned for herself and her husband, Eric, when they moved from Austin to the Big Apple in the mid-1990s.

So in 2002, she challenged herself to cook all 524 recipes in chef Julia Child's definitive work, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," in one year. When her husband suggested she start a blog (after he explained to her what one was), Powell figured it would simply be a good way to chronicle her progress.

Before the year was over, everything would change. Her blog, "The Julie/Julia Project," would have a massive following and lead to a book deal and a major motion picture starring Meryl Streep as Julia Child and Amy Adams as Powell, a 1991 Austin High School graduate. And Powell's sense of hopelessness would slowly disappear as she gained comfort and confidence from a woman she never met — all through a cookbook.

"This is a great book to really learn how to cook, but it was more than that," Powell recalls. "It shows that you can do things. You can learn things. You can change."

The movie, "Julie & Julia," opened nationwide Friday, almost exactly seven years after Powell cooked that first recipe, potage parmentier, for her husband and cat in her dumpy New York City apartment.

From blog to big screen

Powell's parents, Kay and John Foster, still live in the Enfield home where Julie and her brother Jordan grew up. Kay Foster says she occasionally cooked beef bourguignon, pork chops or Brussels sprouts out of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking," but Powell didn't feel particularly connected to the book until she rediscovered it on a trip back home in 2002.

"My entire experience with Julia Child before was the book and Dan Aykroyd," who portrayed the 6-foot-2-inch chef on "Saturday Night Live," Powell says over the phone from New York.

On that visit to Austin, Powell became mesmerized by Child the writer, not Child the cook (after all, she'd never even seen an episode of her shows). So she tucked her mother's copy of the book into her bag when she headed back to New York. She came up with her project a few months later.

Cooking would be an escape from her government temp job fielding calls from people who had suggestions about the Sept. 11 memorial. After the initial plans were announced, it was Powell's job to listen to the public response.

"When I first started the project, I started with just recipes," she says of writing the blog. "I got so bored with it. It naturally started happening that I wrote more about other parts of my life ... and about how this thing I did every day spoke to and informed other parts of my life."

For the first few weeks, it seemed Powell's mother was the only one reading. "I can't even imagine how she did it," Kay Foster says of her daughter's quest. Powell rarely left work before 6 p.m., and she had to buy ingredients such as calf's feet and bone marrow on the way home. She cooked the often complex dishes at night, then got up early to write for the blog before work.

Her mother and her husband tried to persuade her to stop — or at least take a break — because the stress was so high.

Powell didn't listen. "I have to finish; it's all I've got," says her character in the movie.

By the time Powell cooked her last recipe, word about the blog — which by that time was getting up to 100 comments a post — had spread all the way up to Amanda Hesser, the New York Times food writer, whose article spawned dozens of profiles on Powell. (You can still read Powell's blog at http://blogs.salon.com/0001399).

"The most exciting part for me was when I realized she had so many readers because I realized she had found a voice," Kay Foster says. "It was confirmation that she had talent and appeal."

It wasn't always easy to read. Julie and Eric Powell's marital struggles are an integral part of the blog, the book — "Julie & Julia," which was published in 2005 — and the movie. Once Powell blogged about a particularly nasty fight, and after her mother read about it online, she called Julie with concerns about their marriage and her daughter's sanity. Powell's willingness to write openly about her struggles as a writer and a wife give the story line a drama far more personal and engaging than if she'd written only about learning how to flip an omelette.

"She was a young woman struggling with what a lot of young women struggle with," Kay Foster says, "and she's brutally honest in her portrayal of those challenges."

Powell continues to write about painful personal struggles in her second book, "Cleaving," which comes out later this year and is about her time in upstate New York learning to become a butcher. Powell says the new book is as much about meat as "Julie & Julia" was about the famous chef.

"It's a little awkward sometimes having everyone know the details of your life," Eric Powell says. "But it's important for people to talk honestly about marriage," the good and the bad. He praises the movie for being "really honest about the fracture that can develop in a marriage ... and to talk about strong marriages in an interesting way."

Eleven years after they were married among the peacocks at Laguna Gloria, Julie and Eric are still together.

After the 'Project'

The blog was just the beginning.

Powell won two James Beard Awards — the most prestigious honor in food writing — after completing the blogging project: one in 2004 for an article about Julia Child in Bon Appetit and another in 2005 for an article about ancient cooking in Archaeology magazine, for which her husband is an editor.

But months before Powell had cooked the final recipe — a chocolate cake called Reine de Saba — she had hired an agent to help negotiate a book deal, and filmmakers soon started tossing around ideas for a movie.

Then came the one-two punch: First, famed writer and director Nora Ephron, a master of romantic comedies such as "When Harry Met Sally..." and "Sleepless in Seattle," signed on to write the screenplay and direct the film. Then Meryl Streep was brought on to play Child. Powell's yearlong journey wasn't just going to be made into just any movie; it was going to star one of the most talented actresses in the business.

Foster says none of this really sunk in until she and her husband were going to a movie earlier this year and saw a poster promoting Adams as Powell.

Although Powell majored in English and theater at Amherst College in Massachusetts after going to acting school and performing in productions throughout her childhood, it was clear she would not play herself in the movie. The role went to Amy Adams, the Oscar-nominated actress ("Doubt," "Junebug"), whom Powell didn't meet until last week's premiere in New York.

"The Julie of the movie is a sweeter, slightly less prickly person than me," Powell says.

The film combines Powell's book and Child's memoir, "My Life in France," about the 10 years she and co-author Simone Beck spent writing the landmark cookbook.

However, Powell says, the theme of strong women transforming themselves and the relationships with the men who love them not in spite of but because of that, is as central to Ephron's screenplay as it was in both books.

Julia on the 'stunt'

Julia Child didn't have much to say publicly on Powell's project (she died in 2004, just as Powell was finishing the book), but Child's longtime publisher Judith Jones told Publisher's Weekly recently that Child didn't think much of it. She and Child sat down to read some of the blog together and "Julia said, 'I don't think she's a serious cook,' " Jones told the magazine. "What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt."

Powell found out that Child was less than honored about the project as she was finishing it up. It was a hard slap in the face.

Child was one of the first celebrity chefs. After three decades on the air, Child stepped away from the spotlight, as did her style of labor-intensive and technical French cooking. The Food Network started broadcasting shows that taught home cooks how to make quick, family-friendly dishes.

After years of 30-minute meals, butter and braising are back, and Powell's blog, book and now the film are revitalizing American's fascination with Child. She's inspiring a new generation of cooks.

When her mother called her to tell her that Child — whom Powell never met — had died in her California home, Powell wrote on her blog: "I have no claim over the woman at all, unless it's the claim one who has nearly drowned has over the person who pulled her out of the ocean."

The premiere

Last week, members of the Foster, Powell and Child families were in New York for the premiere. (Jordan Foster, who recently graduated from the UT School of Law, couldn't be with his sister on the red carpet; he was taking the bar exam the day of the premiere.)

Kay Foster says it was a little surprising to see the trailer running on taxicab televisions and giant posters with her daughter's name on it every other block. At the lavish premiere, with everyone from Streep and Adams to Barbara Walters and Yoko Ono in attendance, Foster saw the most dynamic year of her daughter's life unfold on the big screen. "It was an amazing thing to see," she says.

Powell will return to her hometown next week for several sold-out screenings of the film at the Alamo Drafthouse, and then she'll go back to New York, where she's working on a novel and where she still has her mother's now very worn copy of "Mastering the Art of French Cooking."

Foster says she doesn't think she'll be getting it back, but she doesn't mind.

abroyles@statesman.com; 912-2504