Michael Arndt

• 1. Introduction

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  Michael Arndt wrote the first draft of Little Miss Sunshine in three days in May 2000. That is a very short span for a screenplay that would later change his career. Arndt is an American screenwriter. His name now sits beside Pixar sequels, the Hunger Games series and the Star Wars saga. How does a script written so fast survive years of development? What happens when studios keep calling a writer back to fix other people's drafts? And why does his name sometimes vanish from the credits of films he worked on?

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• 2. Road to the Page

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  Michael Arndt was born in McLean, Virginia, but Virginia was only one of his childhood homes. His father worked in the Foreign Service, so the family lived in several countries, including Sri Lanka and India. Back in McLean, Arndt graduated from Langley High School, and he also attended The Potomac School.

  At New York University, Arndt studied at the Tisch School of the Arts and graduated from it. His early jobs were apprenticeships around other people's work. He spent some time as a script reader, and he worked as a personal assistant to the actor Matthew Broderick until late 1999.

  In late 1999, Arndt chose to stop assisting and write screenplays full-time. His filmography also lists him as an assistant on Addicted to Love, from 1997, and on Inspector Gadget, from 1999. The first draft of the script that would make his name arrived within months of that decision.

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• 3. A Hundred Revisions

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  Roughly 100 revisions followed that first draft of Little Miss Sunshine, spread across about a year. Arndt asked friends and family for their reactions along the way, treating them as a testing audience before any studio saw the pages.

  Arndt doubted Hollywood would care. He worried that the story was too small and too independent in spirit to attract real attention. So he considered directing it himself, which he described as "as a no-budget, DV feature".

  Then, in July 2001, the Endeavor Talent Agency read the script, and the plan to shoot it cheaply on digital video fell away.

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• 4. Sold and Fired

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  Producers Albert Berger and Ron Yerxa passed the script to Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris. The pair were directors of commercials and music videos, and they were immediately drawn to the project. Producer Marc Turtletaub brought them on board and bought the script from Arndt for $250,000 on the 21st of December 2001.

  Focus Features took on the project, and it spent roughly three years in various stages of pre-production. During that time, Arndt objected to centering the story on Richard Hoover, the character played in the film by Greg Kinnear. He was fired for it. Less than a month later he was re-hired, because the new writer Focus had brought in left the project.

  About eight weeks before the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on the 20th of January 2006, Arndt wrote its final scene, and it was shot soon after. He kept working on the script through production and into post-production. The film reached theaters on the 18th of August 2006, and prizes followed.

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• 5. Awards Season

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  The Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay went to Arndt for Little Miss Sunshine. He also won the British Academy of Film and Television Arts award in the same category, along with the Writers Guild of America award.

  The Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay recognized the script as a debut. Film critics' groups in Kansas City, Phoenix, Washington D.C. and Dallas-Fort Worth gave him honors, as did the Southeastern Film Critics Association. The Los Angeles Film Critics Association gave him its New Generation Award. The Palm Springs International Film Festival gave him its Chairman's Vanguard Award.

  Nominations came as well, from the Chicago Film Critics Association, the Online Film Critics Society and the London Critics Circle, which considered him for Screenwriter of the Year. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later invited Arndt to join its membership.

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• 6. Pixar Years

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  In 2006, Arndt began working with director Lee Unkrich and other Pixar personnel on the screenplay for Toy Story 3. They started from a treatment by Andrew Stanton, who had co-written the two earlier films in the series.

  The Academy nominated Arndt for Best Adapted Screenplay for that work. His first two screenplays had now earned nominations in both screenwriting categories, and no screenwriter had done that before. Other nominations followed from the Annie Awards, the British Academy, the Hugo Awards, the Saturn Awards and the Bradbury Award.

  Pixar's senior creative team on WALL-E in 2008 included him. He worked uncredited on Up in 2009, and he was on the team for Toy Story 3 in 2010 and Cars 2 in 2011. Outside the studio, other productions were already calling him in to revise scripts that others had started.

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• 7. Franchise Work

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  Men in Black 3 was one of the films where Arndt was one of several screenwriters brought in to revise the script. Revision work of this kind often leaves little trace in the credits.

  The filmography shows two pseudonyms. Oblivion, from 2013 and directed by Joseph Kosinski, credits Michael deBruyn. A Walk in the Woods, from 2015 and directed by Ken Kwapis, credits Rick Kerb. Both names are mainly used for script revisions.

  For The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, in 2013, Arndt wrote the script from Suzanne Collins's best-selling novel. Francis Lawrence directed, and the film drew nominations for the Bradbury Award and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form. Ten years later, Arndt co-wrote the prequel The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes, released in 2023, again under Lawrence's direction.

  Another franchise project, Star Wars, sat between those two Hunger Games credits.

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• 8. A Galaxy Rewritten

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  In November 2012, Arndt was announced as the screenwriter of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. The announcement placed him at the head of one of the most anticipated film projects of the period.

  In October 2013, a second announcement followed. Lawrence Kasdan and director J. J. Abrams were rewriting Arndt's script. The film arrived in 2015 with Abrams directing, and Arndt remains credited as a writer on it.

  The Force Awakens brought him nominations for the Bradbury Award and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation - Long Form. It also brought a win, the Saturn Award for Best Writing.

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