Summaries

Little Miss Sunshine Finds Its Way

This is the conclusion of a two-part series. In it Ortner reports on a project on the independent film movement that, starting in the late 1980s, has radically changed the American movie environment. In Part I Ortner introduced Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa, independent producers of many quirky films including Election, The Ice Harvest, and 2006’s breakout hit, Little Miss Sunshine, which had not yet opened in theaters.

Sherry B Ortner
UCLA

3/11/06 Interview with Ron Yerxa at Junior’s, a Jewish deli in my neighborhood. Yerxa is a striking looking man of about 60, with a dramatic shock of white hair. He talked about the big success of Little Miss Sunshine at Sundance, said it was given four screenings and got standing ovations. But he was also inclined to be cautious. He said, “A big success at Sundance doesn’t guarantee commercial success. The two previous high sellers at Sundance are films you never heard of.” He invited me to an in-house, cast and crew, screening of the movie a few days hence on the Fox lot.

3/15/06 I finally see Little Miss Sunshine. For those who have not yet seen it, it is a comedy about a family of mostly dysfunctional individuals who manage nonetheless to hang together and support one another. The father of the family, played by Greg Kinnear, is a motivational speaker who has developed a nine-step program for success, but he is failing to get it off the ground. The teen-age son (Paul Dano) is awash in Nietzschean angst and rage and has completely stopped speaking. The wife’s brother (Steve Carell), whom the family has taken in after a suicide attempt, is deeply depressed. Grandpa, played by Alan Arkin, is a junkie and into porn magazines. The only truly functional characters are the mother, played by Toni Collette, and the eight-year-old daughter, played by Abigail Breslin. The daughter, Olive, is adorable but slightly overweight. Nonetheless she gets accepted as a contestant in a child beauty pageant, and the family takes to the road in an old yellow Volkswagen bus to get her there in time.

The film is clearly an indie/studio hybrid. On the one hand, it is very intelligently written, directed and acted. It also has some “edge”—it is full of problematic characters saying and doing problematic things, some of which can make a viewer quite uncomfortable. At the same time it moves closer to the Hollywood end of the spectrum by being a comedy, and especially by violating one of the unwritten taboos of indies: it has a happy ending.

After the screening on the Fox lot comes to a close, everyone involved in its making goes up on the stage. The directors say a few words about the pleasure of working with all concerned on the movie. Berger and Yerxa look a little uncomfortable in the limelight. They are quiet and self-effacing, as producers in such contexts generally seem to be.

4/5/06 Another meeting with Ron Yerxa at Junior’s. The movie has not yet come out in theaters and Yerxa begins with his customary caution: “You still have to wait to see how it plays in the marketplace. Sundance is so rarefied, you can have everyone standing on their seats for five minutes and you still can’t take it as translating into a big commercial hit.”

Mostly he tells me about the long and tortuous route the film took to being made at all. During the production of Election, Berger and Yerxa met a young screenwriter, Michael Arndt, who was working as Matthew Broderick’s assistant. Arndt showed them the script to LMS and they immediately liked it, so they approached a company called Deep River Productions to co-produce the film. They then brought in Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris to co-direct, and the two independent production companies brought the package to Focus Features, the “specialty” division of Universal Studio, which bought the rights to the film.

Things moved slowly at Focus, however, and the project languished there for two years. At that point one of the principals at Deep River, a wealthy investor, Marc Turtletaub, bought the rights to the film back from Focus, and then financed the complete cost of making the film—$7.5 million—from his personal wealth.

(L to R) Producer Ron Yerxa, co-directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, and producer Albert Berger attend the premiere of Little Miss Sunshine July 25, 2006, in New York City. Photo courtesy Evan Agostini/Getty Images

Although in this case the film wound up being financed independently, Berger and Yerxa usually obtain their financing from one or another of the so-called specialty divisions of established Hollywood studios, like Universal Focus. The creation of specialty divisions within the studios was itself an effect of the unexpected commercial success of some independent films starting in the late 1980s. (The watershed film is generally considered to have been Steven Soderbergh’s sex, lies, and videotape which came out in 1989.)

Between 1990 and 1995 all of the major studios formed such divisions. In some cases they created their own units from scratch, as when Twentieth-Century Fox created Fox Searchlight Pictures. But in most cases they bought existing independent production/distribution companies: for example, Sony bought Orion Classics and renamed it Sony Picture Classics; Universal bought October Films and renamed it Focus Features; and Disney bought the company that first demonstrated on a large scale that indies could make money, Miramax.

The creation or acquisition of specialty divisions in the studios represented the other side of the process of opening up what Janet Maslin had called the great untested midrange. Specialty divisions in theory provide a nurturing environment for the same sorts of films that independent filmmakers would make on their own. Berger had said in the earlier interview that he felt this worked out very well. “Ron and I have been very fortunate to work with auteur directors, and in every instance the studio has left them alone. Nobody has ever forced us to do something we didn’t all want to do.” But others are skeptical about the degree to which the specialty divisions can maintain an independent stance. Peter Biskind, in his excellent book on the early years of the indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures, said that specialty divisions “are often treated like orphans, starved and neglected.”

4/20/06 Another interview with Albert Berger, this time in the Beverly Hills office of Bona Fide Productions. I ask whether he and Yerxa ever felt they went more to the commercial side than they had imagined they would. Berger answers, “I don’t think we have yet, we have not faced it.”
It is a tricky question, especially since Little Miss Sunshine will in fact wind up making a lot of money.

One imagines that the purists at the hard end of the indie spectrum might think Berger and Yerxa have indeed have gone over to the dark side. It is the classic bind of any kind of independent art, especially indie rock music: if it makes money, it must be too accessible. And if Little Miss Sunshine is funnier and more cheerful than your average indie film, Berger and Yerxa have certainly made their share of edgier films, including their more frightening comedy, Election, and their disturbing new drama, Little Children.

I ask Berger why some indie films manage to do well commercially. He responds less with an answer than with a metaphor: he talks of certain films “finding their way.” On the one hand they are “personal,” a central term in independent filmmaking, meaning that the film is created to express the personal vision of the filmmaker and not to cater (primarily) to what audiences want. On the other hand one hopes that one’s personal vision will click with audiences to create a film that actually gets wider reception and also makes some money.

Berger talks about an earlier film that he and Yerxa produced, Cold Mountain, as “something that really came together perfectly as a piece of material that found its way out into the world and really hit with a lot of people.” He has the same hopes for Little Miss Sunshine: “It is personal, yet I think it could really resonate in a great way as well.” But he also mentions some of the films that he and Yerxa produced that did not find large audiences, like King of the Hill or Bee Season, of which he said he was very proud nonetheless. But “they didn’t, you know, find their way.”

7/28/06 Little Miss Sunshine premières in New York. With one or two exceptions, the reviews are extremely favorable. Lou Lumenick in the New York Post describes the film as a “smart, dark road comedy” that is “much better acted, written and directed, not to mention funnier, than almost any of the alleged comedies currently in theaters.” I call Berger and Yerxa’s office to see if they have a file of all the reviews for the film, and their assistant directs me to the website Rotten Tomatoes (rottentomatoes.com) where I find 150 reviews. The spread of reviews in New York is mirrored throughout the country. There is a small handful of negative reviews. But the vast majority range from very high praise to over-the-top raves. Many of them called it one of the best pictures of the year.

9/25/06 I ask Ron Yerxa for a “screener” of the film—a DVD that is made available to special parties, for example, film festival judging boards, either before the film is released at all or before it is released on DVD. Yerxa tells me they do not have one, and if they had one they would cut it in half and throw it away, there is that much paranoia about piracy.

Yerxa did however invite me to another screening, this one for BAFTA, the British Academy of Film and Television Arts. The writer, Michael Arndt, and the directors, Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, take questions at the end. Dayton and Faris talk about how, among other things, they worked with the cast to create the powerful ensemble acting that is one of the striking elements of the film. Everyone seems incredibly nice and down to earth, and the place is not reeking of ego. It is one of the pleasures of working on the indie side of Hollywood.

9/29/06 I have been watching the weekly box office chart in Variety. Little Miss Sunshine moved into the top-10 box office earners in the fourth week of its showing, and has remained there for the past eight weeks, a long time by today’s standards (it would remain there for one more week). On this particular day the movie Jackass Number Two had just opened and moved into the number one slot, while LMS was hanging in at number ten.

The bracketing of the two films at the top and the bottom of the list seems like a parable of the Hollywood/indie relationship. The original Jackass had been described in Variety as “quite possibly the most exuberantly distasteful hodgepodge of beery anarchy and death-wishing irresponsibility ever unleashed by a major Hollywood distrib.” Jackass Number Two is described as “a stunningly shameless follow-up” which “plumbs new depths of ingeniously egregious gross-out humor.” Little Miss Sunshine is also found by many to be very funny, and even by quite a few viewers and reviewers to be “gut busting,” but could not otherwise be more different, above all in the way in which it appeals—like most indies—to the audience’s intelligence.

On this same day I open the New York Times and find a spectacular review by AO Scott of Berger and Yerxa’s new film, Little Children. I send them a congratulatory email. Berger invites me to a screening of Little Children at UCLA, where he and Yerxa will be taking questions. The film is another hybrid, with the trappings of a Hollywood movie on one hand—Kate Winslet in the starring role, outstanding production values—but on the other hand telling a socially and emotionally complex story.

Berger and Yerxa talk thoughtfully again about working on the borders between indies and studios. Berger describes their work as making “left-of-center studio films.” Yerxa emphasizes that the question of independence for them has to do with the material: “We look for material that says something interesting about American culture—its problems, its contradictions. We like to take serious ideas but explore them through comedy.”

The moderator, Denise Mann of the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, asks, “We see so many Academy Awards going to indies these days, does this indicate some kind of shift in Hollywood itself?” Berger replies, “People are really looking for other kinds of movies. Hollywood is taking note.”

Little Miss Sunshine eventually garnered 40 industry award nominations (including a Best Picture nomination for an Academy Award), and 35 awards (including a French César for Best Foreign Film, an Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature, and a Producer of the Year Award from the Producers Guild of America).

Sherry B Ortner is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at UCLA. She is currently developing a project on the relationship between Hollywood films and American culture and also publishes regularly in the areas of cultural theory and feminist theory.