Jon Stewart isn’t the only one poking fun at Park Slope. The popular comedic web series “The Slope” — inspired by the businesses and people of the pricey Brooklyn neighborhood — recently wrapped its second season and is now being adapted into a full-length feature.
The movie, which will be filmed in Park Slope and is being made with the London-based Parkville Pictures, is scheduled to go into production next spring, and be completed by late 2013, series creators Desiree Akhavan and Ingrid Jungermann told The Real Deal.
In creating the series, Brooklyn residents Akhavan and Jungermann drew on the family-friendly neighborhood’s most popular (and easily ridiculed) retail venues — the Park Slope Food Co-op, the Tea Lounge and second-hand boutique Beacon’s Closet among them. Footage of these and other local haunts appeared in the series, and will also play a prominent role in the forthcoming movie, they said.
“Park Slope writes its own jokes,” said Jungermann, who is 35 and lives in the neighborhood. “You don’t have to look hard to find things to make fun of.”
The Co-op, for example, recently drew national attention — including a segment on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart” — for its proposed boycott of Israeli food products.
In the Park Slope depicted on “The Slope” — all 16 episodes can be seen at www.theslopeshow.com — characters attend bring-your-own-Swiss-chard parties, confront snooty Beacon’s Closet employees and beg to be allowed into the Co-op.
There’s something about the famously liberal, brownstone neighborhood —where J.Crew president Jenna Lyons recently sold her Garfield Place townhouse for $4 million — that lends itself to mockery, the creators said.
“Just walking around Park Slope, you can see pretty quickly which places are stereotypical Park Slope,” said Akhavan, a 27-year-old Bedford-Stuyvesant resident.
“The Slope” premiered online in August 2011. The show, and spin-off movie, center on the lives of on-again, off-again girlfriends Desiree and Ingrid, the alter egos of the creators, who also write and star in “The Slope.” Both Akhavan and Jungermann are graduate film students of NYU. The women were dating each other when they developed the idea for the series. They have since broken up, but remain friends and collaborators, they said.