Getting to Know American Actress Julie Carmen

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This month celebrates women by recognizing women's achievements over the course of American history in a variety of fields.

Tonight, we honor a woman who is a veteran performer who understands the business of moviemaking.

And now we can add producer to her list of achievements.

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From Los Angeles.

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Welcome to Everybody with Angela Williamson, an innovation, Arts, education and public affairs program.

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And now your host, doctor Angela Williamson.

I am honored to introduce our guest for tonight, Julie.

Carmen.

Julie, thank you so much for being here and helping us celebrate Women's History Month.

Thank you so much, Angela.

I am thrilled to be here.

And Women's History Month is very important to celebrate.

We hold up half the sky.

They say.

We do.

And before we go into Julie, because we are going to talk about the documentary, which is why you're here today.

but before we do that, I want to talk a little bit about that PSA and why that is so important even now.

Because it it was shot back in the.

94.

Hermanos.

And the last people Barrios would want to battles you calls which will last and they women Latina mother daughter literally can use California New York and they hand those ugly pretty one skinny, one fat, one tall, one Americanos citizen American Americans come together and boom.

As a young actress, I, knew a lot of people in Hollywood and was able to call up friends.

And in 1992, then we were shooting on 16 millimeter.

So I had to raise, I think it was $16,000 in order to shoot, 62nd PSA, which was called Latino Vote 92, which the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project said that it got a million Latinos to register to vote in California that year.

And then in 94, I directed and produced and won Clio Awards for both of them.

the Latino vote.

And I had 108 women on a 62nd spot.

Raquel Welch, Gloria molina, Daphne.

Sonia, Luis Torres, Carmen, Sabata.

Julie, Carmen, Rachel.

Maddie, Nelly, Ada, Jennifer, Antonia.

Sadie.

Renee.

Evelina.

Yvonne.

Diana, Lupe.

Uno.

Camila.

Vanessa.

Nancy.

Esther.

Rose.

Ruby.

Alma, Diane.

Padilla, Paula.

Fischer.

Tobiah.

Patsy.

I felt kind of.

So we have both the 62nd to 32nd and then Rock the vote.

Didn't have any Latino spots and but somebody introduced me to, the head of Rock the vote, and he put it on the master reel.

So it went to the nine states that had the largest Latino population.

So it actually helped move the needle a little bit.

But when I look at it, I just see all of our hairdo from the 90s and all of these friends, and it was a lot of work to write personal letters.

There was no internet back then.

We had to write letters to everybody and inviting them all to be on the spot and to get and, and a director named Louise, I was my mentor, and he helped me with the 92 spot in 94.

I was able to direct myself.

So it's an interesting, little background story.

Well, it's a very interesting background story because we know that Julie Carmen that we've seen on screen for many years doing these incredible roles.

But I think it's really important to tell our audience how you started, because you have such a unique background that made you such a legendary actress and what you're doing even today.

Thank you.

Angela, I always feel invisible and I have such a beginner's mentality.

I approach each day like I'm starting from scratch.

But you know, I grew up in a very loving, supportive family.

I was born in New York and raised in the suburbs of new Jersey.

I went to Essex County Community College, for a semester, and then transferred to the State University of New York.

They had University Without Walls, Empire State College, so I was able to, dance and do choreography.

I was the resident choreographer at Inter Cuban American Theater, when I was 17, 18 years old, and did three plays for them Urawa Espectacular Y and Clan and The Shoemakers Prodigious Wife by Lorca.

because I grew up as a dancer, my grandma used to take me on the Erie Lackawanna train to South Orange, where I studied at the Garden State Ballet School until, he said, well, my feet are much more built for modern dance.

And I started to go into the city every a few times a week on the, you know, the Path train into Manhattan.

We weren't far.

And in those days, my parents really supported that kind of, education.

So I went alone into the city back and forth, in my early teen years and, it and then I started auditioning for off Off Broadway, did a lot of off Off-Broadway, did Broadway with Luis Valdez and Zoot Suit and, you know, I showed up in my Martha Graham outfit because I had studied at Neighborhood Playhouse, and I was in a, you know, black onesie, and everybody else was like an orange spandex with, like, you know, calf warmers matching.

And it was a little intimidating.

And there were hundreds and hundreds of young ladies auditioning for Zoot Suit.

And then Luis Valdez hired me to be in the chorus, and he also hired me to understudy the two female leads.

So I was there.

I was on it.

I was raised with that kind of work ethic as an artist and I think that that has, paid off.

Well.

I would love for you to talk a lot more about that work ethic, because with everything that I've seen you do, you bring that 125 or 80% from the day you, you step foot into a studio.

And so how do you continue to do that every day?

There is something special about Julie that brings that every day.

Oh, gosh.

you know, this is familial.

And one of the things that I'm going to talk about today is what we've identified as nine generations in our lineage of artists, you know, musicians as some.

I'm there only two actors.

I found myself and my great aunt who lived with us for until I was 11.

She was in Max Reinhardt's Midsummer Night's Dream, playing Titania.

And then she also when she emigrated to New York, she was a nurse doing, massage in water with polio survivors.

So, you know, there was that bridge between health there are a lot of doctors.

My brother is an MD and doctor of public health and has run the occupational health clinic for 30 years at a big public hospital.

So we have that in our family all through a lot of obstetricians.

And my niece is a neonatal ICU nurse.

So I think when we go into our family lineage and ask questions of anybody that is in your roots and say, what are the values?

And we talked a lot about certain values and where are the heroes and heroines in our own family lineage and start highlighting those, and you end up feeling like, wow, I'm lucky and I can source all of that.

So I was raised feeling, if we're lucky, we have 100 years on this planet.

What do we want to do to move the needle so that good will prevail?

And so you bring that to every project that you do is how can I, as Julie Carmen, move the needle?

I do I think about that.

You know, some people rely on prayer, some people rely on un, dogma.

I was raised unitary where we kind of find our own values and dogma and, and look for the goodness in people.

We were raised in a very nonviolent household.

We would sit and talk around the dinner table.

Not to say that we didn't rebel.

My brother and I were of the hippie generation, and we lived, you know, 20 minutes from Manhattan.

So we, you know, I got to see Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin and, and all these people at the Fillmore East.

So we had a very, you know, early hard core rock n roll upbringing, too.

But, you know, I think that we were able to sift out what we value, and I just don't want to feel like I'm on this planet to create more scarcity or to sap the resources or to hurt somebody, because then that that sits with us.

It does.

And I mean, what I've seen, even with what you've done, is not only just with your craft, but that you've taken the good from your craft.

And, for example, you produce a public service announcement to tell people get out their vote, be part, make your voice heard.

And is that something that was talked about at the dinner table?

Because I just I love the way that your family instills this into you and your brother.

Absolutely.

Yes.

my mom was an immigrant and she fled war, and she was raised under bombs.

And in her schools were all bombed.

And she'd come up and there would be rubble.

And so there's a kind of transgenerational transmission that happens when people have gone through an early childhood, have gone through adverse childhood experiences.

They now call it aces, adverse childhood experiences.

And you need to mitigate them.

You need to actually be conscious of what those experiences were and do the healing work so that we can move on a little bit lighter and of heart, and not always carry with us a sense of being victimized or hurt or traumatized.

So, yes, my parents were very much against war because, she was raised with it.

My father was in the army, but because he has hay fever, he he stayed stateside and he was a mambo teacher before he got married.

And then he was stationed in Florida.

So I'm sure there was a lot of mumble there, but I grew up doing a lot of mambo in the living room and listening to Celia Cruz and, Montserrat Carvajal and all the great, great musicians.

Wow.

Well, I believe it or not, we're almost done with the segment.

But before we fit, I know it goes by so fast.

Before we finish, there was something unique.

you talked about your grandmother and and how she worked, and she was a dancer and things.

That's very.

When I looked at your grandmother's history.

I see the activism there in your family.

So do you think that that has a lot to do with that?

Julie?

Carmen we see today and why we'll talk more about it in the break, but why you're working on this documentary?

Yeah.

Let me tell you quickly about the documentary that I'm working on.

I as an actress, I've done well on IMDb and the Internet Movie Database.

They say 76 TV shows and and films.

But then in the middle of that, I took 15 years and was a licensed marriage and family therapist working, one on one doing psychotherapy.

I got certified as a yoga therapist, and I'm director of mental health at Loyola marymount University.

Yoga therapy, which is 1000 hours certificate.

And I still teach there just 28 hours a year, and it's spread out.

But I created the first yoga therapy, supervised clinical practicum at Venice Family Clinic, where I was training the certified yoga therapist to work with behavioral health patients.

Then during Covid, that shut down and I said, I'm going to, make a, documentary film.

My brother and I were brought to Cuba for the book launch of this, about my great grandfather, who was a child prodigy pianist.

His aunt was Catalina Baruah, who was the first lady composer, in Cuba and my great great grandfather.

And they were living in the 18 6070s, 80s in Trinidad de Cuba as free blacks because his father emigrated from it, part of San Dominica and the revolution there outlawed enslaving people.

Much earlier.

it was still legal to enslave people until 1886, in Cuba, and because of the sugar trade and the rum trade and Europe and the world was getting addicted to that.

So this musicologist, Isidro Betancourt, republished my great grandfather's compositions.

And, my great grandfather was sent to study, 15 years old, in Leipzig.

And his father played violin at the house.

So he spent 11 years in Europe.

They were the house musician, the 3 or 3 minutes.

Then they called them the Nigger Trio because this was the era era of human zoos in Europe.

So they fled that, that movement and moved to France, where they were the house musicians at the Chateau tional zoo.

Then he went back to Cienfuegos and tried to open a music school, but it was like the Jim Crow era here.

There was still enslavement of people in Cienfuegos because it was a main port.

So, he was only allowed to teach out of his home.

And he was called the father of Cuban lead.

Lead music is classical piano and voice.

And in the documentary that I'm executive producing for director Isidro Betancourt, we are recording the music for the first time and and putting it out into the world because we wanted to.

It's the opposite of erasure.

I was actually googling what's the opposite of erasure?

It's everybody has, everybody dies.

But there's certain people who have accomplished something that we want to highlight, that we want to, keep, keep it alive.

And I feel because of race, it this human history in the 1880s in Europe, they just weren't allowed to to be known as the other romantic classical musicians.

But Afro-Cuban classical music is is a thing.

And we're bringing it back.

Well, you know, that's a perfect way to end our segment, because I want to come back and talk more about this, and I want us to talk about how we can support you in getting this story out.

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Who was leak or humaneness?

In an age when classical music child prodigies were white, he was black.

My great grandfather, Jose Manuel Jimenez Baruah, was born in 1851, in a house that stood here in Trinidad, Cuba.

Lagos studied piano with his aunt, Catalina Baruah, the first woman conductor in Cuba.

He was discovered playing piano at age 12, and this Palacio Cantero, where we filmed his descendants meeting for the first time to hear his music.

And where local musicians and dancers helped us inaugurate this plaza.

Who was he?

The room below.

Welcome back.

You just watch the trailer about Julie's great grandfather.

Let's hear more about his music legacy and how we can support it.

While making an independent documentary.

Nowadays, without a big studio behind you so that you can do it exactly has as the family wants me to do it.

it is challenging because you basically are shooting footage, editing footage on your own dime in the beginning, and then you put it together the way you want.

You make something called a fundraising trailer.

And what I've shown you today is what I'm calling behind the scenes the making of.

And because you see us with masks on.

I was in Cuba twice in 2022, to and right in the center of the pandemic.

And my son got Covid.

My husband got Covid, and the torrential tropical storms came.

So you see us with umbrellas and, everything was was a big challenge.

And right now, living conditions in Cuba, maybe because of the supply chain or because Russia is otherwise involved there.

No one is sending resources.

So we found our long lost relatives and they didn't have band aids.

They didn't have blood pressure medication, they didn't have diabetes medication.

They didn't have the monitors.

They didn't have batteries, they didn't have light bulbs, they don't have running water.

And they live in a cinderblock house, dirt floors.

And you had to go in the back yard, turn on the spigot.

You have to boil that water on on a little burner for 11 people in the household.

You have to boil it just to be able to freeze it, to have drinking water.

So the the and doctors right now are get $100 a month.

So it's across the board.

So the living conditions right now in Cuba are really, really dire.

And we didn't know who our great grandfathers, Cuban family, we couldn't find them.

My brother being a doctor, he went to Cuba a few times.

he's also a conjurer.

And he, he played with us, and he right now plays at Lincoln Center with walking posture.

And he's a top Cuban conjurer on top of.

They call him a doctor de la rumba.

And, but he, my great grandfather, had a child while he was in Cienfuegos named Angel Zambrano, who had five children, and they had children, and we found them in 2022.

And the documentary is about this reunification of the European branch and the Cuban branch.

And some live in Miami, some live in New York, some live here, some live in tour France, Ibiza, Spain, Britannia and Hamburg.

So we're spread all over.

But we brought them all, as many as possible, to this inauguration of the plaza where his house used to stand, and we inaugurated the plaza.

He managed.

And now we're going to, to La Corona and recording the otro Canciones.

These are Cuban lead eight songs.

Incredibly difficult.

Maria Newman and Scott Felt, who, are renowned classical musicians.

Her father won nine Oscars.

Alfred Newman.

they they played it in the in that trailer.

You saw them playing it, and that was just sight reading.

it's very difficult music.

So, we're going to record it at in La Coruna, Spain on April 20th, and we're raising money to help bring this story to light because we feel like Afro-Cuban classical music just hasn't had its day yet.

And it's the opposite of erasure.

So you can help us with, we have a little GoFundMe campaign.

Any amount helps.

And we're just, you know, gathering resources to help pay for the film, the editing and our finishing funds.

And this is definitely going to see see the light.

I even gave these two books to Gustavo Dudamel for his, it may I don't know if his Venezuelan Youth Orchestra can play it, but we we gave him these, and they're their pictures in the trailer of us handing them to the head of, head of production at the LA Phil.

And now that Gustavo is going to be at the New York Philharmonic, we have a conductor in New York, Tanya Leon, who's Afro-Cuban.

She's 80, and she just won the Kennedy Award, and she said she wants to conduct it.

She's a family friend.

So this is I'm putting it out in the universe, and that's why I'm here.

And, you know, they say from from our lips to the universe.

May it happen.

While this document entry is so need it right now.

And thank you so much for coming on the show to talk about the documentary and how we can help you.

But before we in the show, there are two things I would love for you to talk about.

One.

What's next for Julie Carmen as the performer?

Because you have so many things you're doing there.

And then two, I'd love to tap in to your knowledge of how women can stay calm during life's moments.

during the pandemic, I was lucky to book a job on Gray's Anatomy.

I was a triple organ transplant survivor and had a beautiful scenes about, if I die during this surgery, I want to be a tree.

I read that you can plant someone as a tree.

And anyway, that was, I loved working with Debbie Allen, because as a dancer, she has this dance academy, and I just have always looked up to Debbie Allen, and she directed our episode.

And then I did LaDonna and tales of the Walking Dead, where?

Where everybody is dying and walking dead.

And I'm not a Walking Dead watcher much, but my character, who was 80 years old, they gave me a long gray wig.

I still had chickens and food and water, and these two young people on news come into my house and want to take my house, and they watch me die and they bury me in my backyard.

And then I climb out of my own grave, and I basically pick them up and throw them into the ceiling and throw them on the ground and throw them out of my house.

So I do tai chi, and that will segue us to how to stay calm.

Okay, so I use my tai Chi as LaDonna, and anybody who does Tai Chi, they'll see in my movement where I take these people and I just throw them out.

So it's it's like there's a certain move in Tai Chi.

I do the Yang style 108, the B side.

We learn the A side every morning during the Pandem MC.

I did Tai Chi on zoom.

My teacher and his mother both live in, Singapore.

but sometimes spend time in LA.

And so it was on zoom because of, Covid.

And every morning at eight we did the A side 108 moves.

And then we learned that.

And then we did the B side, which is backwards.

It's so good for the brain.

If we each take responsibility for our own anxiety and not displace it.

On to the behavior of a spouse, a sibling or a child, then I feel the household becomes more of a calm sanctuary.

The world out there is tough enough.

We don't need the the home life to be an area of conflict.

We want to respect our siblings so that they grow up and still love us and aren't angry about trauma from childhood.

We want to respect our children so they don't grow up and say, oh, dad or mom did this and that to me.

And it was awful.

So to be able to listen and be supportive so that person can go out into the world and do their best.

I really am a big advocate of kindness and doing one's own inner work.

Well, what a wonderful way to end our conversation.

Julie, thank you so much, not only for gracing the screen and sharing your talent with the world, but you share it to make the world a better place by introducing us to your great grandfather, creating public service announcements.

You are truly a legend and all.

So thank you so much and thank you for spending time with us.

And thank you for joining us on everybody with Angelo Williamson.

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