Adaptation Screenwriting
In Adaptation Kaufman created an acerbic satire on traditional Hollywood movies.Screenwriting guru Robert McKee (played by Brian Cox), is even a character in it. And the film goes out of its way not only to blatantly defy McKee's 'Ten Commandments' of screenwriting, but pointedly shows us that he's doing so. Structure, dialogue, use of voice-over - Kaufman plays fast and loose with many of the formulaic strictures, but achieves a surprisingly coherent and gripping narrative. Kaufman's
Brian Cox as Robert McKee and Nicolas Cage as Charlie Kaufman in Adaptation. Screenwriters: Charlie and 'Donald' Kaufman. Director: Spike Jonze. Sony Pictures Entertainment Read The Adaptation ScriptThe character Charlie is striving to write screenplays that are intensely personal and deal with the uncertainties and ambiguities of life. He doesn't want to write about a hero with an impossible goal having to overcome mammoth obstacles, as the How To books tell you. The real-life Kaufman writes Adaptation with screenwriting that abjures the forumlas and rules and produces a fascinating script that is smart and compelling. Kaufman even invents a brother for his main character who is a loutish idiot who attends a McKee screenwriting seminar, walks around intoning McKee's ten commandments, and persuades Charlie to go to a McKee seminar too. It is one of the most glorious scenes in Adaptation. Screenwriting seminars that will attend in their thousands every year. Charlie is surrounded by hundreds of hopefuls earnestly scribblng notes while he sits listening with mounting discomfort to the commandments which forbid all the scriptwriting sins he (and the real-life Kaufman) commit. Long speeches, voice-overs, no great dramatic action scenes and so on. Everything that Adaptation screenwriting isn't. Donald writes a crass screenplay about a cop and a serial killer, involving plenty of sex and drugs, following the McKee principles and becomes the hottest screenwriter in Hollywood, selling his screenplay for a six-figure sum. And Charlie himself ends up selling his soul by following McKee's advice and writes a totally derivative, over-the-top ending for his script. Like all the best satire, Adaptation offers a warning.It's as if he saying to all scriptwriters: 'This is what happens when you follow the cliched screenwriting paradigm - a pile of crap and a soul for sale.' Like all the best innovative screenwriters at work today such as Tarantino Kaufman's dazzlingly original treatment of structure and genre is not a facile exercise in experimenting with screenwriting technique. Being inventive with style and structure is not enough to write a great movie. You realise there's so much more to it when you look at Adaptation. Screenwriting that's bold and original has a solid emotional core and something important to say. and Emotional Depth Adaptation cuts back and forth in time and place - right back to the birth of the planet. It employs techniques every aspiring screenwriter is told to steer clear of - flashbacks, extended monologues, voice-overs, its mood, style of visual grammar, use of dialogue, and it even switches genre, in a completely over-the-top finale to the movie which the character of Kaufman finally ends up writing - as 'McKee' has advised the fictional hero: "You can have an uninvolving movie, but wow them at the end, and you've got a hit." So the real-life Kaufman gets his hero to write a McKee blockbuster ending which is deliberately stuffed with movie action cliches - thereby brilliantly demonstrating how superior a Charlie Kaufman script is to the screenplays that follow the Hollywood paradigm. As well as being a serious, heartfelt exposure of the gimmicky storytelling and glib rules of McKee and the other screenwriting gurus, Adaptation has what every great story has: emotional pull. For all the inventive takes on narrative and postmodern stylistics, the film has an unsentimental tenderness and emotional depth. The movie is also about passion and obsession, about theft and appropriation, about the difficulty of retaining artistic integrity, and reveals a quite profound exploration of the workings of evolution. The movie is not just about adapting a book. It's also about all the ways - inept, painful, helplessly striving and joyful - with which we try to adapt to life. What makes Adaptation an exemplar of unique screenwriting is not simply that he breaks the technical rules and finds new ways to tell his story, it is that the substance of that story bristles with intelligence and important insights into how we live.
Screenwriters: Charlie and 'Donald' Kaufman. Director: Spike Jonze.Sony Pictures Entertainment. How Kaufman was able to go against so many of the formulaic screenwriting rules and produce what many see as a masterpiece in storytelling, in its emotional depth and capacity to make cinema audiences identify with the lives of his characters, and at the same time produce a post-modern satire on Hollywood makes Adaptation itself a masterclass in unique screenwriting. As the world waits with bated breath for his next screenplay and debut as director, Synecdoche: New York (insiders who have read the script describe it as "awesome"), it's as good a time as any to take a closer look at how he creates his highly original screenplays.
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