Little Miss Sunshine
Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American tragicomedy film directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris from a screenplay written by Michael Arndt. The film stars an ensemble cast consisting of Greg Kinnear, Steve Carell, Toni Collette, Paul Dano, Abigail Breslin, and Alan Arkin, all of whom play members of a dysfunctional family taking the youngest to compete in a child beauty pageant. Breslin's breakout performance in the film earned her an Academy Award nomination. The road film tackles themes of family, depression, self-acceptance, and finding meaning in absurd conditions. It was produced by Big Beach Films on a budget of US$8 million. Filming began on June 6, 2005, and took place over 30 days in Arizona and Southern California.
The film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2006, and its distribution rights were bought by Fox Searchlight Pictures for one of the biggest deals made in the history of the festival. The film had a limited release in the United States on July 26, 2006, and expanded to a wider release starting on August 18.
Little Miss Sunshine was a box office success, earning $101 million. It garnered critical praise for its performances, as well as for its directing, screenplay and humor. It earned four nominations at the 79th Academy Awards, including Best Picture. Arndt and Arkin won Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, respectively, and Breslin was nominated for Best Supporting Actress. It also won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Feature and the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, and received numerous other accolades.
Plot
Sheryl Hoover is a stressed mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her husband Richard is an aspiring motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's Nietzsche-admiring teenage son from a previous marriage, has taken a vow of silence until he accomplishes his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Sheryl's older brother Frank, a gay scholar of Proust, is living with the family after attempting suicide. Richard's profane father Edwin is also living with the family after being evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin. Olive, Richard and Sheryl's 7-year-old daughter, is an aspiring beauty queen coached by Edwin.Olive learns she has qualified for the "Little Miss Sunshine" beauty pageant being held in Redondo Beach, California, in two days. Richard, Sheryl, and Edwin want to support her, and Frank and Dwayne cannot be left alone, so the whole family attends. Due to financial constraints, they go on an road trip in their yellow Volkswagen van. Family tensions play out along the way, amidst the aging van's mechanical problems. When the van's clutch breaks early on, the only way to drive it is to push it fast enough for the driver to put it into gear, then jump in the open side door. Later, the van's horn starts honking by itself, and at one point the side door falls off.
Throughout the trip, the family suffers numerous personal setbacks and discovers their need for each other's support. Richard loses an important contract that would have jump-started his motivational business. Frank embarrassingly encounters the ex-boyfriend who, in leaving him for an academic rival, had prompted his suicide attempt. Edwin fatally overdoses on heroin. When the grief counselor refuses to let the family leave his corpse at the hospital while they go to the pageant, they smuggle it into the van, almost getting caught when a police officer pulls them over because of the honking horn. During the final leg of the trip, Dwayne discovers he is color blind, meaning he cannot become a pilot. This revelation prompts him to finally break his silence and shout his disdain for his family, though he apologizes after Olive calms him with a gentle hug.
After a frantic race against the clock, the family arrives at the pageant hotel. Sheryl prepares Olive for her performance while Richard makes arrangements for Edwin's body. Meanwhile Frank counsels Dwayne about dealing with life. The pageant begins, and the other contestants are slim, sexualized pre-teens who perform elaborate dance numbers with great panache. Fearing that the amateur Olive will be laughed at, Richard and Dwayne try to stop her from performing, but Sheryl insists that they "let Olive be Olive", and she goes on stage.
The hitherto-unseen dance routine Edwin had taught Olive is revealed to be a striptease performed to the Rocasound remix of Rick James' "Super Freak". Olive is oblivious to the subtext of the routine, but it horrifies and angers most of the audience, and the pageant organizer demands she be removed from the stage. Richard physically prevents this, and the family all join Olive on stage, dancing alongside her to show their support.
The family is later released from the hotel's security office on the condition that Olive never enter a beauty pageant in California again. Piling into the van with the horn still honking, they begin their trip home to Albuquerque.
Cast
Production
Casting
When choosing the cast for the film, directors Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris were assisted by casting directors Kim Davis and Justine Baddeley who had worked with them on previous music videos. Davis and Baddeley traveled to "every English-speaking country" to search for the actress to portray Olive Hoover, and they finally chose actress Abigail Breslin through an audition when she was six. Paul Dano was cast as Dwayne two years before production began and in preparation for portraying his character, spent a few days taking his own vow of silence.The role of Frank, the suicidal Proust scholar, was originally written for Bill Murray, and there was also studio pressure for Robin Williams. The directing duo chose Steve Carell for the role a few months before filming began, and in an interview revealed, "When we met with Steve Carell, we didn't know he could do this based upon what he had done. But when we met with him and talked to him about the character, the tone of the movie and the way we were approaching it, he was right on the same page with us." Although known to Comedy Central viewers for many years as a correspondent on the satirical news program The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, at the time Carell was cast he was relatively unknown in Hollywood, and producers of the film were worried that he was not a big enough star and did not have much acting experience.
Script and development
The script was written by Michael Arndt and was originally about an East Coast road trip from Maryland to Florida, but was shifted to a journey from New Mexico to California because of budget issues. Arndt started the script on May 23, 2000, and completed the first rough draft by May 26. He had initially planned on shooting the film himself by raising several thousand dollars and using a camcorder. Instead, he gave the screenplay to producers Ron Yerxa and Albert Berger who teamed up with Deep River Productions to find a potential director. Arndt included the character Stan Grossman as a tribute to the film Fargo.The producers met directors Dayton and Faris while producing Election and in turn gave the script to them to read in 2001. The directors commented later on the script stating: "This film really struck a chord. We felt like it was written for us." The script was purchased from first-time screenwriter Arndt for $250,000 by Marc Turtletaub, one of the film's producers, on December 21, 2001. Yerxa and Berger remained as producers as they were responsible for finding the directors and cinematographer, assisting in the ending re-shoot, and helping bring the film to the Sundance Film Festival.
The film was pitched to several studios, and the only interested studio was Focus Features, who wanted to film it in Canada. After the studio attempted to have the film be centered on the character Richard Hoover, and Arndt disagreed, he was fired and replaced by another writer. The new writer added several scenes, including Richard's confrontation with the character who dismisses his motivational technique business. A corporate change brought in a new studio head and Arndt was rehired when the new writer left after four weeks of rewriting the script. After two years of pre-production, Focus Features dropped the film in August 2004. Marc Turtletaub paid $400,000 to Focus Features to buy back the rights to the film and for development costs. He also paid for the $8 million budget, allowing Little Miss Sunshine to then be filmed.
Filming
began on June 6, 2005. Filming took place over 30 days in Arizona and southern California, with scenes shot in keeping with the chronological order of the script. Arndt re-wrote the ending to the film six weeks before the film's release at the Sundance Film Festival, and this was filmed in December 2005. The film was dedicated to Rebecca Annitto, the niece of producer Peter Saraf and an extra in scenes set in the diner and the convenience store, who was killed in a car accident on September 14, 2005.Volkswagen T2 Microbus
When writing the script, Arndt chose the Volkswagen T2 Microbus to use for the road trip based on his experience with the vehicle and its practicality for filming: "I remember thinking, it's a road trip, what vehicle are you going to put them in? And VW bus just seems logical, just because you have these high ceilings and these clean sight lines where you can put the camera. In the front windshield looking back and seeing everybody." Five VW Microbuses were used for the family car as some were modified for different filming techniques. Three of the vans had engines, and the two without were mounted on trailers. During pre-production, the cinematographer used a basic video camera and set it up at angles inside the van to determine the best locations to shoot from during filming. Many of the problems associated with the van that were included in the plot, were based on similar problems that writer Arndt experienced during a childhood trip that involved the same type of vehicle.In an interview, actor Greg Kinnear jokingly described how the scenes were filmed when he was driving: "I was going like 50 miles an hour in this '71 VW van that doesn't have side airbags. Basically, you'd wait for this huge camera truck to come whizzing in front of us with the camera. 'Okay, go!' I mean, it was insanity; it's the most dangerous movie I've ever made." While filming the scenes in the van, the actors would at times remain in the vehicle for three or four hours a day. For scenes in which Alan Arkin's character was swearing excessively, Breslin had her headphones on and could not hear the dialogue, just like her character in the film. Only when she saw the film did she know what was being said. On July 25, 2006, Fox Searchlight Pictures invited VW bus owners to a screening at Vineland Drive-In theater in Industry, California. Over 60 of the vans were present at the screening.