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Director Spike Jonze prepares a scene with Nicolas
Cage, playing screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and his
twin brother Donald in Adaptation, an avant-garde
comedy about Kaufman's struggle to adapt Susan
Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, into a Hollywood
movie.
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The size of the movie screen is the main thing that separates screenwriter Charlie Kaufman from his on-screen counterpart in Adaptation, a role brought to comical, self-effacing life by Nicolas Cage.
Kaufman wrote Adaptation, an avant-garde comedy about his own creative struggles adapting New Yorker magazine writer Susan Orlean's book, The Orchid Thief, into a Hollywood movie. Meeting Kaufman in person answers any questions one might have about the truthfulness of Adaptation. Basically, Kaufman's shy screen version of himself is dead-on accurate.
It's early November and the Beverly Hills Four Seasons Hotel is busy with a room-busting schedule of press conferences, celebrity photo shoots, media interviews and industry meetings surrounding the latest James Bond adventure, Die Another Day. Much of the hotel hoopla is directed towards actress Halle Berry, who plays Bond's feisty fighting companion in the film. Kaufman is tossed into the publicity maelstrom of a weekend press junket on behalf of Adaptation, and he looks like a fish out of water. Kaufman, or at least Cage's version of Kaufman, is in every scene of the movie, and one imagines that the spotlight must drive Kaufman crazy.
Asked if he's making a comment on his role as a Hollywood screenwriter, Kaufman answers tentatively, staring down at the table in front of him: "We (Kaufman and director Spike Jonze) don't want to talk about the significance of what anything is in the movie. We intentionally set out to make the movie that hopefully generates positive conversation and different reactions. That's what we want in a movie ... I think our intention was to leave a lot of questions open about what our intention was."
Recently, Kaufman wrote the script for director Michel Gondry's comedy, Human Nature, a clever farce about an eccentric scientist studying a wild man who was raised in the jungle. Kaufman also wrote Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the comedy based on TV game show host Chuck Barris' cult memoir about his life as a CIA operative. Both Confessions and Adaptation are in theaters, offering audiences a double threat of Kaufman's unique point of view.
Kaufman's plans to reunite with Gondry for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a comedy starring Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet. Still the most significant moment in Kaufman's short career has to be Being John Malkovich, the twisted 2000 comedy about a portal to actor John Malkovich's mind that Kaufman wrote for Jonze. Kaufman earned an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for writing Being John Malkovich, and Kaufman appropriates his worrisome experiences from that film into Adaptation. The mix of his true-life screenwriting adventures and Hollywood-like melodrama is laugh-out-loud funny. Watching the movies from Kaufman's scripts makes one wonder: Is Charlie Kaufman's life as strange as the version depicted in Adaptation?
"I didn't set out to write this (Adaptation) this way," Kaufman says. "When I decided to do it, I was nervous the whole time. I was nervous when I turned it in. I didn't prepare them at all for it. But by the time I talked to Ed (the film's producer Ed Saxon), he already liked it."
Kaufman sits next to Jonze during our interview, and he is as nervous and twitchy as you would expect a publicity-shy writer to be. The frantic pace of talking to the press can be overwhelming and Kaufman -- well, he looks decidedly overwhelmed. Everyone has the same agenda when talking to Kaufman: They want to know what's inside his head. The challenge is getting him to open up.
"I do actually think a lot of Adaptation is about failure, but I don't see that as a negative thing. I think it's important to fail because I think failure only happens when you try something that you don't know how to do and, if you try things you know how to do, it's not terribly interesting or valuable. You have to be willing and readily accepting of failure."
Other screenwriters find themselves in the public spotlight. David Hare's acclaim as a playwright precedes the attention he's currently receiving for writing The Hours. Journalists like John Gregory Dunne and Dorothy Parker earned their reputations before working as scriptwriters for the studios. Past Hollywood screenwriter Joe Eszterhas was known for his giant paychecks as much as his scripts for Basic Instinct and Showgirls. So Kaufman is not the first Hollywood writer to gain notoriety. He's just that one writer crazy enough to use his own life to complete a script assignment.
Later that same day, Saxon talks about his shock the first time he received Kaufman's treatment of The Orchid Thief. Saxon expected to read what he hired Kaufman to do, adapt The Orchard Thief into a straightforward drama. He remembers his shock at receiving something completely different.
"We optioned The Orchid Thief and hired Charlie, knowing the work that he's done. I was at the lunch where he talked about doing something outside of himself and not working inside his head. We got the script and it said by Donald and Charlie Kaufman. I was a little angry and curious. Then I picked it up and read it, but I couldn't read it from outside. I was wondering. Who is this brother? What's up with this brother? I took it home and read it again, and I thought: this is very good. Then the question became, 'Can we get it made?' "
In Adaptation, Kaufman creates the role of Donald, his twin brother, a wannabe screenwriter who's interested in all the things he hates about clichéd Hollywood screenplays. Of course, Donald turns out to he a huge success, while Charlie struggles to finish his assignment.
In the film, Meryl Streep shows plenty of comic spirit as Orlean and Chris Cooper's rich performance prevents Laroche from abecoming a strictly farcical character. Still the true star of Adaptation is Kaufman's writing -- and when was the last time a scriptwriter was tagged as the star of a movie? Adaptation is a mirror reflection of Kaufman's assignment, albeit one that's twisted and surreal. It's a dizzy movie, filled with comic surprises around every narrative corner.
There is talk about a possible Oscar nomination for Kaufman's Adaptation script. If that were to happen, his second Oscar nomination in two years, Kaufman probably wouldn't know how to act. Then again, he'd probably write a script about his worrisome Oscar night experiences. ©
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