Script Review: ADAPTATION

by Darwin Mayflower

WARNING: SPOILERS!

(10/02/00)

Charlie Kaufman, beyond all his obvious talents, has possibly the most amazing attribute of anyone in his field. He creates such bizarre, off-the-wall premises for his screenplays that the scripts, long before a single frame of the movie is shot, generates massive buzz for the project.

This is a rarefied -- if not singular -- ability. The buzz is so strong, in fact, that on a movie like BEING JOHN MALKOVICH (the script of which was floating around for a few years) I think the heaven-reaching praise given to it was really just a runoff from the astonishment the script created.

BEING JOHN MALKOVICH was a script that took your breath away with its originality and nerve. The film, I felt, was a mind-numbingly dull, colorless bore-fest. Spike Jonze, a commercial director, had absolutely no sense of timing. The movie dragged till you were left squirming in your seat. This plus they ditched Charlie’s hilarious third act that kept true to the spirit of the script.

Now Mr. Kaufman brings us ADAPTATION. The weird script to beat all weird scripts, if you’ve read anything about it.

It is the story of Charlie Kaufman himself, trying to pen the adaptation of a book (THE ORCHID THIEF). And also about the author of that book (Susan Orlean) and her subject: the obsessed-with-orchids John Laroche.

The script jumps through time and various stories. There’s Kaufman battling the book and his own self-loathing; Susan Orlean straining to find passion in life, the way John Laroche puts his life into orchids; John Laroche poaching orchids, getting arrested, yammering about a fabulously interesting and tragic life (he is a mad genius with no front teeth); and also flashbacks to what made these people who they are today.

The thing that’s attracted so much attention is that the script shatters the fourth wall in an exciting, daring way. The only thing I can think of that comes close is Woody Allen’s one-act play DEATH (where Woody shows up himself and people in the audience get involved with the production).

But you have to ask yourself something: Is Kaufman striving for Godardian experimentation -- or, like it’s said in the script, is there really not enough story -- not enough connection between Orlean and Laroche -- for an entire script?

I’d say Kaufman thought the latter. But it’s not true. As a writer and a film fan, I find Kaufman’s humorous accounts of the hot screenwriter gut-busting. And the overall insanity of writing a script about himself writing a script appeals to the oddball inside me. But why is it here? In the script the Kaufman character says he wants to write THE ORCHID THIEF because he wants to try writing "something serious." Maybe this was true in real life, too, but Kaufman got scared, not thinking people would accept him as serious, so he instead turned it into another hold-no-prisoners, spare-no-rule explosion of conventions.

THE ORCHID THIEF is a fascinating book. And Laroche is a wonderful character. You can pick that up even here in the script from the bits and pieces shown. It might have actually made, with Kaufman’s own sense of style, a better script than this -- which is, as wild and original as it is, quite self-indulgent (something Kaufman acknowledges).

Maybe it’s that the whole thing never jibes. Kaufman’s story on his own works. As does Orlean’s and Laroche’s.

But linking them is like forcing mismatched pieces of a puzzle together.

You can look for the deeper meaning in this script (about passion in your life, loving oneself, finding love). But since I usually take the side that artists are doing nothing but exorcising their demons (I’m one of the rare and brave that say genius artists are human, too) I’ll say Kaufman was trying to make you laugh, not think, and if you did get anything out of the sentiment he never really believed in it anyway.

In Kaufman’s story Robert McKee (of the famous/infamous screenwriting manual STORY) shows up. Kaufman rails against the notion of teaching someone to write. (Something I wholeheartedly agree with.) Kaufman’s twin brother Donald (who is credited as co-writer but does not exist) is trying to write a serial killer flick and goes to McKee’s seminars to perfect his craft.

What Kaufman does is kind of amazing: he exposes the uselessness and stupidity of McKee’s teaching, but then has Kaufman go to McKee when he needs guidance and shows McKee to be a wise man with a true passion for his job. What’s extraordinarily brilliant is that ADAPTATION's third act is the act McKee told Kaufman he needed to make his script work. And what we’re presented with is the best spoof of contrived, obvious, moronic Hollywood endings you’ve ever seen.

People are not who they seem. Secrets are revealed and someone has to now die. Guns are fired. There are car chases. Mythical man-animals show themselves and save our hero!

It’s ripe and so adroit at what it’s doing that if you happened upon it without reading its preamble you might mistake it for the real thing.

What I find the most intriguing about the script is Kaufman’s own view of his character. He presents himself as bald, fat and ugly (he is actually none of these things). What’s funnier is that he’s a self-hating, painfully-shy person who can’t even talk to a woman who’s dying for him to start a conversation. He ogles women like an out-in-the-open Peeping Tom. And has pathetic fantasies involving every woman he brushes past on the street. He’s a gigantic loser who learns, through his experiences during this script, that one must love oneself before he can love anyone else.

I have to assume the inspiration for this script was BARTON FINK, DEATH, THE PLAYER and EDWARD FORD. A screenwriter growing insane over a script; an author showing up in his own work; someone laying out plot details for a script and later seeing them in the film you’re watching; characters talking to the camera (to us) to move the story -- these are in those scripts.

In EDWARD FORD someone says he’s going to start his script with a wide shot of all of L.A. With a phone ringing somewhere down there. "But that’s how every movie starts, man," someone tells him. Later in the script we see a wide shot taking in all of L.A. A phone rings somewhere down below.

ADAPTATION reminded me of that one bit stretched out for 117 pages.

So Charlie Kaufman proves to us he’s probably the weirdest screenwriter around, and maybe one of the most talented. And, as with the original BEING JOHN MALKOVICH script, all screenwriting fans should buy this screenplay and read it (I’m always asked -- even though I list it at the end of all my reviews -- so here it is: you can buy all the scripts here at scriptforum.com). Not just because of its quality -- but because this is not going to hit the screen looking anything remotely like this script.

First, we have Spike Jonze. Who directed BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. With his molasses-in-January pacing, this would be a four-hour torture. There’s also a big star involved (Nic Cage) and I can’t imagine any studio would greenlight this, as is, when it would clearly need a budget of forty-to-fifty million dollars.

I think ADAPTATION is a spectacular failure. An exploding star that briefly lights up the universe and then dies away. Something that should probably not get made because moving on to celluloid will destroy its mystique. It could have been split in half and become two of the best scripts ever written. Taking away either side of this script wouldn’t have killed either one’s ultimate effect.

Seek it out, friends, because the movie coming will not be this. The way BEING JOHN MALKOVICH was not Kaufman’s true vision. (This makes one want Kaufman to get off his writer ass and direct.)

Whether Kaufman continues on this incredible path or if he never writes another script or if one of his scripts ever makes it to the screen as it was written is irrelevant. He’s proved to us, quite a few times, that you can be as original, offbeat, and downright scary as you want to be and you can still be heard and accepted. You can let the little demon inside you out for a dance and be a screenwriter (working in a world full of hit men and car chases and mindless plot twists) at the same time.

I don’t mean to get too sentimental -- too "Ron Bass" (that’s for all you Ron-haters out there) -- but (sniff, sniff) he’s an inspiration to us all.

Now if only his enlightened, grand, mind-bending scripts could make it up on the big screen as they deserve to.

I guess we’ll have to wait for HUMAN NATURE and CONFESSIONS OF A DANGEROUS MIND.

-- Darwin Mayflower.