Anthropology News • October 2007 22 F IELD NOTES Notes From Hollywood SHERRY B ORTNER UCLA 3/11/06 Interview with Ron Yerxa at Junior’s, a Jewish deli in my neighborhood. Yerxa is a strik- ing looking man of about 60, with a dramatic shock of white hair. He talked about the big success of Lit- tle 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 suc- cess. 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 nonethe- less 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 Ni- etzschean angst and rage and has completely stopped speaking. The wife’s brother (Steve Carell), whom the family has taken in after a sui- cide attempt, is deeply depressed. Grandpa, played by Alan Arkin, is a junkie and into porn magazines. The only truly functional char- acters 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 pag- eant, 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/stu- dio hybrid. On the one hand, it is very intelligently written, direct- ed and acted. It also has some “edge”—it is full of problematic characters saying and doing prob- lematic things, some of which can make a viewer quite uncomfort- able. 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. took to being made at all. During the production of Election, Berger and Yerxa met a young screenwrit- er, Michael Arndt, who was work- ing as Matthew Broderick’s assist- ant. 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 lan- guished 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 mak- ing the film—$7.5 million—from his personal wealth. Although in this case the film wound up being financed inde- pendently, Berger and Yerxa usu- ally 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 unexpect- ed 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 divi- sions. In some cases they created their own units from scratch, as when Twentieth-Century Fox cre- ated Fox Searchlight Pictures. But in most cases they bought exist- ing independent production/dis- tribution 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 studi- os represented the other side of the process of opening up what Janet Maslin had called the great untested midrange. Specialty divi- sions in theory provide a nurturing environment for the same sorts of films that independent film- makers would make on their own. Berger had said in the earlier inter- view that he felt this worked out FIELD NOTES 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 lit- tle uncomfortable in the limelight. They are quiet and self-effacing, as producers in such contexts gener- ally 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 custom- ary caution: “You still have to wait to see how it plays in the market- place. 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 FIELD NOTES 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. Little Miss Sunshine Finds Its Way (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