Posted are two versions of our Kaufman story: My revise with Jason's comments/changes/challenges and then the clean version I put together for Wired's executive editor, Bob Cohn, to read.
Right now, I see this story as 85% finished. There are still a few TK's (shorthand for "to come") in need of filling but I'm thinking the piece looks pretty good. There are still a lot of steps to go: Bob's version, with his comments and questions (posting tomorrow), copy editing, fact-checking, art's layout, a process we have here called "scrub," but we'll get to that next week. For now, here's Jason's version and my final (for now) take, presented side-by-side for comparison.
Disclaimer: The piece will be fact-checked and copy-edited soon, but for now, this story, like the previous versions, may contain errors.
]]>
FF.Kaufman JTanz Revise
UNADAPTED
Charlie Kaufman's ability to bend moviegoers' minds has made him one of cinema's most respected auteurs. But with his directorial debut, has Hollywood's brainiest screenwriter gotten too smart for his own good?
By Jason Tanz
There are TK sentences in this story. One of them is false.
[Break]
We
open on Charlie Kaufman, entering an empty room in a French bistro in
Los Angeles. He is slight. A healthy serving of reddish brown curls
burst from his noggin. Two deep vertical creases climb from the bridge
of his nose, the product, one imagines, of countless late-night
brow-furrowing sessions. His wardrobe whispers "hipster-shlub":
short-sleeve Penguin button-down, tan jeans, lime-green socks. Kaufman,
50[CK], has a reputation for shyness, but, as he takes a seat in the
far corner of the restaurant, he speaks directly, rapidly, forcefully.
The conversation begins with some recording difficulties, and Kaufman
smirks. "Every journalist who ever interviews me tells me they don't
know how to work their recorder," he says. "I think it's a bit of a
scam to disarm me or something." [OK, THIS IS MY ATTEMPTED SOLUTION TO
THE QUOTE ISSUE. I DON'T KNOW. I DON'T LOVE BRINGING MYSELF INTO THIS.
BUT I THINK IT'S TOO MUCH TO BRING UP HIS UNEASE ABOUT THE MOVIE AND
ITS RECEPTION RIGHT IN THE TOP GRAF. JUST BEGS TOO MANY QUESTIONS. SO
MAYBE THIS HELPS EASE US INTO THE SCENE, AND ALSO HINTS AT HIS
SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND HUMOR?]
Kaufman is here to talk up his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York,
which comes out on October 24. The film is the Oscar-winning
screenwriter's trickiest to date -- which is really saying something.
Kaufman's previous mind-bending work -- a roster that includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich -- brought meta to the multiplex and established him as the most distinctive and admired screenwriter of his generation. With Synecdoche, Kaufman is attempting to make the jump to full-on auteur
status. It has been five years since he started batting ideas around
with his friend and sometime collaborator Spike Jonze, five long years
during which he worked on nothing but this bleak story of a man's
anxieties, failures, flaws and ultimate demise. The result, Synecdoche, New York,
is a deeply personal, borderline-obsessive story of heartache and death
-- and not the fun kind of death that fills movie theaters, but the
holy-crap-look-at-the-size-of-that-abyss kind of death that fills
Sartre novels. It is not, in other words, an easy sell. And now he has to plug the thing. [because
it's coming out when TK?] [I PUT THE DATE IN EARLIER. I LIKE ENDING
WITH "AND NOW HE HAS TO PLUG THE THING." IT FEELS LIKE A STRONG END TO
THAT GRAF. THAT OK?]
He is not very good at it. The first question is a softball -- How do you feel about this film in relation to your other ones? -- and the answer should be obvious. would seem pre-determined [line is little awkard. The standard filmmaker answer is]: I'm prouder of this movie than any I've ever done. Everyone should see it. But Kaufman doesn't do confident. "This
is a difficult period for me right now with this movie, because it's
over and I want it to be over," he says. "Putting it out into the
world, there's a lot of..." He trails off, stares at a point in the
middle distance for a few seconds, then continues. [Per
my note above, you might want to move this underlined quote up earlier,
then keep this part of the quote here. Not sure if that will work, but
seems like we take a long time to hear from him.] [THIS OK NOW?] "It's
so hard to know what I'm supposed to say. I'm participating in an
article to sell this movie, but what am I supposed to say? 'It's great
and I'm loving it'? It seems to be a tricky thing to sell people on,
and I'm frustrated with that."
Welcome to the mind of Charlie KaufmanThe mind of Charlie Kaufman may not be the , [I find the "Welcome to" construction a little cliché. Do you need it?] maybe not the happiest place on earth, but it is one
of the most fascinating. At a time when most movies measure success by
the number of cornea-frying fireballs, Kaufman creates different kinds
of explosions -- IN YOUR MIND! -- merging the existential
despair of Beckett, the absurdist humor of Monty Python, and the
intellectual playfulness of a natural-born puzzle geek. (Kaufman is
particularly fond of Epimenides' Paradox, a classic one-sentence
brainbuster: "This sentence is false.") In Malkovich, the eponymous actor enters a portal into his own mind. In Adaptation, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman writes himself into his own movie, which becomes Adaptation. And the lead character of Eternal Sunshine
witnesses his memories as they are being erased, including the memory
of his decision to erase his memories. Cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer-winning tome Godel, Escher, Bach,
refers to such regressions as "strange loops" -- circular paradoxes that
contain themselves. And Kaufman's Moebius scripts [clever!] contain
some of the strangest loops ever put to film. "I've been told that my
stuff is mathematical," says Kaufman. "There's like a hidden epiphany
in it for me. You think you understand something, and then another
version opens up." [Great stuff ]
For anyone who doesn't mind a little grey matter with their Raisinets [nice], Kaufman is more than a writer; he is a cultural touchstone. brainiac-god. [Hmmm...maybe a little overstated.] "Screenwriters are notoriously badly treated, but he's one of the few that has a reputation just for his voice as a writer," says Patrick Goldstein, TK. "Filmmakers
are eager to see his scripts, and actors are eager to play the parts he
writes." [THIS BETTER? I ALSO HAVE A QUOTE FROM A GUY WHO JUST WROTE A
BOOK ON KAUFMAN, JUST ABOUT HOW GREAT HE IS. OR MAYBE WE DON'T NEED A QUOTE HERE AT ALL.]
Once,
everybody who was in screenwriting wanted to be Quentin Tarantino,"
says Mick Spadaro, who runs beingcharliekaufman.com, a fan site. "Now,
everybody wants to be Charlie Kaufman." [I'm not crazy about this source -- not really surprising that the guy from the charliekaufman.com fansite is saying this.]
"It's
hard not to see his influence," says Anthony Bregman, who has served as
producer on three of Kaufman's films. "Every submission I get is, 'We
have a Charlie Kaufmanesque movie for you.'"
But it's hard to imagine anyone trying to keep up with Synecdoche, Kaufman's most Kaufmanesque film yet. (Yes, that's a tautology.) Let Stranger Than Fiction and Tropic Thunder splash around the ontological kiddie-pool; Synecdoche plunges to such murky depths that it makes Adaptation look like Mamma Mia!
The film revolves around theater director Caden Cotard, played by
Philip Seymour Hoffman, who attempts to capture the "brutal truth" of
his own existence by staging a life-sized, real-time recreation of it.
He casts an actor to play him, who then must cast an actor to play him, and so on ad infinitum. Caden's girlfriend attracts the affections of the actor playing Caden, and Caden sleeps with the actress playing her.
The entire story, meanwhile, is filtered through Caden's perspective --
further complicating matters, because his autonomic nervous system may
be shutting down, and there are hints that he suffers from psychosis,
chromosomal damage, and Capgras syndrome. Meanwhile, Kaufman himself
hovers around the outer rim of this infinite spiral, a director who --
like Caden -- is attempting to recreate the story of his life, only to get muddled and lost along the way.
If that description makes you yearn for a Kaufman decoder ring [nice, because yes, it does], keep wishing; this time, the puzzle master doesn't provide any answers. "Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine ultimately have a safety valve -- a clever conceit that you come to understand," Kaufman says from his perch in the French restaurant. [WOULD LOVE TO BE MORE COLORFUL, BUT HONESTLY HOW MUCH MORE IS THERE TO SAY?] [Feels like we've lost our scenery here. Where are we?]. "There
isn't anything like that in this movie, which is more like life. Things
flying off and becoming unhinged and being incomprehensible seem to be
the process of existence. That's what I set out to explore. I don't
know. Maybe it isn't a good idea for a movie."
Early indications suggest that Kaufman may be right. Synecdoche was one of the most highly hotly anticipated [better?] [cliché alert] films
to screen at Cannes in June, but it left the festival without a
distributor. (To be fair, no other American film got picked up at
Cannes either. True, but the buzz around this film was big and this is Kaufman we're talking about here. [YES, ABSOLUTELY, BUT I STILL THINK WE NEED THE PARENTHETICAL DISCLAIMER. BUZZ AROUND CHE WAS BIG TOO...) And while the movie has received its share of raves -- Time called it "a miracle movie" -- most reviews have focused instead on its difficulty; Variety's
mostly warm analysis warned that "a venturesome distrib will have its
work cut out for it," adding that the film spins "into realms that can
most charitably be described as ambiguous and more derisively as
obscurantist and incomprehensible." (Synecdoche was quietly picked up, two months after Cannes, by Sony Classics. It hits theaters in late October.)
It will be two more months before the film's release, and on this August afternoon Kaufman waits, anxiously, For now, on this August afternoon, there is nothing for Kaufman to do but wait, anxiously, for the market to render its cold verdict [Sort of. I mean, he's out there, shilling his movie, going to film fests months before its out. DOES THIS FIX MATTERS?] He has been here before. When he submitted the screenplay for Adaptation,
he says, he assumed he was destroying his career. "Charlie's nature is
to set himself up in ways that he can't possibly succeed," says Spike
Jonze, who directed Adaptation and Malkovich, "to set up goals that are impossible to pull off."
That's not a fun job description, but
Kaufman doesn't see that he has any other choice. "I'm not going to
pander," Kaufman says. "I'm going to anti-pander. But then the question
I raise about myself is, Is that pandering?" Pause. "You can't win."
[BREAK]
Here's
another paradox, albeit one not quite worthy of a Kaufman film: Charlie
Kaufman, perhaps the world's most famous writer of movies, hates almost
all movies. I HAVE SEEN HIM QUOTED SEVERAL PLACES ON THE PERNICIOUSNESS
OF MAINSTREAM HOLLYWOOD STORYTELLING. I PARTICULARLY NEED HIM TO TALK
ABOUT HOW STORIES DON'T ALWAYS END HAPPILY OR EASILY, WHICH WILL TIE
INTO THE END OF THIS STORY. SHOULD BE EASY TO GET THIS OUT OF HIM IN
TORONTO. I HOPE TO ALSO GET A COUPLE OF OTHER SCENES OUT OF TORONTO TO
WORK INTO THIS GRAF AND INSERT BELOW, WHERE I'VE PUT ASTERISKS.
It
may seem surprising, then, that Kaufman began his path to screenwriting
stardom as a scribe for that most constrained and artificial of
formats, the half-hour sitcom. It is probably less surprising that
Kaufman was not very successful at it. (How do you know when you're
toiling in obscurity? When Chris Elliott's cult series Get a Life is the best-known show on your resume.) Throughout the early 90s, Kaufman worked on such forgotten gems as Ned and Stacey, Misery Loves Company, The Dana Carvey Show, and a sketch-comedy show called The Edge. He developed a pilot for Disney called Astronuts
(their title), which Kaufman remembers as "a throwback to the Monkees
about a goofy rock band that were astronauts by day and their biggest
challenge was getting back from space in time so they could make their
gig."
More than once, Kaufman wrote scripts that so
incensed the networks that they opted to "go dark" -- not broadcast the
show that week -- rather than air them.[Oh I so want to read those!]
Kaufman penned an episode for the short-lived Bronson Pinchot vehicle The Trouble With Larry,
in which the title character mistakes his archaeologist-roommate's rare
child-king mummy for a piñata, and then has to replace it with an
injured tightrope-walking monkey in a full-body cast. "They wouldn't do
it," Kaufman remembers. "There was a woman on staff who was an
animal-rights person, and she was crying. I was like, 'Man, this is the
stupidest thing. It makes no sense any way you look at it. The monkey's
in a human hospital. A mummy doesn't look like a piñata. Why can't you
make a fake mummy instead of stealing the monkey?' That's what was
funny to me about it. It was like saying 'This form is such bullshit,
let's play around with it.'"
In between short-lived gigs,
Kaufman worked on a similarly bizarre screenplay about a hapless
puppeteer who discovers a portal into the consciousness of actor John
Malkovich. The script was audacious and silly, and Kaufman, who wrote
it to attract more television work, never expected it to be made. But
in YEARTK he got a call from Spike Jonze, a popular music-video
director seeking his first foray into feature films. "It was unlike
anything I had ever read," Jonze says. "Later, Charlie told me that the
script had gotten around and everyone said it was unmakeable. I guess I
didn't know any better."
Kaufman was unfamiliar with Jonze --
whom he assumed was the son of 1940s novelty musician Spike Jones -- but
the two quickly bonded. Jonze invited Kaufman, who lived in New York at
the time, to his Los Angeles home, where the two spent four days going
over every line of the screenplay. Jonze had issues with the movie's
third act: Kaufman's draft spun off into chaos, with the main character
engaging in a puppeteering duel with the devil, who enters Malkovich's
body and rules earth like a tyrant. Together, the two hammered out a
new ending that felt less madcap and more emotionally resonant.
That
provided a template for Kaufman, who has been deeply involved with the
making of almost all of his films, a rarity for a screenwriter. In his
subsequent movies -- Human Nature, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine
-- Kaufman submitted drafts to the directors, then worked hand-in-hand
with them as they revised and polished the script together. (The one
exception: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, an impressionistic biopic about Gong Show creator
Chuck Barriss. Kaufman says that George Clooney, who directed the film,
never consulted him, and he still holds a grudge. "My value to a
director is to keep them aware of what the movie's really about," Kaufman says. "He wasn't interested in that.") Gondry somewhere in this section, maybe? [ASSUMING I CAN GET HIM, YES]
Jonze was initially slated to direct Synecdoche as well. The idea for the film came from Amy Pascal, Sony's TITLE TK. While traveling with Kaufman and Jonze to promote Adaptation,
she suggested that the two work on a horror movie. Jonze had recently
suffered anxiety dreams, and he and Kaufman agreed they would rather
capture the eerie quality of those night terrors than recreate standard
slasher-flick tropes. The two hashed out some basic details -- a man
dying of an unidentifiable disease -- and Kaufman left to write.
He emerged two years later with Synecodoche,
a sprawling opus that spans TK decades of regret and death. By that
time, Jonze was already committed to directing an adaptation of Maurice
Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Kaufman, who majored in filmmaking at New York University, always planned to direct. He asked Jonze if he could take over Synecdoche, and Jonze quickly agreed. Quote here from Kaufman about why he wanted to direct? [WILL GET FROM HIM IN TORONTO]
With
Kaufman at the helm, there was no need to engage in multi-day
script-polishing sessions, no requirement to adapt his work to another
director's vision. This time, Kaufman was free to make the movie as he
saw fit. Other than some cutting for length, there was virtually no
difference between Kaufman's first draft and the shooting script.
But
if this was a thrilling prospect for Kaufman, it was less so for Sony;
after reading the script and learning that Jonze would not direct it,
they abandoned the project, requiring Kaufman to drum up financing from
other sources. (He eventually got $20 million from Sidney Kimmel
Entertainment.) Meanwhile, Kaufman found himself growing defensive over
some of his artistic choices. He says that he and Jonze had some
difficult conversations after screenings, when Jonze would suggest
directions with which Kaufman disagreed. "There were tensions," Kaufman
says. "But Spike loves the movie now. He has told me that it isn't the
movie he would make, but it shouldn't be. It's the movie that I made."
*** INSERT ANOTHER SCENE FROM TORONTO HERE.
Jonze says that, for him, the story of Synecdoche
ends at the screening at Cannes. "I'd already seen this movie so many
times in editing, but at that screening, somehow I still felt it very
deeply," he says. "And the movie was over, and the credits were
rolling, and I was still sitting in that space that the movie created.
And then the lights came up, and suddenly I'm seeing thousands of other
faces in that same space. And they gave Charlie a standing ovation, and
it had such feeling to it. That felt like the end of it. Now
we have to release it, and there's all this other stuff, but that felt
like the ending."
[BREAK]
Well, that's one
ending. It's a pretty familiar one to any movie buff: the dedicated
individual who believes in himself, takes on every risk, and triumphs.
That's been Kaufman's story so far -- it's the story of Being John Malkovich, the story of Adaptation, the story of Eternal Sunshine. It wraps everything up in a nice bow and lets us all feel good about ourselves. Maybe this ends the same way, with Synecdoche finding a dedicated following and earning its place in cinematic history, even if it never does Dark Knight numbers.
But
maybe there is another way to end to this story. Maybe it doesn't end
with Kaufman's moment of triumph in Cannes. Maybe after Cannes, Synecdoche
sees a limited release. Maybe audiences don't love it. Maybe Kaufman
doesn't emerge victorious. Maybe he spends five years pursuing the
truest expression of his artistic vision, only to find it
misunderstood, or underappreciated, or -- worst of all -- ignored. Maybe
this is a story of frustration and disappointment and failure. It may
not be a happy ending. It may not be the kind of ending that would make
for a good Hollywood movie. But it is the kind of ending, for better or
worse, that Charlie Kaufman would write.
__________________________________________
FF.Kaufman 01 Full
UNADAPTED
Charlie Kaufman's ability to bend moviegoers' minds has made him one of cinema's most respected auteurs. But with his directorial debut, has Hollywood's brainiest screenwriter gotten too smart for his own good?
By Jason Tanz
There are TK sentences in this story. One of them is false.
[Break]
We
open on Charlie Kaufman, entering an empty room in a French bistro in
Los Angeles. He looks nothing like Nicolas Cage, who played Kaufman in
the Kaufman-penned film Adaptation. Cage is hulkish and
balding. Kaufman is slight, with a healthy serving of reddish brown
curls. Two deep vertical creases climb from the bridge of his nose, the
product, one imagines, of countless late-night brow-furrowing sessions.
His wardrobe whispers "hipster-shlub": short-sleeve Penguin
button-down, tan jeans, lime-green socks. Kaufman, 50[CK], has a
reputation for shyness, but, as he takes a seat in the far corner of
the restaurant, he speaks directly, rapidly, forcefully.
Kaufman is here to talk up his directorial debut, Synecdoche, New York.
The film, out in late October, is the Oscar-winning screenwriter's
trickiest to date -- which is really saying something. Kaufman's
previous mind-bending work -- a roster that includes Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, and Being John Malkovich -- brought meta to the multiplex and established him as the most distinctive and admired screenwriter of his generation. With Synecdoche, Kaufman is attempting to make the jump to full-on auteur
status. It's been five years since he started batting ideas around with
his friend and sometime collaborator Spike Jonze, five long years
during which he worked on nothing but this bleak story of a man's
anxieties, failures, flaws and ultimate demise. It's a deeply personal,
borderline-obsessive story of heartache and death -- and not the fun
kind of death that fills movie theaters, but the
holy-crap-look-at-the-size-of-that-abyss kind of death that fills
Smiths albums and Sartre novels. It is not, in other words, an easy sell. And now he has to plug the thing.
He
is not very good at it. The first question is a softball -- How do you
feel about this film in relation to your other ones? -- and the answer
should be obvious.: I'm prouder of this movie than any I've ever done. Everyone should see it.
But Kaufman doesn't do confident. "This is a difficult period for me
right now with this movie, because it's over and I want it to be over,"
he says. "Putting it out into the world, there's a lot of..." He trails
off, stares at a point in the middle distance for a few seconds, then
continues. "It's so hard to know what I'm supposed to say. I'm
participating in an article to sell this movie, but what am I supposed
to say? 'It's great and I'm loving it'? It seems to be a tricky thing
to sell people on, and I'm frustrated with that."
The mind
of Charlie Kaufman may not be the happiest place on earth, but it is
one of the most fascinating. At a time when most movies measure success
by the number of cornea-frying fireballs, Kaufman creates different
kinds of explosions -- IN YOUR MIND! -- merging the existential
despair of Beckett, the absurdist humor of Monty Python, and the
intellectual playfulness of a natural-born puzzle geek. (Kaufman is
particularly fond of Epimenides' Paradox, a classic one-sentence
brainbuster: "This sentence is false.") In Malkovich, the eponymous actor enters a portal into his own mind. In Adaptation, a screenwriter named Charlie Kaufman writes himself into his own movie, which becomes Adaptation. And the lead character of Eternal Sunshine
witnesses his memories as they are being erased, including the memory
of his decision to erase his memories. Cognitive scientist Douglas
Hofstadter, in his Pulitzer-winning tome Godel, Escher, Bach,
refers to such regressions as "strange loops" -- circular paradoxes that
contain themselves. And Kaufman's Moebius scripts [clever!] contain
some of the strangest loops ever put to film. "I've been told that my
stuff is mathematical," says Kaufman. "There's like a hidden epiphany
in it for me. You think you understand something, and then another
version opens up."
For anyone who doesn't mind a little
grey matter with their Raisinets, Kaufman is more than a writer; he is
a cultural touchstone. "It's hard not to see his influence," says
Anthony Bregman, who has served as producer on three of Kaufman's
films. "Every submission I get is, 'We have a Charlie Kaufmanesque
movie for you.'"
But it's hard to imagine anyone trying to keep up with Synecdoche, Kaufman's most Kaufmanesque film yet. (Yes, that's a tautology.) Let Stranger Than Fiction and Tropic Thunder splash around the ontological kiddie-pool; Synecdoche plunges to such murky depths that it makes Adaptation look like Mamma Mia!
The film revolves around theater director Caden Cotard (played by
Philip Seymour Hoffman), who attempts to capture the "brutal truth" of
his own existence by staging a life-sized, real-time recreation of it.
He casts an actor to play him, who then must cast an actor to play him, and so on ad infinitum. Caden's girlfriend attracts the affections of the actor playing Caden, and Caden sleeps with the actress playing her.
The entire story, meanwhile, is filtered through Caden's perspective --
further complicating matters, because his autonomic nervous system may
be shutting down, and there are hints that he suffers from psychosis,
chromosomal damage, and Capgras syndrome. (Caden's last name, Cotard, is also the name of a delusion that causes sufferers to believe that they are dead or dying.) Meanwhile,
Kaufman himself hovers around the outer rim of this infinite spiral, a
director who -- like Caden -- is attempting to recreate the story of his life, only to get muddled and lost along the way.
If
this all makes you yearn for a Kaufman decoder ring, keep wishing; this
time, the puzzle master doesn't provide any answers. "Adaptation or Eternal Sunshine
ultimately have a safety valve -- a clever conceit that you come to
understand," Kaufman says."There isn't anything like that in this
movie, which is more like life. Things flying off and becoming unhinged
and being incomprehensible seem to be the process of existence. That's
what I set out to explore. I don't know. Maybe it isn't a good idea for
a movie."
Early indications suggest that Kaufman may be right. Synecdoche was
one of the most highly anticipated films to screen at Cannes in June,
but it left the festival without a distributor. (To be fair, no other
American film, including Steven Soderbergh's equally hyped Che Guevara
biopic landed a deal at Cannes either.) And while the movie has
received its share of raves -- Time called it "a miracle movie" -- most reviews have focused instead on its difficulty; Variety's
mostly warm analysis warned that "a venturesome distrib will have its
work cut out for it," adding that the film spins "into realms that can
most charitably be described as ambiguous and more derisively as
obscurantist and incomprehensible." (Two months after Cannes, Sony
Classics quietly picked up Synecdoche for TK million, with plans to release in a modest TK number theaters.)
It
will be two more months before the film comes out, and on this August
afternoon Kaufman waits, anxiously, for the market to render its cold
verdict. He has been here before. When he submitted the screenplay for Adaptation,
he says, he assumed he was destroying his career. "Charlie's nature is
to set himself up in ways that he can't possibly succeed," says Spike
Jonze, who directed Adaptation and Malkovich, "to set up goals that are impossible to pull off."
Kaufman
doesn't see that he has any other choice. "I'm not going to pander,"
Kaufman says. "I'm going to anti-pander. But then the question I raise
about myself is, Is that pandering?" Pause. "You can't win."
[BREAK]
Charlie
Kaufman is running through a courtyard and into the bathroom of a
restaurant in Toronto, his hands to his face, bleeding from the bridge
of his nose. It's early September, the TKth night of the Toronto Film
Festival and in two days, Synecdoche
will make it's North American premiere. Tonight, Sony Pictures Classics
is throwing a party to promote the ten films they have at the festival
and, with any luck, generate early Oscar buzz. In one corner, director
Jonathan Demme chats up a few industry bigwigs as a luminous Anne
Hathaway dazzles a few lanyard-toting reporters. Kaufman should be
right here, eating canapés and shilling Synecdoche,
but he bumped his head getting out of his taxi and his glasses sliced
into his face, and now he's in panicking that he's broken his nose.
Instead of schmoozing, Kaufman spends the cocktail hour in a darkened
corner of the restaurant, talking to actress Debra Winger about her
farm in the Catskills and holding a napkin full of ice cubes to his
face.
"I shouldn't have come here tonight," he mutters. "Then my nose would be fine."
Even now, Hollywood's most admired screenwriter can't manage to celebrate. And here's
another paradox, albeit one not quite worthy of a Kaufman film: Charlie
Kaufman, perhaps the world's most famous writer of movies, hates almost
all movies He is miserable about the state of the movie industry, and hates much of what Hollywood produces in the name of art. "TK quote from Kaufman Tk"
It
may seem surprising, then, that Kaufman began his path to screenwriting
stardom as a scribe for that most constrained and artificial of
formats, the half-hour sitcom. It is probably less surprising that
Kaufman was not very successful at it. (How do you know when you're
toiling in obscurity? When Chris Elliott's cult series Get a Life is the best-known show on your resume.) Throughout the early 90s, Kaufman worked on such forgotten gems as Ned and Stacey, Misery Loves Company, The Dana Carvey Show, and a sketch-comedy show called The Edge. He developed a pilot for Disney called Astronuts
(their title), which Kaufman remembers as "a throwback to the Monkees
about a goofy rock band that were astronauts by day and their biggest
challenge was getting back from space in time so they could make their
gig."
More than once, Kaufman wrote scripts that so
incensed the networks that they opted to "go dark" -- not broadcast the
show that week -- rather than air them. Kaufman penned an episode for
the short-lived Bronson Pinchot vehicle The Trouble With Larry,
in which the title character mistakes his archaeologist-roommate's rare
child-king mummy for a piñata, and then has to replace it with an
injured tightrope-walking monkey in a full-body cast. "They wouldn't do
it," Kaufman remembers. "There was a woman on staff who was an
animal-rights person, and she was crying. I was like, 'Man, this is the
stupidest thing. It makes no sense any way you look at it. The monkey's
in a human hospital. A mummy doesn't look like a piñata. Why can't you
make a fake mummy instead of stealing the monkey?' That's what was
funny to me about it. It was like saying 'This form is such bullshit,
let's play around with it.'"
In between short-lived gigs,
Kaufman worked on a similarly bizarre screenplay about a hapless
puppeteer who discovers a portal into the consciousness of actor John
Malkovich. The script was audacious and silly, and Kaufman, who wrote
it to attract more television work, never expected it to be made. But
in YEARTK he got a call from Spike Jonze, a popular music-video
director seeking his first foray into feature films. "It was unlike
anything I had ever read," Jonze says. "Later, Charlie told me that the
script had gotten around and everyone said it was unmakeable. I guess I
didn't know any better."
Kaufman was unfamiliar with Jonze --
whom he assumed was the son of 1940s novelty musician Spike Jones -- but
the two quickly bonded. Jonze invited Kaufman, who lived in New York at
the time, to his Los Angeles home, where the two spent four days going
over every line of the screenplay. Jonze had issues with the movie's
third act: Kaufman's draft spun off into chaos, with the main character
engaging in a puppeteering duel with the devil, who enters Malkovich's
body and rules earth like a tyrant. Together, the two hammered out a
new ending that felt less madcap and more emotionally resonant.
That
provided a template for Kaufman, who has been deeply involved with the
making of almost all of his films, a rarity for a screenwriter. In his
subsequent movies -- Human Nature, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine
-- Kaufman submitted drafts to the directors, then worked hand-in-hand
with them as they revised and polished the script together. (The one
exception: Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, an impressionistic biopic about Gong Show creator
Chuck Barriss. Kaufman says that George Clooney, who directed the film,
never consulted him, and he still holds a grudge. "My value to a
director is to keep them aware of what the movie's really about," Kaufman says. "He wasn't interested in that.")
Jonze was initially slated to direct Synecdoche
as well. The idea for the film came from Amy Pascal, co-chair at Sony
Pictures. While traveling with Kaufman and Jonze to promote Adaptation,
she suggested that the two work on a horror movie. Jonze had recently
suffered anxiety dreams, and he and Kaufman agreed they would rather
capture the eerie quality of those night terrors than recreate standard
slasher-flick tropes. The two hashed out some basic details -- a man
dying of an unidentifiable disease -- and Kaufman left to write.
He emerged two years later with Synecodoche,
a sprawling opus that spans TK decades of regret and death. By that
time, Jonze was already committed to directing an adaptation of Maurice
Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are. Kaufman, who majored in filmmaking at New York University, always planned to direct. He asked Jonze if he could take over Synecdoche, and Jonze quickly agreed. Quote here from Kaufman about why he wanted to direct TK from Toronto.
With
Kaufman at the helm, there was no need to engage in multi-day
script-polishing sessions, no requirement to adapt his work to another
director's vision. This time, Kaufman was free to make the movie as he
saw fit. Other than some cutting for length, there was virtually no
difference between Kaufman's first draft and the shooting script.
But
if this was a thrilling prospect for Kaufman, it was less so for Sony;
after reading the script and learning that Jonze would not direct it,
they abandoned the project, requiring Kaufman to drum up financing from
other sources. (He eventually got $20 million from Sidney Kimmel
Entertainment.) Meanwhile, Kaufman found himself growing defensive over
some of his artistic choices. He says that he and Jonze had some
difficult conversations after screenings, when Jonze would suggest
directions with which Kaufman disagreed. "There were tensions," Kaufman
says. "But Spike loves the movie now. He has told me that it isn't the
movie he would make, but it shouldn't be. It's the movie that I made."
Jonze says that, for him, the story of Synecdoche
ends at the screening at Cannes. "I'd already seen this movie so many
times in editing, but at that screening, somehow I still felt it very
deeply," he says. "And the movie was over, and the credits were
rolling, and I was still sitting in that space that the movie created.
And then the lights came up, and suddenly I'm seeing thousands of other
faces in that same space. And they gave Charlie a standing ovation, and
it had such feeling to it. That felt like the end of it. Now
we have to release it, and there's all this other stuff, but that felt
like the ending."
[BREAK]
Well, that's one
ending. It's a pretty familiar one to any movie buff: the dedicated
individual who believes in himself, takes on every risk, and triumphs.
That's been Kaufman's story so far -- it's the story of Being John Malkovich, the story of Adaptation, the story of Eternal Sunshine. It wraps everything up in a nice bow and lets us all feel good about ourselves. Maybe this ends the same way, with Synecdoche finding a dedicated following and earning its place in cinematic history, even if it never does Dark Knight numbers.
But
maybe there is another way to end to this story. Maybe it doesn't end
with Kaufman's moment of triumph in Cannes. Maybe after Cannes, Synecdoche
sees a limited release. Maybe audiences don't love it. Maybe Kaufman
doesn't emerge victorious. Maybe he spends five years pursuing the
truest expression of his artistic vision, only to find it
misunderstood, or underappreciated, or -- worst of all -- ignored. Maybe
this is a story of frustration and disappointment and failure. It may
not be a happy ending. It may not be the kind of ending that would make
for a good Hollywood movie. But it is the kind of ending, for better or
worse, that Charlie Kaufman would write.
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