30 Days of Screenplays, Day 26: “Little Miss Sunshine”
Why 30 screenplays in 30 days?
Because whether you are a novice just starting to learn the craft of screenwriting or someone who has been writing for many years, you should be reading scripts.
There is a certain type of knowledge and understanding about screenwriting you can only get from reading scripts, giving you an innate sense of pace, feel, tone, style, how to approach writing scenes, how create flow, and so forth.
So each day this month, I will provide background on and access to a notable movie script.
Today is Day 26 and the featured screenplay is for the 2006 movie Little Miss Sunshine. You may read the screenplay here.
Background: Written by Michael Arndt.
Plot summary: A family determined to get their young daughter into the finals of a beauty pageant take a cross-country trip in their VW bus.
Tagline: Everyone just pretend to be normal
Awards: Nominated for 4 Academy Awards, winning 3 including Best Writing, Original Screenplay.
Trivia: Michael Arndt quit his job as Matthew Broderick’s assistant to write Little Miss Sunshine.
Here is how Arndt described the writing of the screenplay and what the movie means to him:
On Tuesday, May 23, 2000, at 4:27 p.m., I sat down to write LMS [Little Miss Sunshine]. I wrote twelve pages the first day, thirty-seven pages the second, and — pulling an all-nighter — fifty-four pages on the third day. I finished the first draft at 9:56 a.m. on Friday, May 26.
Then I spent a year rewriting it.
On July 29, 2001 — a Sunday — I heard from Tom Strickler.
On December 21, 2001 — the Friday before the holidays — the script was purchased by producer Marc Turtletaub.
Principal photography began on June 6, 2005, and ended — after thirty shooting days — on July 18.
The film had its world premiere on January 20, 2006, at Sundance, and was bought by Fox Searchlight the next day.
Little Miss Sunshine opened in theaters on July 26, 2006.
As of this writing (November 6, 2006), it has grossed $75 million worldwide.
So the film has “succeeded,” and I have (temporarily, at least) escaped from the jaws of failure.
In many ways, though, my life has remained much as it was in 2000. I still rent the same one-bedroom walk-up in Brooklyn, and I still spend my days sitting in a chair and staring at a computer (though the chair is more comfortable and the computer is nicer). The main difference is I don’t worry about having to get a day job. (Not yet, anyway).
A number of people who know my story have been quick to seize upon it as a rewards-of-virtue narrative — all that effort and persistence, they tell me, was bound to pay off. In this view of the world, character is destiny and success is the logical — almost inevitable — consequence of hard work, patience, and a shrewdly applied intelligence.
That is not how I see things.
From my perspective, the difference between success and failure was razor-thin and depended — to a terrifying degree — upon chance, serendipity, and all manner of things beyond my control. A thousand things could have gone wrong in the five years it took to turn Little Miss Sunshine into a movie, any one of which could have destroyed the project.
Yet at every turn the script was met with good fortune; every setback was revealed to be a blessing in disguise. I was lucky to stumble upon the right agents, who got it to the right producers, who chose the right directors, who cast (perfectly) the right actor and hired the right crew. A single misstep in this concatenation and the film would have been made badly or, more likely, not at all.
Which brings me — in a roundabout way — to Richard Hoover, Winning and Losing, and the underlying concerns of Little Miss Sunshine.
All of us lead two lives — our public lives, which are visible to others, and our private lives, which are not. Richard is obsessed with the values of public life — status, rank, “success.” His view of the world, divided into Winners and Losers, judges everyone — including himself — accordingly. These values have become seemingly inescapable — including himself — accordingly. These values have become seemingly inescapable in our media-saturated culture — from American Idol, to professional sports, to the weekend box office reports. Everything, it seems, has become a contest.
The problem with this worldview is that it neglects and devalues the realm of the private — family, friendship, romance, childhood, pleasure, imagination, and the concerns of the spirit. Our private lives — invisible to the outside world — tend to be far richer and more gratifying than the rewards of public life. We would do well, as poets and philosophers have long advised, to turn away from the bustle of the world and cultivate the gardens of our souls.
And yet — as I learned in July 2001 — it is extremely difficult to set aside the judgments of the world and march to your own drummer. To “do what you love and fuck the rest,” as Dwayne says. That is a hard path, and not often one that leads to happiness or fulfillment (see van Gogh’s letters). I wouldn’t recommend it to everyone.
What I would recommend — and this is the central hope of the movie — is that we make an effort to judge our lives and the lives of others according to our own criteria, distinct from the facile and shallow judgments of the marketplace.
James Joyce once said we should treat both success and failure as the impostors they are. I would humbly concur — the real substance of life is elsewhere.
This script is distinctive in that it’s arguable there are several Protagonists and even several different types of Protagonists. Generally, a Protagonist is determined by one or more of the following aspects:
- The main character in the story.
- The character whose goal defines the end point of the Plotline.
- The character who goes through the most dramatic transformation.
Let’s go through the cast of characters one by one to see which ones can be typified as a Protagonist:
Grandpa Edwin Hoover (Alan Arkin): He is secondary character, one with the least screen time, dies midway through the story, goes through no psychological transformation, starting the story as an irascible, foul-mouthed, drug snorting old fart and ending the story an irascible, foul-mouthed, drug snorting old fart — albeit a dead one. Per character archetypes, I’d call him a Trickster.
Sheryl Hoover (Toni Collette): Is she the story’s main character? No. Do we experience the story primarily through her? No. Does she go through any sort of significant transformation? No. Christina in comments said this of Sheryl: “She just wants everyone to get along, to have an intact family. She has the smallest arc, but is the glue for the story.” I think that’s right, definitely the character who manages to wrangle together this unwieldy mess of a family time after time. As the “glue,” she feels to me like the face of the family — and as the story is so much about this group of people, as flawed as they are, coming together as a family, I think she functions as an Attractor character.
Abigail Breslin (Olive Hooper): This is where things get interesting. Is Olive the main character in the story? Well, the movie is titled Little Miss Sunshine, which refers to the contest Olive dreams about winning. The first character we see in the movie is Olive. The entire road trip is all about transporting Olive to Redondo Beach, CA for her to participate in the LMS competition. But is she the main character in the story? Not so sure. That said it is her goal which provides the end point of the plotline — the LMS contest. But does she go through a transformation? I’d argue, no. She does get an eyeful of the other kids at the LMS competition and would evidently have seen enough to draw a distinction between herself, her body type, her interests, and such as compared to the others, but apart from a moment where Sheryl tells Olive she does not have to follow through with the talent part of the show, and Olive ponders that possibility for several seconds — perhaps thinking about the other girls and how Olive might not really fit in with them — Olive is stoutly resolute in going after her goal. So in one way, Olive could be considered a Protagonist: Her goal creates the end point of the main plot. However I think she has a different function — which I’ll get to later.
That leaves us with three other primary characters, each of whom does go through a transformation:
Frank Ginsberg (Steve Carell): The second ranked Proust scholar in the world whose life crumbles when a young student he was in love with opts to become lovers with Frank’s academic rival, leading to Frank’s suicide attempt. Clear Disunity state. Is he the story’s main character? No. Does his goal define the plot? No, in fact, it’s not clear what his goal is at all. But he does go through a transformation — from depressed to an engaged, enlivened human being. How? Through the ‘magic’ of all the shit he and his travel mates endure on the road trip from hell. In that process, he becomes a part of his extended family, especially by bonding with his nephew Dwayne.
Dwayne (Paul Dano): A young man who has taken a vow of silence and is obsessively working out in order to go to flight school and become a pilot. Plus he hates his family. Again Disunity state. And how symbolic is his desire to be a pilot, akin in a way to Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz, looking to fly away ‘over the rainbow,’ go far, far away from his ‘troubles’ and the family he thinks he despises. Does his goal define the plot? No, in fact his goal goes up in smoke when he discovers he’s color blind. But transform he does — and how? Again the ‘magic’ of all the crap he goes through on the trip. He, too, comes to accept the family. And he also benefits by bonding with Frank.
There is a great scene between these two characters — as chaos moves closer inside the hotel where the LMS contest is going on, Frank and Dwayne stand together on a pier over the Pacific Ocean, and this is their interchange, Dwayne wishing he could sleep until he turned 18 and Frank responding by talking about Marcel Proust.
In this wonderful interaction scene, each character acts as a mentor to the other with the two of them expressing one side of life’s coin: Suffering can be the best time of your life (negative) and You do what you love and fuck the rest (positive).
Because each of these characters goes from a Disunity state to a place where they at least have a more positive / Unity place in sight, their respective transformations and key positions in the script suggests they can be looked at as Protagonists.
But in my view, the main Protagonist is:
Richard Hoover (Greg Kinnear): It’s his character which carries the main thematic point of the story, a person who starts off with a skewed view of what success means, one based on a — what proves to be — failed belief that we can somehow control fate, even perhaps force success to come to us by following his beloved 9 principles. He is so full of his own B.S. at the beginning of the story, he is incapable of seeing how much of a loser he is — the epitome of Disunity.
It’s Richard who, more than anyone else, experiences over and over again, the harshest point of the reality of his utterly screwed up life — from his own father, who dies of an overdose, to suicidal brother-in-law, Dwayne who appears to absolutely loathe Frank, a wife who is struggling to support Richard emotionally, even as the chances for his book getting published crashes and burns. Oh, and the family may have to declare bankruptcy. And then that whole thing with the barely functioning car (an obvious metaphor of the family).
Once on the scene at the LMS contest, while Frank and Dwayne are outside waxing philosophical, Richard is left to watch — in horror — the spectacle of the competition, one gross little tarted up young girl after another, each one symbolic of what contemporary America would call a ‘success’. And in the face of the thin veneer of ‘beauty’ and ‘talent,’ what Richard is forced to see is that everything he’s been dreaming about is one big huge crock. It’s only then that he’s able to step outside himself enough to go backstage and say that Olive should not do the talent performance — this going directly opposite the pledge he extracts from Olive at the very end of Act One, where Olive has to be determined to win the competition in order for the family to go on the trip.
Then what happens? Olive’s performance. An unmitigated disaster. Faced with ushering his daughter off-stage per the contest’s President, Richard does something really, really stupid: He starts to dance. He allies himself with Olive on stage. It’s reminiscent of that wonderful scene at the end of Zorba the Greek, where Basil (Alan Bates), the repressed, bookish Englishman, confronted with having lost everything he owns, asks Zorba (Anthony Quinn) to teach him to dance. Sometimes in the face of life’s absurdity, the only thing to do is dance.
And that’s what the entire Hoover family does — dance. Which is why I think Olive’s main function is as a Mentor. Because even though she is clearly not a ‘winner’ by the standards of the LMS competition, she is committed to be who she is. And when the rest of the Hoover family dances with her onstage, it’s like they embrace that mantra — especially important for Richard, who gets a taste of what success is, as a flawed but loving father, a member of a dysfunctional but supportive family, even in the face of life’s crap.
So it feels to me like this is a story with 3 transforming Protagonists and 1 goal Protagonist.
But I’m pretty sure screenwriter Michael Arndt never once thought of his story in those terms. It strikes me that his process was to immerse himself in that story world and with those characters, up they sprang as full-blown individuals, and he followed into and through their journeys.
What a wonderful script with such interesting and diverse characters, strong use of themes and metaphors, and beautifully made as a movie.
What’s your take on Little Miss Sunshine? Stop by comments and post your thoughts.
To see all of the posts in the 30 Days of Screenplays series, go here.
This series and use of screenplays is for educational purposes only!
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