6. Adaptation
"People don't know somebody sits down and
writes a picture," William Holden grumbles in Sunset Blvd.; "they think the actors just make it up as they go along." With the exception of superstars like Quentin Tarantino, screenwriters are mysterious, shadowy figures; the closest they come to the glamour of "moviemaking" is boiling around in the background of a movie set, fussing and fretting as their words are haphazardly changed. Charlie Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) is pretty much the perfect picture of a neurotic screenwriter; awkward, monosyllabic, tortured by the knowledge of his own limitations. He's struggling to adapt Susan Orlean's beautiful novel The Orchid Thief, and finding it impossible... how exactly are you supposed to wring a two hour drama out of a book about orchids? Most of Charlie's neurosis seem to center around his brother, Donald (also Nicolas Cage),
also a screenwriter; Donald is outgoing, charming, and highly successful, making big bucks off concepts Charlie
knows are terrible. More and more, he's beginning to feel he'll never write anything good again. Anybody who's written a script - or
tried to write a script - will instinctively understand Adaptation. The existential panic that sets in at two in the morning, as you realize you have no way around your story problems. The deep depression that begins to settle in, as you mentally join together all your sexual, psychological and emotional hang ups with the fact that you can't finish this damn screenplay. The fear that you won't write something that anyone wants to see, or that you won't write something good...and the terrifying notion that those two things are not necessarily the same. Beyond being a terrific metacinema commentary on itself (Adaptation was written by the
real Charlie Kaufman, "based on" a real novel by Susan Orlean called The Orchid Thief), Adaptation is maybe the best depiction in movie history of the trials and tribulations of this bastardized form we call screenwriting. Oh, and while we're on the subject of screenwriters...