Chapter forty-eight: Adaptation

Hello again! How's your Monday? Mine's good. I know it's good because I slept until nearly noon without realizing it was Monday. How blissful are no alarms? I thought it was Wednesday! But, the fact that it's Monday does give me more time to blog. Woohoo! I hope you like this one.

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Adaptation is a film about twins Charlie and Donald Kaufman (both played by Nicolas Cage.) Charlie is a screenwriter who was assigned to turn Susan Orlean's (Meryl's) top New York novel The Orchid Thief into a movie. The novel is about Orlean's studies and time spent with John Laroche (Chris Cooper.) John is the actual orchid thief. Five years earlier, he and some friends went to a nature reserve in Florida where they brought home a rare, nearly extinct type of orchid for research purposes because John is very interested in science and Charles Darwin, but did so without the proper permission. He and Susan met when her reporting job led her to him. Soon, they became more than friends, and two years after the fact, Susan wrote her book. It's now 2002, three years after Susan's book is published, and a movie is in the works. Only, Charlie is having severe trouble writing the script.

The actual movie, not to be confused with the one Charlie is supposed to be writing, details Charlie's sleepless nights as he tries to format Susan's book in a cinematic way that will honor her poetic words and flawless imagery. While, at the same time, trying not to disappoint Susan or create a cliche Hollywood film. He himself stands in his own self-deprecating way, but his twin brother doesn't make things any easier. Influenced by Charlie, Donald takes his first shot at screenwriting and ends up writing a hit, which provides him with a healthy love life, and debunks Charlie's motivation for his own project even lower than it already was.

Later on, Charlie sits at lunch with Susan to discuss her book, but the answers she gives to his questions are very vague and do not help his process. At a loss for anything better to do, the twins venture out to see if they can meet with John in Florida, unannounced. As it turns out, Susan and John are with each other at the time of the twin's unexpected arrival. Things get heated. All Charlie wants to do is ask for insight, but Susan is absorbed with worry by the idea that if this news about her personal life leaks to the presses and Hollywood, it will destroy her reputation. The only way to make sure that doesn't happen, as she puts it,

"We have to kill him."

It becomes this four-person one-gun mad dash for survival through the nature reserve in the middle of the night. I won't spoil the ending body count for you, but it's very thrilling. It ends with Susan begging for her life to start over,

"I want my life back. I want it back before it all got fucked up. I want to be a baby again. I want to be new. I want to be new."

Charlie returns home and writes the script, at last, incorporating his own story into it.

This movie is semi-autobiographical. Susan Orlean is a real person who plays a small role in the film and actually wrote a book called The Orchid Thief about a real John Laroche, though I imagine she isn't as suddenly deranged as she is portrayed to be. Also, Charlie Kaufman is a real screenwriter who wrote this movie with the director, Spike Jonze. So, their struggle is real.

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When I first watched this movie a couple of months ago, I thought it was a writer's worst nightmare to be stuck in a slump, unsure what to do, but I figured I wouldn't have to cross that bridge for another decade or so until I became a serious writer. Well-- I jumped the gun and started writing multiple (two) screenplays. I stopped doing the first one almost immediately because it was a transcription of my book that ended with me begging Nora Ephron's ghost for some enlightenment as I sobbed into my computer at 1:30 in the morning.

The formatting wasn't difficult, but what was difficult was completing one small part of it after two hours and realizing I still had so many more chapters to go. I stopped. I'll pick it back up someday, but that someday won't today, and it isn't my New Year's resolution either.

The process was fun, though, so I chose to start with a smaller project for my own sanity and wrote what I call a "scrap script" that's nine pages long. It's alright, and for the time being, I figure if I can't write a screenplay, I can at least write about how I can't write a screenplay. Hopefully, someone finds this amusing.

As always, thank you for the entertainment, Meryl.