When sibling filmmakers Justen and Julien Turner sent in their comedy pilot “FreeLance” for consideration at the Sundance Film Festival last year, the duo thought they had everything in order. Everything except one crucial detail.
“It’s a funny story,” Justen told HuffPost. “When we submitted, we didn’t have any of our personal or contact information on the submission.”
Fairly new to the process, the brothers weren’t entirely sure how representatives from the renowned film festival would get in touch if their scripted project was selected. Justen said he turned to Reddit for guidance (“It was like, they call you”) and even double-checked to make sure everything on their cold submission appeared complete. Still, that missing piece of information nearly derailed their golden opportunity. Fortunately, the duo received a phone call one day in late November — though it wasn’t from the festival just yet.
“They ended up reaching out to our mom first, because her number is on our website, and she called us,” Justen explained. “She was like, ’Call this number right now, it’s Sundance.’”
“At the time, Justen and I were on the phone when our mom told us to call those people back,” added his older brother, Julien. “We were like, ’Oh, we’re about to ring them in right now.’ We called them back, merged the call and one of the programmers picked up and said, ’We just wanted to let you know that we want [‘FreeLance’] to premiere at Sundance.’”
