Hollywood Tales

“Part of the romance of movies — one of the elemental myths of show biz — is their ability to transform lives seemingly overnight (“You’re going out there a nobody, kid, but you’re coming back a star!”). That has been, to some degree, my story: I wrote Little Miss Sunshine when I was unemployed, living in a small one-bedroom walk-up in Brooklyn, and slowly burning through my hard-earned savings. I had quit my job and given myself a year off, hoping to write a salable script in that time. It was the financial equivalent of jumping off a cliff and trying to build an airplane on the way down. I had never made a dime from creative writing. I had no credits, no agent, no publishing history.

I was — in every external — a complete and total loser.

What I did have, though, was an enormous sense of happiness and purpose (finally, I could write full-time!) and a boundless, delusional self-confidence. I spent a year writing and, with my bank balance dipping into negative territory, gave one of my scripts, Little Miss Sunshine, to my friend Karyn Kusama, who had just directed the film Girlfight. She read the script, liked it, and passed it along to her agent, Tom Strickler of the Endeavor Agency.

I waited. Days turned into weeks. My boundless and delusional confidence began to falter. I started, for the first time, to contemplate the prospect of failure. I had worked very hard, for many years, trying to learn the craft of screenwriting, and had written what I felt was the best script I could write. What if nothing came of it?

For one unhappy week, I considered whether I should do something else with my life. What I was trying to do — write an original screenplay that would be bought and turned into a movie — suddenly seemed impossible. It would never happen. Not, at least, to me.

In the end, I decided to forge ahead — I’d get another day job and continue writing. I’d try to shoot Little Miss Sunshine as a no-budget DV feature. I loved movies, and there was nothing else I wanted to do with my life. Still, the sting of failure was was painful as anything I’d ever experienced, and it left me, I would say, permanently humbled.

The story, of course, has a happy ending. At the end of that week I got a message on my machine from Tom saying he’d read my script and ‘really liked it, actually.’ Five months later, the script sold for more money that I’d made in the rest of my life combined.”

 — Michael Arndt, “Little Miss Sunshine: Screenplay and Notes by Michael Arndt,” PP. ix-x.

Comment Archive