This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2004, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
It began with two buddies from Brigham Young University making a short film about a geeky high-school student. Now those buddies are up-and-coming Hollywood players with agents, appearances on MTV and other trappings of imminent stardom - all because of a kid named Napoleon Dynamite.
I got a cell phone, because I was sick of people calling my poor wife's cell phone and having to find me somewhere at school, said Jon Heder, who plays the title character in the scruffy comedy Napoleon Dynamite, which opens today at the Broadway Centre Cinemas and Century Cinemas 16.
The story of Napoleon Dynamite begins with its director, Jared Hess, a BYU film student who created a character based on himself and his younger brothers growing up in Preston, Idaho.
"For a long time, I wanted to tell a story about the kid you sat next to in school who you never talked to that much - but you knew he was drawing magical beasts and other exciting things, the 24-year-old Hess said in a recent phone interview. So Hess and his wife, Jerusha, began writing a script featuring a karate-kicking, tetherball-playing, moonboot-wearing dancing machine named Napoleon Dynamite.
Heder, in a separate phone interview, described Napoleon as being the sort of perpetually annoyed adolescent everyone has encountered in high school: They never have a smile, yet they're happy kids, kind of. They think that they're going through hell, when it's just teen-age years and they don't know what they're doing. . . . You give them a compliment and they think you're a dork.
To showcase the character, and to convince investors to make a feature film about him, Hess made a short film, Peluca. Hess auditioned actors to play Napoleon, but never could find anyone who could be authentic and genuine, he said.
Instead, Hess asked Heder, his classmate in BYU's film program, to talk like Napoleon.
He was like, 'All right, let's use Jon,' Heder said.
Peluca, filmed in Preston, played at the 2003 Slamdance Film Festival, and drew enough investors to get a feature made. When the money came through, Hess had only a month of pre-production time before filming. He cast his film from Salt Lake City's talent pool (such as Hess' BYU pal Aaron Ruell as Napoleon's chat-room-obsessed brother, Kip) and with Hollywood casting agents, who brought in such familiar faces as Tina Majorino (the former child actress in Waterworld and Corrina, Corrina) as Napoleon's friend Deb and Haylie Duff (older sister of Hilary Duff) as Preston High's most popular girl, Summer Wheatley.
Dry heaves: Napoleon Dynamite premiered at the 2004 Sundance Film Festival, and the first screening at the Park City Library Center was nerve-racking for Hess.
I was dry-heaving moments before the screening, Hess said. I was expecting to hear crickets, man. . . . After 10 seconds into it, I started to hear the first pockets of laughter. They were laughing at places that I never anticipated. . . .
The point that made me go, 'You know what? I think we're going to sell this movie,' was when the audience began cheering for him, when he was walking down the street in his suit on the way to the dance, Hess said.
Napoleon became one of the hits of Sundance, winning over audiences and scoring a reported $3 million distribution deal with Fox Searchlight. (MTV Films, a division of Paramount Pictures, later signed on to help market the film.)
But not everyone was impressed with Hess' little geek who could. Todd McCarthy, movie critic for the influential Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety, hated the film. Absurdist piece about a rural community of clueless cretins who careen through life like poorly played pinballs represents the definition of the comedy of condescension and ridicule, McCarthy wrote in his review, which ran during the festival.
The movie, McCarthy said from his Southern California home, is incredibly mean-spirited, and you're supposed to be laughing at these people for being so out of it - rather than kind of laughing with them. . . . I felt you were being encouraged to laugh at these completely misfit, socially graceless characters.
Heder believes McCarthy got it wrong, especially in his harsh assessment of Hess' motives. Part of that review was saying Jared was making fun of his characters and didn't like them, Heder said. Jared loves these characters. These are the kind of people he was growing up with. . . . He definitely loves these characters, and puts them in high esteem.
McCarthy said his review got some negative feedback from Sundance organizers. Two days later, he wrote about the movie again, in a column that suggested Napoleon Dynamite could fall victim to the 'Happy, Texas' syndrome - one of those films that everybody goes ga-ga over at the festival, but then it doesn't turn out that way with the public, he said.
More screens: So far, Fox Searchlight's gamble is paying off. After opening in 12 theaters on June 11, and expanding last weekend to 73 screens, the movie has made nearly $1 million at the box office - with much of the country yet to be heard from.
McCarthy said the movie's popularity with audiences, at Sundance and in cities where it has opened, might be kind of an age thing. A friend of mine who saw it recently at a public show in L.A. said it seemed like the kids, from what he could reckon 16 to 25, were just busting a gut laughing, McCarthy said. Anyone older than that was not laughing at all.
Thumbs down: (Some major critics agreed with McCarthy. Roger Ebert, in the Chicago Sun-Times, wrote that Sundance audiences are concerned with being cool, and to sit through this film in depressed silence would not be cool, however urgently it might be appropriate. Lisa Schwarzbaum in Entertainment Weekly commented that affectless laugh-at-the-locals humor has become the easiest way for an indie filmmaker to cash in on his past while preparing for a lucrative Hollywood studio comedy career.)
Since the movie's success at Sundance, Hess and Heder each have signed with Hollywood agents. Heder has moved to Los Angeles to pursue acting and his first love, animation. Hess is working on another screenplay, and he and Jerusha (and their baby son, Elliot) recently bought a house in Salt Lake City; I fly out to L.A. as needed, Hess said. My agent keeps me very connected. (Hess recently directed a series of offbeat ads, introduced in last week's American Film Institute 100 Years . . . 100 Songs special, for the Moviefone listing service.)
Making Napoleon Dynamite even taught Hess a bit of music history.
Hess took his character's name from an eccentric person he met in Chicago, while serving his mission for the Church of Jesus Christ Latter-day Saints. Two days before we wrapped, somebody on the crew said, 'So is this based on Elvis Costello's pseudonym?' I said, 'What?' Hess said. Sure enough, Costello used the name on Blood and Chocolate, the album he released in 1986, when Hess was six years old.
It was like, 'What do you do?' Hess said. It was like, 'Crap, we've shot this whole movie.' There was no turning back.