I must admit that I haven't had time to see the new Julie & Julia film starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams- but it's definitely tops on my to-do list. Both actresses are my fav's and I love the concept of the movie - an aspiring writer, Julie Powell, desperately in need of some zest in her life decides to blend a love of cooking with her passion for writing. The result: Powell cooked her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking and kept a well documented and very popular blog about it.
What resulted was a book and what looks like an amazing film - just goes to show the power of the blog! Powell talked with MediaBistro recently about her media odyssey - below are a few highlights ~ but be sure to read the whole interview here.
Powell says: "I was a frustrated writer. I majored in fiction writing in college and wanted to be a writer, and nothing was happening with that. I pretty much stopped writing by the time I was 29 and was feeling extraordinarily unfulfilled. So I had this midnight revelation that I would cook my way through Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which came out of talking about going to cooking school. But I didn't have the money and didn't think I wanted to be a chef or anything like that. I did want to learn how to cook well, and Mastering was obviously a great way to do that.
I had no notion of what a blog could do and what the medium was really capable of at the time. I kind of chanced into it. I just was in the right place and time.
I started on a pretty instant level because I thought I was writing for family and friends. I would write, "Here's what I'm cooking." And then I would have some side notes about what was happening in my life. People ended up being interested in the food, but really interested in the other stuff. Then, I realized that I had all these readers interested in the gory details of my daily life; that's what they were following, and they wanted to learn more about that. "Tell me about how shitty you feel about your job, and tell me more about your pet snake," [readers said]. By that time, this bar had been set in terms of intimacy, which was very important to the development of the tone of the blog."
