Amazon and Jill Soloway team up again for female rodeo series
David Farnor | On 09, Mar 2017
Amazon and Jill Soloway are teaming up once again to develop a new series about an all-female rodeo.
Soloway, who was previously best known for Six Feet Under, struck gold with Amazon original series Transparent, which follows the identity struggles of a transgender parent and her family. After winning several Golden Globes, Emmys and a DGA award for the ongoing show, Soloway and Amazon reunited for a new series, I Love Dick, which premieres this year on the streaming service. Before that has even been released, though, the pair have announced another project: a limited series about an all-girl rodeo.
Written by Cassie Pappas (Tyrant), the drama is set in 1940s Texas, where women find themselves left behind by the men going to fight World War II. And so they form the first all-female rodeo, as the official description puts it, “riding to unprecedented fame and fortune — as long as they can hold on”.
Under an overall deal at Amazon Studios, Andrea Sperling’s Topple Productions will exec produce the show alongside Soloway.
“Movies about people, human stories, they simply aren’t told on the big screen anymore,” Soloway told us in an interview about Transparent Season 1 and the freedom and backing offered by Amazon Studios. “You can find them, but they are very rare and that whole ethos, the ethos of the independent filmmaker of the late 60s, 70s, Scorsese, Cassevetes, Altman, people who were making these films about what it means to be alive, Woody Allen? Thank god for streaming television and thank god for the cult of the auteur because it’s given people a place to go.”
“Even 10 years ago, we’d have had to raise money for and make an indie film, or do this in grad school, as part of a museum show documenting the lives of others,” she added. “It’s such personal work that inspires us to make art, make art, make art. I think it feels like Amazon is saying: ‘Go, make your thing.'”