Adaptation Screenwriting

Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation is a wholesale demolition job on everything that Hollywood stands for.

Anyone who aspires to write intelligent, ground-breaking scripts would do well to make a study of Kaufman's inventive screenplay. However experienced you are at writing movies, this film will almost certainly inspire you.

The Adaptation Screenplay
A Must-Read For All Screenwriters

It's a story about a screenwriter trying to be a unique screenwriter, resisting the easy path to commercial success.

It satirises the formulaic blockbuster movies that get churned out from the Hollywood machine every year. It mocks the glib rules laid down by screenwriting gurus with their 'How To Write a Movie' grid.

And it's a dazzling example of unique screenwriting.

Adaptation was written by one of the hottest - and most original - writers in Hollywood.

Its dizzying narrative contortions and absurdist blurrings of fantasy and reality, and its self-referential, meta-everything structure were all unlikely elements for a commercial movie.

It's interesting to watch the movie again in light of his extraordinary Synecdoche, New York.

Chris Cooper and Meryl Streep in Adaptation.
Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman.
Director: Spike Jonze. Beverly Detroit. Sony Pictures
Entertainment

Watch The Movie With Script in Hand -

Charlie Kaufman won a BAFTA for Best Adapted Screenplay and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for Adaptation.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the screenplay is that it is actually about the real-life screenwriter Kaufman.

When Kaufman was commissioned by a Hollywood studio to adapt a book about orchids into a screenplay he nearly had a nervous breakdown. It was, Kaufman said, nightmarish. He wanted to give his fee back but his agent wouldn't let him.

Kaufman has talked about trying to turn the bestselling The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean into a movie as arduous and despressing. The book is very literary, full of interior monoloques and lengthy narrative sequences - everything that's anathema to Hollywood scriptwriting tutors.

The film is a hilarious - and painful - exposure of the stifling constraints of a writer trying to squeeze a story into the traditional straitjacket of Hollywood cliches. In the end, Kaufman decided to write a movie about his own difficulties in adapting the book, even giving the screenwriter's character his own name (played by Nicolas Cage), and writing in the real-life character of Orlean (played by Meryl Streep).

And it became one of the most extraordinary and original movies of recent times.

It's worth taking a closer look at how Kaufman defied the rules - and why Adaptation is a movie that is much much more than an exercise in postmodern wizardry.

Read on to find out why the film is such a brilliant satire.

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Continue to Adaptation Screenwriting:
Kaufman's Satire and Robert McKee

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