Mr. Todd's Wild Ride

The biggest stories at the Sundance Film Festival are often those of the struggling filmmakers themselves: how Quentin Tarantino languished for years behind a video store counter, how Ed Burns shot "The Brothers McMullen" at his parents' house. This year, it's Todd Solondz's turn to leap from don't-quit-your-day-job obscurity.

By Debra Jo Immergut

Jan 28, 1996 | Her classmates call her "Weiner Dog." Or, on a good day, "lesbo." Dawn Weiner has it rough: she's not very pretty, her social skills are just a bit underdeveloped, and she's stuck in the hell on earth known as seventh grade. But Dawn's not a mere loser: she's a survivor, a rebel. She has an intense crush on the lead singer in her older brother's garage band, she wants to kill her darling little sister -- and she's one of the most believable adolescent movie characters in memory.

In his film "Welcome to the Dollhouse," which won the Grand Jury Prize for best dramatic feature at the recent Sundance Film Festival, 36-year-old writer/director Todd Solondz has managed to depict the agonies of suburban pubescence in way that's as compassionate as it is darkly hilarious. His script perfectly captures the name-calling and ingeniously cutting insults that fly through school hallways (in fact, originially Solondz wanted to title the film "Faggot-Retard"), and yet the story reveals the essential humanity lurking within the little monsters as well.

Solondz himself is a battered but unbowed survivor of a cruel milieu, also the province of bullies and name-callers: Hollywood. Having made several acclaimed shorts as a graduate student at New York University's film school, he was wooed by the major studios and ultimately signed three-picture deals with both Fox and Columbia. His first feature, "Fear, Anxiety, and Depression," was released in 1989 by the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and was, as Solondz himself says, "a disappointment." Utterly disenchanted, Solondz turned his back on the film business and, for several years, taught English to Russian immigrants. He was convinced he would never sit in a director's chair again.

Money from a family connection finally gave him the impetus to return to filmmaking; he shot "Welcome to the Dollhouse" from a script he'd written several years before. Shortly after its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival last year, the film was snapped up by Sony Pictures Classics; it will be released in late May.

We talked with Solondz on the eve of his triumphant comeback at the Sundance Festival.

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