Blake Edwards

CHAPTER 9 Julie (1972)

Executive Producer and Director, Blake Edwards

When we interviewed Ken Wales in 2011, during a discussion of the difficult time Edwards had after the problems he encountered on The Carey Treatment, Wales remarked, “We were working on some little documentary thing, behind the scenes thing,” but he quickly passed on to the events that led to Edwards’s next theatrical feature, The Tamarind Seed. We had no response to or questions about the “little documentary” since we did not know about it and had not seen it. We, like Wales, assumed the next important film was The Tamarind Seed. That changed dramatically in 2020.

On March 26, 2020, Richard Brody published a commentary in The New Yorker entitled “What to Stream: Blake Edwards’s Masterwork Documentary of His Wife, Julie Andrews.”¹ The masterwork to which he refers is, of course, the “little documentary” mentioned by Wales and which credits Wales as the producer. Brody’s essay is itself a virtual writer’s version of Edwards’s beloved gag routine of “topping the topper topper.” After acknowledging that “Edwards (who died in 2010) was a comedic genius, the most skilled and inspired director of physical comedy working in Hollywood in his time” (the topper), he goes on to make the claim, “Yet Edwards has also made some of the best movies of modern times, including ‘Experiment in Terror,’ ‘Days of Wine and Roses,’ ‘Wild Rovers’ and even ‘Sunset,’ which has been much, and wrongly, maligned, including by Edwards ...