The Pursuit of Happyness is a 2006 American biographical film directed by Gabriele Muccino about the on and off-homeless salesman-turned-stockbroker Chris Gardner. The screenplay by Steven Conrad is based on the best-selling memoir of the same name written by Gardner with Quincy Troupe. The film was released on December 15, 2006, by Columbia Pictures. For his performance Will Smith received an Academy Award nomination for Best Actor and a Golden Globe nomination.
The title is intentionally misspelled, as it also appears as graffiti in a scene in the film. The misspelled phrase is actually taken from an essay written in 1776 that argued that whites and blacks were created equal. The essay, which was written by Lemuel Haynes, a biracial man living in New England during the Revolution, quoted Thomas Jefferson's well-known sentence from the United States Declaration of Independence, but spelled the last word of the sentence with a y. The sentence, as it appears in Lemuel's essay, is as follows: "We hold these truths to be self-Evident, that all men are created Equal, that they are Endowed By their Creator with Ceartain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happyness."
The film begins in 1981 in San Francisco, California. Linda and Chris Gardner live in a small apartment with their 5-year-old son, Christopher. Chris has invested the family's life savings in a franchise selling portable bone density scanners. These scanners provide slightly denser pictures than X-rays, but most of the doctors Chris visits find that they are too high-priced. Linda works in a dead-end job in a local hotel laundry. The tension between them mounts as unpaid rent and bills continue to accumulate. Chris often parks his car in disallowed areas so he can make scheduled appointments on time, and after parking tickets remain unpaid, their car is impounded. After missing a shift at her job, Linda finally leaves with their son Christopher, returns briefly, then departs for New York City, where a better job awaits her, leaving behind the boy at his father's request.
Highly skilled at mathematics, Chris accepts an unpaid internship at brokerage firm Dean Witter Reynolds that promises employment to only one trainee at its conclusion. His lack of salary, and his lack of scanners to try to sell, leaves him riddled with debt, and he and his son eventually become homeless. After spending several nights riding buses and sleeping in subway restrooms, saddled with their meager belongings, they begin lining up at the Glide Memorial Church on a daily basis in an effort to secure accommodations for the night. Sometimes they succeed, other times they literally are left out in the cold. As he struggles to provide a semblance of a family life for his son under the most dire of circumstances, Chris becomes more determined to complete the intern program and become the sole trainee the firm will hire.
In the end, Chris gets the job and later starts his own brokerage firm, called Gardner Rich, in 1987. The man in the final scene that walks by is actually Chris Gardner, who nods to Smith at the end of the film. In 2006, he then sells a minority of it for a multi-million dollar deal.