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Steve Mason is a Los Angeles-based talk show host for 710 ESPN Radio. He has previously hosted the nationally-syndicated "The Late, Late Radio Show with Tom Snyder & Steve Mason" for CBS Radio and worked the last five Olympic Games for NBC and Westwood One Radio Network. He is also President of Flagship Theatres which owns the University Village Theatres near downtown Los Angeles (www.FlagshipMovies.com) and Cinemas Palme d'Or in Palm Desert, California (www.ThePalme.com).

Crockett and Tubbs Set To Top Captain Jack

With diverse critical notices ranging from "brutally efficient" to "crummy, pointless and brain-dead", it's safe to say that Miami Vice (Universal) will not go down as one of Michael Mann's best films. Heat and The Insider remain my favorites (I wasn't as wowed by 2004's Collateral), but the film adaptation of his '80s TV breakthrough is sure to be, at worst, interesting.

Mann is famous for his attention to detail. Heat co-star Amy Brenneman told me a remarkable story a few years back. While shooting The Insider in Los Angeles, there was a scene set in Louisville that required a snack cake. Hostess cup cakes and Ding Dongs, etc. are available most everywhere, and the brand of snack cake was completely incidental to the scene. But, in Louisville, the Wigand family would have had the Tasty Cakes brand. Mann shut down the set for a day in order to have Tasty Cakes flown in for the scene.

It sounds like Mann had problems larger than snack cakes while working on Miami Vice. Oscar Winner Jamie Foxx and bad boy Colin Farrell clashed during production, and Farrell checked into rehab immediately after finishing the shoot. Also, the two stars have had their box office struggles. Foxx has followed Ray with Stealth and Jarhead (although Dreamgirls is sure-fire Oscar bait and box office gold this Christmas) and Farrell has appeared in a series of bombs, including The New World, Alexander and Ask the Dust.

Fortunately for Universal, the tracking sounds solid. I'm told that Miami Vice is the first choice this weekend among males under 25 and males 25 plus. It's even tracking in the double digits among females 25 plus. This should add up to $35-$40 million – enough to win the weekend. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (Buena Vista) should still score between $21-25 million good for #2, then it's a bit of a crapshoot.

Reviews are generally negative for Ant Bully (Warner Bros.), and, by all accounts, Monster House (Sony) is a better film. The word is that Ant Bully's tracking is slightly softer than Monster House a week ago, but tracking is incredibly unreliable for kiddie pics. Positive buzz will keep Monster House in a near dead-heat with Ant Bully for #3 with both films right around $15-$17 million.

The #5 spot this weekend should be Fox's John Tucker Must Die, but honestly, somebody at Fox may die for greenlighting this misguided comedy. I'm told that tracking among under 25 females is in the high teens, driven by Desperate Housewives star Jesse Metcalfe, recording star Ashanti and Chad Michael Murray ex Sophia Bush, but it will struggle to just $12-$14 million.

It's too late for M. Night Shyamalan's Lady In the Water (Warner Bros.) to be resuscitated. This is Warner's second water-logged bomb of the summer following in the wake of Wolfgang Petersen's Poseidon. The reviled fairy tale from the Sixth Sense creator will finish under $10 million for the weekend.

Two specialty films debut this week. Little Miss Sunshine opened yesterday at seven locations. More on this one later. Woody Allen's Scoop (Focus) will open at 537 locations on Friday (7/28), and unfortunately Allen has regressed to his pre-Match Point mediocrity. This one will die a fairly quick death. To put it in perspective, Scoop will likely do $8,000-$13,000 per screen compared to a possible $30,000-$50,000 per screen for Little Miss Sunshine (it did $9,400 per location Wednesday).

Sundance Record-Breaker Little Miss Sunshine Set To Brighten Summer Box Office

On a winter's night in Park City in January, the husband-wife directing team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris found themselves at the center of the show business universe. Their first feature film, Little Miss Sunshine, had its world premiere at Sundance, and for the next 11 1/2 hours, a furious bidding war raged. The winner was Fox Searchlight with among the biggest sales in Sundance history – just over $10 million.

Little Miss Sunshine begins a platform release this Wednesday (7/26), and with a cast that includes Oscar nominees Greg Kinnear, Toni Collette and Alan Arkin along with Golden Globe winner Steve Carell, this isn't a traditional arthouse offering – and Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris aren't the usual art film directors.

Dayton and Faris started out at MTV with a show called The Cutting Edge. American audiences were introduced to legendary bands REM and The Red Hot Chili Peppers on the program, and, from there, they began directing music videos for diverse acts like The Smashing Pumpkins, Macy Gray, Weezer, Janet Jackson and The Ramones. Then it was on to commercials for everyone from Gap to Target to ESPN.

Their previous work doesn't necessarily inform Little Miss Sunshine heavily. They say that this film is about actors and not flashy MTV visuals, but that their past work gave them a solid foundation to build on. "Videos and commercials gave us a lot of experience working on our craft," says Valerie. "We got to know crews and got practice. Our production muscles are very well-trained."

So what made the directors of Korn's Freak On A Leash video choose this quirky comedy to be their first foray into features? "We developed other projects prior to this, but nothing hit us the way that this did," says Dayton. "We were never particularly interested in kids' beauty pageants or family road movies, but this script was so well-written and these characters were so well-drawn."

Michael Arndt's screenplay introduces us to the Hoovers, a uniquely fractured family that decides to make a cross-country trip to Redondo Beach, California so that their daughter can compete in a pre-pubescent beauty pageant. The Hoover patriarch is a desperately hopeless motivational speaker played by Greg Kinnear. Toni Collette plays Mom Sheryl Hoover, who tries to put a happy face on the clan's dysfunctions. Steve Carell is her brother who has just been jilted by a gay lover. Abigail Breslin is the slightly pudgy daughter who aspires to win the Little Miss Sunshine pageant; her brother is a Nietzsche-fueled teen who has taken a vow of silence; and Alan Arkin adds spice as the grandfather who has been kicked out of his retirement home for snorting heroin.

Over the years, there have been other proposed film projects for Dayton and Faris, but the script for Little Miss Sunshine was the furthest along in terms of development with very solid characters and a sound structure. Still, it took five years to get the movie made.

Dayton says that it was a hard film to make for a number of reasons, "It's an ensemble movie on a small budget, so, and it was tough to get big-name actors. It wasn't like Lost In Translation where Bill Murray is the star of the movie." Also, it's a comedy, but not a pure comedy, and "people couldn't see the whole picture."

The Wachowski brothers have given us Bound and The Matrix trilogy and the Farrelly brothers have scored with films like Dumb and Dumber, Kingpin and There's Something About Mary, but directing teams are fairly rare. Husband-wife directing teams are even more unusual. (Little Miss Sunshine is the second notable film from a husband-wife directing team this summer, though. Dominic Harari and Teresa Pelegri wrote and co-directed Only Human [Seres queridos] from Magnolia, now in limited release.)

Dayton and Faris say that there is no division of labor when they are working. "We both do everything," says Dayton. "It happens without much wrangling. We are well-versed in coming to a consensus." Faris adds, "Directing is bigger than one person can handle. It would be more efficient to divide labor, but we value each other's opinion."

There's also the sense that their work, including Little Miss Sunshine, may be more accessible to a wider audience. It has both male and female points of view. "Our work may be more approachable because we've already reached a consensus," says Faris. "It forces both of us to be less indulgent."

Before the premiere of Little Miss Sunshine in Park City, nobody had seen it. In fact, the film was finished only two days before the premiere. There was incredible anticipation, particularly because of the presence of Carell who was fresh from the box office success of The 40 Year-Old Virgin. According to Dayton, "Producers spent a lot of energy trying to keep the buzz at bay."

The film premiered at 9:00pm to a wildly enthusiastic festival crowd. Then the "mating dance" began. An hour after their debut feature film screened at the America's most famous film festival, Dayton and Faris found themselves sitting at a Park City restaurant being courted by virtually every studio and distribution head in the industry.

After dinner, Dayton and Faris retired to their hotel room while the producers negotiated. Faris says, "A lot of great places were bidding. We received calls from the producers through the night, and Fox sincerely loved the film." Ultimately Fox Searchlight landed the distribution rights to Little Miss Sunshine at 8:30 a.m. the following morning for a Sundance record price.

Fox Searchlight has a tremendous track record with high-end art films with wide commercial appeal. In just the last few years, they have scored major successes with Napoleon Dynamite, Garden State and Sideways. There have been about 30 word-of-mouth screenings across the country in the past month, and the husband-wife duo has dutifully traveled the country doing Q&A's at each of them.

With the platform release now underway, they are a bit worried about "the 40 Year-Old Virgin crowd" because it's a very different film. Much of the humor comes from pain, and it's not purely optimistic. However, with a tremendous cast, sterling reviews and the Sundance seal of approval, Little Miss Sunshine has become the most anticipated specialty film of the summer. "We hope that people won't come in thinking it's a mind-blowing, life-changing film," says Dayton. "We want people to have realistic expectations."

The Little Miss Sunshine team expects this film to perform. It's perfect for summer. It's funny enough to stand out against the major tent pole movies and smart enough to appeal to the adult film crowd that is starved for something more intelligent.

The reward for Jonathan Dayton and Faris is seeing the film with an audience. "They're laughing," Dayton says. "They're rocking in their seats. It's almost like a jackknife effect as they curl over and laugh from a deep place."