10 Movie Characters Destroyed By The Fourth Wall

5. Donald Kaufman, John Laroche & Susan Orlean - Adaptation.

Charlie Kaufman's masterful 2002 meta-comedy Adaptation. cast Nicolas Cage as two twin brothers, Charlie and Donald Kaufman, the former a struggling writer attempting to adapt Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief into a movie screenplay.

The film effectively chronicles the real Charlie Kaufman's attempts to adapt The Orchid Thief amid crushing writer's block, and the result is a gloriously self-aware exercise in an artist working out his inner torment.

Though for its first two acts Adaptation. is a ferociously unique and dementedly hilarious character study-cum-satire, the final reel shifts gears to transform into the very cliched schlock that Charlie himself was trying to avoid while adapting the book.

Act three becomes a more conventional thriller-type film, with Donald being killed in a car accident, the real-life orchid thief John Laroche (an Oscar-winning Chris Cooper) getting eaten by an alligator, and Orlean herself (Meryl Streep) being arrested for trying to have Charlie killed.

And so, three major characters were led to their unpleasant fates in the pursuit of an hilariously tongue-in-cheek "Hollywood" finale, which also concludes on an uncharacteristically hopeful note for Charlie, who finally conquered his writer's block.

Never change, Charlie Kaufman.