CS Weekly Archive > From the Trenches > 3/20/09

Sparkling Words:
Sunshine Cleaning's Megan Holley

BY PETER CLINES

A fledgling writer cleans up with her first screenplay—a story about two women who clean up.

At first glance, Megan Holley would seem to have all the odds against her. She doesn't live in Los Angeles or New York. She doesn't have any formal training. And her self-taught ideas on script formatting were, in her own words, "unconventional." Holley entered a local screenplay contest in her native Virginia, and Sunshine Cleaning suddenly found itself gathering a lot of unexpected attention.

In Holley's script, Rose (Amy Adams) was head cheerleader in her glory days, but now she cleans houses to support herself and her son, Oscar (Jason Spevack), and spends her nights in seedy motels with Mac (Steve Zahn), her old boyfriend…who married someone else. One evening Mac suggests she focus her cleaning skills on crime scenes, and suddenly Rose finds herself in the surprisingly lucrative (and sometimes horrifically disgusting) biohazard disposal business with her often-deadbeat sister, Norah (Emily Blunt), as a junior partner. But as the two women soon come to discover, there's a bit more to the job than mopping floors and tossing questionable materials into the nearest dumpster. The only question is if they can learn it before one of them falls back on old habits and destroys their chance at real success.

In Los Angeles for the film's premiere, Holley took a couple of minutes with CS Weekly to talk about procrastination, death, and the weird games people play at baby showers.

Now, I heard that you started out making safety films for the government?
Yeah, for the state of Virginia. I worked for the Department of Economic Development in Business Assistance. Part of our incentive package to lure people to Virginia was we would provide them with a video. It could be an employee orientation video, a safety video, whatever they wanted. I was the person who edited all of those. So, I did movies about grout, the history of windshield-wiper manufacturing, meat-packing safety, all sorts of things.

So was Sunshine Cleaning your first attempt at a script?
It was. I had done kind of a do-it-yourself thing before, but this was my first attempt where I got all the books and read about structure and format and all of that. [chuckles]

The original idea from this came from a news story, yes?
I heard a news story, a human interest story, on NPR while I was driving around. It was about two women who had a crime-scene cleaning business. They were friends in Washington State. It immediately came to me, this seemed like such fertile ground for a story. I didn't know what that story would be. What I liked about the story on NPR was it was two women in this industry that didn't seem typical for women to be in. I liked that they had this really upbeat attitude about what they did. So, I knew I wanted two women in this world, and I wanted to portray this attitude that they were doing good. But I really didn't know if it was going to be a mystery, if it was going to be a thriller, what it was going to be. I had no idea at that point, but I knew that I wanted to do something in this world.

What finally clicked?
Well, I decided I wanted the women to be sisters, because I was interested in exploring the relationship between adult siblings. Once I had in my mind that they were sisters, and that there was going to be this dynamic between them, it was kind of natural that it evolved into exploring that relationship and their family. This job they were doing was going to be an important part in exploring that relationship.

How did you start? Are you an outline person, note cards, or did you just sit down and start writing page one?
I started on page one. I was not an outline person at all. In fact, when I started writing this, I joined a local screenwriting group. You had to turn in 30 pages at a time to get critiqued by that group, so my goal was just, okay, get the first act done and turn that in. Then get the next 30 pages and turn that in. The basic nut of it was I wanted the character of Rose to be trying to seek validation in all the wrong ways, to be needy for validation. She was going to stumble into this job and discover a sense of value in what she was doing, and then, in turn, her self-respect. It was going to play an important role in growing and breaking that cycle. Then she was going to trip herself up by doing something kind of her old behavior, her needy behavior, was going to jeopardize everything she built. And then she would realize how important it was and what she had done, the value of what she'd been doing, and that she had done it herself. I knew that was the basic story, but then I just started plowing through. It took me about six months to do it. I would sit down and write for an hour or so before work every day.

You first got attention with a screenplay contest, yes?
Yes, and that was another way just to get it done, because I'm a typical procrastinator. There was this local contest, the Virginia Governor's Screenwriting Competition, and it was free to enter, so I thought that was going to be my goal, to finish this thing so I could get it into the contest before the deadline. And I, of course, procrastinated and procrastinated. Since I worked for the state of Virginia, the film office was the next building over, so at five to five I was running it over there and handing it in right before the doors closed. Which was great, to get it done and get it finished. Also, it was great, because it ended up being one of the winners that year. I also entered the Chesterfield, and I was a semi-finalist. That was 2003.

After you won the contest you kept working on this, yes?
Glenn Williamson, who is one of the producers on the film, he graduated from UVA. I think he was an executive at Focus at the time but wanted to get into producing. He was one of the panelists on this contest because of his ties to UVA. He really loved the script, and he wanted to try to develop it. He came down to the Virginia Film Festival that year, and we had coffee and talked about the script. He got on board at that point.

Now when you say you developed it…
Well, it evolved over a span of several years, and it changed with each element that was added. With Glenn, there were some small changes. It was more about editing, thinning down some areas, and some format things. Because I was such a novice there was some…unconventional formatting. [laughs]

You've got a bunch of powerhouse actors in this. Amy Adams, Alan Arkin, Emily Blunt—did they work with you at all on the script?
I didn't get any notes from Amy or Emily. There were some notes from Alan that I did try to address. Some things didn't ring true for him with the character, so just trying to shade the character a little differently.

There are two character elements I'd like to talk to you about. First is using the CB to talk to heaven. Where did that come from?
Growing up we had an old, beat up Econo-line van with a CB in it. I remember that CB was such a source of fascination for me as a kid. It was magical. I knew I wanted them to have this van for their business, and I wanted the detail of the CB there. I guess a big part of the fascination for me, of the story, is the issues about death. The huge mystery that is death, and we'll never know the answers. It's a fascination for me. It's something I'm terrified of. It's something that, growing up, I was always very curious about, and I would say these free-form prayers. "What does it mean to die? What are you before you're you?" So it was a way for me to put those ideas—which I think are central to the film—into the character of Oscar's mouth. It just seemed like the CB was a good way to do it. I didn't want him to be super-religious and saying prayers every night, but I liked the misinterpretation of what, exactly, heaven is.

Second is the constant search for the movie-of-the-week Rose and Norah's mom is in—the waitress and pie clip. What inspired that?
Well, in the very first draft that I did—not the one that I ended up submitting to the contest but my personal first draft—I knew that the mother was gone, but I didn't have her dead. She was just gone, she left, and we never really know why. The sisters, kind of as a coping mechanism, had invented this idea that she is now living a glamorous life in Hollywood. It was a game they shared growing up. Initially, it was just the family mythology that developed between these two young girls that they carried over into adulthood. With further revisions I thought, if this job that is so transformative to Rose is cleaning the tragedy of death, then it makes sense that the big void of the mother should be caused by death. So, that came by letting the script stew a while and making those connections.

During the baby shower sequence, the "chocolate-filled diaper" game seemed just too bizarre not to be something true. Is it?
[Laughs] I was in the middle of writing this and a friend of mine went to a baby shower. She said "You would not believe the game we had to play at this baby shower." So, I said, that is definitely going in.

Peter Clines has had a lifelong love affair with the movies. He grew up in New England, where he studied English literature and education, and now lives and writes somewhere in Southern California. If anyone knows exactly where, he would appreciate a few hints.



Sunshine Cleaning courtesy Overture Films

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