Little Miss Sunshine

Little Miss Sunshine is a 2006 American tragicomedy road film and the feature film directorial debut of the husband–wife team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. The screenplay was written by first-time writer 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 (Breslin) to compete in a child beauty pageant. 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, and was praised mainly for the performances (particularly towards Breslin and Arkin), direction, screenplay and humor. The film garnered 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 received numerous other accolades. The film also won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture. Plot Sheryl Hoover is an overworked mother of two living in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her gay brother, Frank, an unemployed scholar of Proust, is temporarily living with the family after having attempted suicide. Sheryl's husband Richard is striving to build a career as a motivational speaker and life coach. Dwayne, Sheryl's Nietzsche-reading teenage son from a previous marriage, has taken a vow of silence until he can accomplish his dream of becoming a fighter pilot. Richard's foul-mouthed father, Edwin, lives with the family after being evicted from a retirement home for snorting heroin. Olive, the daughter of Richard and Sheryl and the youngest of the Hoover family, is an aspiring beauty queen who is coached by Edwin.