Chef and author Alice Waters is the owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant and founder of the Edible Schoolyard program. Tom Luddy, film producer and codirector of the Telluride Film Festival, was director of PFA from 1975 to 1979.

Pagnol was a schoolteacher before writing his knowing satire, Topaze, and Merlusse benefits as much from that experience as from his having also been, inevitably, a schoolboy. It is Pagnol's own Zero for Conduct, shot in a boarding school using school kids as actors. It tells of a bearded, one-eyed teacher who is nicknamed Merlusse (codfish) by the kids who fear and revile him. As always with Pagnol, the film is a delicate balance of parched realism and profound humanity, giving no slack to melodrama and much to argot and observation. Variety, in 1936, raved: “Curious and deeply interesting relation of boy and teacher, in a dozen phases, is masterfully painted throughout . . . He's gone deep into the feelings of schoolboys."