When Obvious Child premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival, it heralded the beginnings of three extremely promising film careers. Jenny Slate, though she’d spent one season as a Saturday Night Live cast member, was still mostly known as a live performer in New York City. It was at one such performance that Gillian Robespierre, an aspiring filmmaker working as a production assistant, approached her about playing the lead in a short film. When it came time to adapt that short film into a feature, Elisabeth Holm, a film program director at Kickstarter, joined the team as a producer. The resulting film received overwhelmingly positive reviews, and led to a spate of creative opportunities for all three women. That team is now coming back together again for another film, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Landline, a comedy co-written by Robespierre and Holm, will send Slate back to the Manhattan of 1995, when cell phones were non-existent and smoking indoors was de rigueur, to tell the story of “three women in one family having lots of sex, drugs, and Japanese food.” She’ll be joined by John Turturro (Fading Gigolo) and Edie Falco (Nurse Jackie) as her parents, novice actor Abby Quinn (The Sisterhood Of Night) as her younger sister, and Jay Duplass (Transparent) as somebody or other. Robespierre and Holm will once again direct and produce respectively.
In addition to Landline, Robespierre and Holm are developing a comedy pilot for FX starring Slate and Ari Graynor (Bad Teacher) as two New York filmmakers whose relationship evolves over the course of a cross-country road trip.