Michael Arndt is an American screenwriter, who has written for the films Little Miss Sunshine (2006), Toy Story 3 (2010), and Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015).

[2] Arndt was a script reader for some time, and was a personal assistant to actor Matthew Broderick until late 1999,[3] when he chose to begin writing screenplays full-time.

[2][3] Arndt considered directing the film himself "as a no-budget, DV feature" due to his concern of the story being "just too small and "indie" to get any real attention from Hollywood".

During that time, Arndt was fired when he objected to centralizing the story on Richard Hoover (played by Greg Kinnear in the film), only to be re-hired within a month after the new writer hired by Focus left the project.

[7] Arndt resumed work on the script, which continued through production and into post-production: "The final scene of the movie [...] was written and shot about eight weeks before [its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival on January 20, 2006]", he said.

[8] Arndt began collaborating with Lee Unkrich and other Pixar personnel on the screenplay for Toy Story 3 in 2006,[9] working from a treatment by Andrew Stanton, who co-wrote the two preceding films in the series.