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Lianne Halfon: The Producer

Title: Producer, Mr. Mudd

Notable projects: Crumb (1994); Ghost World (2001); Juno (2007)

Years in the industry: 20+

Juno, this season’s surprise hit and an Oscar nominee for Best Picture, could easily have turned into just another teen comedy. But Lianne Halfon, the film’s producer, stuck to her vision of preserving the “in-between” nature of the film’s titular character, neither loser nor popular girl, and playing up screenwriter Diablo Cody’s original voice. Halfon even convinced the film’s studio, Mandate Pictures, to delay the film’s release until every last quirky detail was right. The results have been spectacular: The underdog contender has racked up an eye-popping $153 million in ticket sales so far on a meager budget of $7.5 million, making it the most profitable picture Hollywood has seen since My Big Fat Greek Wedding. It’s not simply a successful indie, it’s a bona fide blockbuster. No matter who wins on Oscar day, Juno will have prevailed by perhaps the industry’s most obsessive measure: the box office.

“Studios often see teenagers as a much more homogenous group,” Halfon says from her offices at Mr. Mudd, her production company in Los Angeles. “But that marketplace is as diverse as any other demographic. The teenager who is neither the mean girl nor the shy girl, but that in-between girl, has a whole other set of preoccupations.”

As Halfon’s choices make clear, Juno is a bottom-up, artist-driven movie, and her success puts her at the forefront of a new movement of films that draw upon characters who do not sit at either end of the typical Hollywood extreme of queen bee or outcast, who by their very depth can attract a wider viewership. Halfon’s instinct with Juno was to highlight the main character’s sensitivity while still maintaining that sharp-tongued discourse so favored among the teen set, a move that clearly paid off. While the movie has only been out for a few months, it’s safe to say that other Hollywood studios are looking to develop their own vehicles focused on this market.

“All the studios want to do another Juno,” Halfon explains. “But the thing that’s difficult for them to understand is what’s responsible for that kind of success. Those elements are harder to identify from the outside.”

Halfon, who started working as a script reader for Columbia Tri-Star in the eighties, eventually went on to found production company Mr. Mudd in 1998, with partners John Malkovich and Russ Smith, where she produced the cult hit Ghost World. Her next project, Lawyerland, based on a novel about Manhattan lawyers, begins shooting later this year. Though Halfon is a Hollywood veteran, she has always focused on idiosyncratic projects with quirky, honest voices, and her success with Juno is now allowing her to apply that vision to bigger projects.

Of her recent success she says, “Maybe it’s partly an experience thing of knowing when to fight for things, but at the same time, I think things in this industry are changing.”