Word: orlean
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...also a film director (Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, which opens Friday), he gives long, well-thought-out answers. "We just kept cutting the budget until it wasn't a major risk for the studios," he says about Adaptation, an unconventional adaptation of New Yorker writer Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief, in which screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Being John Malkovich, Human Nature and next month's Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) writes about his struggle to write the screenplay. Jonze has learned to spend his creative weirdness in his work instead...
...earnestness that gets everyone involved. When Orlean read Kaufman's script, she originally decided she didn't want her real name in the movie because halfway through the film, Kaufman gives up trying to write an unorthodox screenplay and goes conventional, which means the movie's Orlean sleeps around, gets homicidal and deals drugs. But after meeting with Jonze, she was onboard. "Spike seems really earnest and sincere. He's not trying to be postironic ironic. I got this feeling that this was a very human effort and not an effort to be cool," she says. "You feel like, 'What...
...interested in me, I thought it was the son of the bandleader who is also a producer out here. I didn't really watch videos," Kaufman says. He came up with the idea of inserting himself into Adaptation when he was stuck trying to write a film version of Orlean's book. He ran the idea past Jonze, who was in the middle of directing Malkovich, and Jonze encouraged...
...Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean comes up with a more creative, a lovelier idea. Of her eccentric Laroche, who lurched from an obsession with turtles to one with Ice Age fossils, then resilvering old mirrors, then orchids, Orlean writes: "I was starting to believe that the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to more manageable size. It makes the world seem not huge and empty, but full of possibility." In other words, the exclusionary element of an obsession also implies what the obsession includes. In other words, tunnel vision takes...
...direct the one he was going to act in. The film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the life story of Gong Show creator Chuck Barris, is one of three Kaufman-penned movies due out this year. Another, Adaptation, is the result of Kaufman's failed attempt to adapt Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief into a movie script. Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman. This is the definition of power: stars want to play you in movies about your failures...