Truth and Fiction in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation

[Kire]

Truth and Fiction in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation
by Gabrielle S. Prendergast (Apr-21-2003)


In the film Adaptation screenwriter Charlie Kaufman appears as a fat balding, single loser with a paralyzing case of writers block. In real life, Charlie Kaufman is, slim, well-coifed, married with kids, successful and... well, apparently suffers writer’s block. It’s testament to Kaufman’s talent that he included only the truth about himself that really matters in his brilliant, twisted screenplay.

There has been much dinner party discussion about how much of Adaptation is truth and how much is fiction. It’s fairly well accepted that there is no Donald Kaufman, for example, although both Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze are disarmingly coy on this issue. It is also known that Susan Orlean is not, in fact, a murderous, drug-addicted adulterer and that John Laroche is, in fact, a toothless eccentric with a passion for orchids, amongst other things.

The film has been described many ways. Ella Taylor of LA Weekly described it as “a movie about the writing process, and the writer's dilemma -- caught between analytical detachment on the one hand and obsessive overidentification with one's characters on the other." ("Inside 'Charlie Kaufman' The metafictional mayhem in -- and behind -- Spike Jonze's Adaptation", December 6-12, 2002) While the film is about many things, it is of special interest to writers, and screenwriters in particular because of its poignant portrayal of the writer’s life.

But how much of this portrayal is true? Charlie Kaufman concedes in a
number of interviews that the way he arrived at this interesting approach to adapting Orlean’s book is accurate. “My anxiety about adapting the book was very real” he reports in an IMDB interview, “The sequence of events is pretty real. I was hired to adapt this book. I struggled with it. I lost my mind a bit. I became desperate. I decided to put myself in and that's what I did.” (imdb.com, interviewed by Keith Simanton) All, according to Kaufman, and backed up by Jonze, true.

Kaufman’s odd journey to the final script: TRUE

More: http://www.cyberfilmschool.com/articles/adaptation.htm