BPS 412: How to Create a Compelling Documentary with Julie Cohen & Betsy West

Today on the show we have Oscar nominated documentarians Betsy West
& Julie Cohen.Betsy West (Director/Producer) is an Academy
Award-nominated Emmy winning director/producer of RBG (Magnolia,
Participant, CNN Films, 2018), along with Julie Cohen. Most
recently, she and Cohen directed My Name is Pauli Murray
(Participant/Amazon Studios), which premiered at the Sundance Film
Festival in 2021.Betsy was executive producer of the MAKERS PBS/AOL
documentary and digital series about the modern women’s movement,
and the feature documentary The Lavender Scare (PBS, 2019). As an
ABC News producer and executive producer of the documentary series
Turning Point, she won 21 Emmy awards. Betsy is the Fred W.
Friendly Professor Emerita at Columbia Journalism School.Julie
Cohen (Director/Producer) is the Academy Award nominated, Emmy
winning director and producer of RBG (Magnolia, Participant, CNN
Films, 2018) along with Betsy West.

Her film My Name is Pauli Murray, also directed with West,
premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival.Previous films she’s
directed include The Sturgeon Queens (7th Art Releasing; Berlinale,
2015; Best of the Fest, San Francisco Jewish Film Festival), and
Ndiphilela Ukucula: I Live to Sing (2014 New York Emmy Award for
Best Arts Program).Before she started making documentaries, Julie
was a longtime staff producer for NBC News. She's been an
enthusiastic amateur cook and baker ever since her parents bought
her a Cuisinart for her bat mitzvah in the 1970s.Their current film
is called JULIA. The film tells the remarkable story of the
groundbreaking cookbook author and television superstar who forever
changed the way Americans think about food, about television, and
even about women.Using a treasure trove of never-before-seen
archival video, personal still photos, first-person narratives, and
cutting-edge, mouth-watering food cinematography, the documentary
will trace Julia Child’s surprising path, from her struggles to
create and publish the revolutionary ‘instant’ classic Mastering
the Art of French Cooking (1961, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group),
to her empowering personal story of a woman in her 50s, finding her
calling as an unlikely television sensation.

This is the first feature-length documentary solely devoted to
Julia Child, and will illuminate her casual upheaval of the
male-dominated culinary and television worlds.Almost
single-handedly, Julia Child upended the mythology that women could
not hold their own at the highest levels of creative gastronomy,
and that the only women Americans wanted to see on TV were young,
submissive, and conventionally beautiful.JULIA is produced with the
full cooperation of Julia Child’s friends, family, and the Julia
Child Foundation.  It follows the highly-acclaimed
documentary, RBG, executive produced by CNN Films, directed and
produced by West and Cohen through their company Storyville Films,
and edited by Carla Gutierrez, who will also edit JULIA.The film
comes out Nov 12 in-theatres NY/LA followed by nationwide
expansion.In this episode we not only discuss the making of Julia
and RBG but also cover how they approach documentary, the craft of
tell stories and much more.

Enjoy my conversation with Betsy West & Julie Cohen.

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