‘Sunshine’ garners record $10.5 million
PARK CITY, Utah – The weather was bitterly cold, the hour was late and there wasn’t a parking spot to be found.
Still, the night belonged to “Little Miss Sunshine,” and nothing could keep the parade of top independent studio executives away from the Riverhorse Cafe on Friday.
They were there to woo filmmakers Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, the pair behind Sundance Film Festival’s first clear sensation.
By the end of a marathon and often combative negotiating session that lasted until 7:30 a.m. Saturday, Fox Searchlight had won – buying “Little Miss Sunshine” for $10.5 million, the biggest deal for a single film in the festival’s history. (The previous high point was $10.25 million, set by 1999’s “Happy, Texas.”)
For the money, Fox Searchlight got what it believes could be its next “Garden State” or “Napoleon Dynamite” – an inventive comedy that could appeal well beyond the art-house circuit.
Fox Searchlight is so confident in the film’s prospects that it plans to release “Little Miss Sunshine” in midsummer, up against the sequel to “X-Men,” among others.
“It’s an incredibly appealing movie with a big heart and big comic set pieces,” says Peter Rice, one of three Fox Searchlight executives who were up all night hammering out the deal. “It’s both that funny and delivers real emotional moments.”
The film took five years to make, and it came together only after one of its producers, Marc Turtletaub, decided to cover the $8 million budget himself.
The production suffered nearly as many detours as does the film’s eccentric family, which is racing from New Mexico to Southern California so that a 7-year-old girl named Olive can enter a beauty pageant.
The movie begins after the failed suicide attempt of Proust scholar Frank (Steve Carell), who moves in with his sister Sheryl (Toni Collette) and her family as part of his recovery from depression.
Sheryl is married to third-rate motivational speaker Richard (Greg Kinnear), with whom she is raising morose, uncommunicative teenage son Dwayne (Paul Dano) and pudgy, awkward but seemingly unstoppable daughter Olive (Abigail Breslin).
With their money running low, but desperate to make the beauty pageant’s deadline, the family packs into its unreliable Volkswagen bus – with its bawdy, drug-addled but doting grandpa (Alan Arkin) riding in the back.
For all of its charm, “Little Miss Sunshine” languished after producers Turtletaub and David T. Friendly bought its script in 2001 for $150,000.
After many other studios passed, “Little Miss Sunshine” eventually was sold to USA Films. But within days of the 2002 deal, USA Films was merged with the production and sales company Good Machine to become Focus Features.
Then, after more than two years developing the movie, Focus dropped the project.
Turtletaub had made a fortune through his lending company, the Money Store, and he decided to pay for the production himself. In 27 busy days of shooting last summer, “Little Miss Sunshine” was made.
“There’s an old saw that making movies is about overcoming obstacles,” says Friendly. “And sometimes, the best things happen after the longest fight.”