A year ago, two very different oddball movies, "Napoleon Dynamite" and "Super Size Me" - one a teenage comedy, the other a fast-food documentary - ended up having some important things in common.
Both were made for little money (much less than half a million dollars), both were sold at the Sundance Film Festival for a lot of money, and both went on to earn the studios that bought them much, much more money at the box office - $44 million and $27 million, respectively.
The man largely responsible for their success was not a Hollywood studio executive but an aggressive New York lawyer named John Sloss, who worked as the sales agent for the virtually unknown creators of both movies, and 11 other films as well. Randy Kennedy reports for the New York Times.
