As Julia Child herself said, “I was 32 when I started cooking; until then, I just ate.” So, what else did she do before then? Many of us learned what we know about Julia Child from PBS reruns, Nora Ephron’s “Julie & Julia,” or Dan Aykroyd’s impersonation on “Saturday Night Live.” All of these representations focus on the second and third acts of her life. The media at large, however, has yet to dabble in Child’s time prior to the kitchen.
ABC Signature would like to change that. According to Deadline, ABC’s digital/cable division has just picked up writer Benjamin Brand’s hour-long dramedy “Julia.” This fictional project is very loosely based on Child’s experience as an agent for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA, during the Second World War.
In this series, Brand contemplates what would occur if the CIA took advantage of Child once she became a renowned public figure, and how she would operate as an agent during this phase of her life.
The inspiration for Brand’s show ironically stems from one of Child’s PBS programs, “Cooking for the C.I.A.” “I was disappointed when I learned that in this case, the C.I.A. stood for the Culinary Institute of America,” Brand said. He later merged this initial disappointment with research pertaining to Child’s employment during WWII, and “the story of ‘Julia’ quickly fell into place.”
Further details regarding “Julia” have yet to be announced.
