Love Charlie Film Screening & QA

“Perfectionist control freak… Boundary pusher… Enfant terrible… Driven taskmaster….” Much can be said about Chef  Charlie Trotter, the self-proclaimed “excellence-ist,” who reimagined haute American cuisine and made Chicago the  culinary capital it is today. Charlie was a rock star among the first generation of celebrity chefs, but because he rose  to prominence in the pre-social media era, his legacy stands to be lost to time.  For 25 years, Charlie and his diverse team that hailed from all over Chicago and elsewhere improvised 10-course  tasting menus, never serving the same dish twice. The self-taught chef was credited with inventing micro-greens  and took vegetarianism mainstream, and the groundbreaking style of photography in his cookbooks made him the  godfather of food porn. Charlie’s obsession with exceptional ingredients and his exacting management style drew  ambitious aspiring chefs to his door, and his flock of trainees have become the who’s who of the culinary world. To his employees, Chef Charlie Trotter was an enigmatic guru. To the media, he was a caricature of an overbearing  perfectionist. But to those who loved him, he was “Chuck,” a fun-loving dreamer whose passion knew no bounds.  LOVE, CHARLIE reveals how, over the course of his career, Chuck (his authentic self) gave way to Charlie (his  professional persona), with devastating consequences.  Told through intimate sit-down interviews with family, friends and celebrated chefs including Wolfgang Puck,  Emeril Lagasse and Grant Achatz, along with extensive personal archival material (including 8mm home movies  and hundreds of pieces of personal correspondence), and evocative graphics and animation- the film is a searing  portrait of what happens when a person’s identity becomes intrinsically tied to their work and an epic cautionary tale  of what can happen when that work fades away.