Recent Adaptation News

Susan Orlean's book Joyride: A Memoir was released in October, and within it she relates the experience of having her book, The Orchid Thief, turned a Charlie Kaufman movie.

The New Yorker excerpted this part of the book, and it's a fun read. Little snippet:

I flipped through a few pages, and landed on a scene featuring me, as a child, with my parents. What? Another scene included a fictional love affair between John Laroche and me, which was not only embarrassing but, if it had actually occurred, would have violated journalistic ethics. What I didn’t realize at the time was that after struggling for a while with how to write a movie from material that didn’t have an obvious story arc and without betraying the spirit of it, Kaufman had landed on the device of having a fictional movie live within a story about making the movie. He felt he could pay homage to the book in a sincere way and at the same time wickedly portray the meat grinder of Hollywood, which would have wanted to jazz up the story with sex and drugs and drama. He spared no one: his self-portrayal, as a fumbling, whiny artiste who masturbates to my author photo for inspiration, is perhaps the most wicked portrayal of all. (Source)

That link takes you to the New Yorker, but you can hopefully read a non-paywalled version here.

Big thanks to Anthony for the heads up, and sorry I took foreverrrrrr to post!

Really fun interview with Nicolas Cage by Susan Orlean, for the New Yorker. Among other things, of course, the subject gets around to Adaptation.

Recently American Cinematheque held a members' only Charlie Kaufman retrospective at the Egyptian Theater, screening all the big guns: Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine, Synecdoche, Anomalisa and Ending Things. Alongside Charlie for the Adaptation Q&A was Spike Jonze. You can check it out here:

Be sure, too, to check out Charlie's Malkovich Q&A with Catherine Keener.

Adaptation turns 20 this month, and you would think in that time pretty much every Adaptation angle has been covered, but no! Not the angle of Nic Cage's hair! Thank you for filling this gap, Cracked!

Larry Waggoner is the Hollywood hairstylist who came up with the fictional Kaufman's hair, in collaboration with Cage, and Tim Grierson got the lowdown, in an article that is a lot longer (and more interesting) than you would perhaps expect such an article to be:

When he and Cage first met to discuss Adaptation, Cage had ideas about Charlie’s appearance. “I just want to look a little crazy, like Andy Kaufman,” Waggoner remembers the actor telling him. “He’s got that crazy hair.” 

[...] “Nic didn’t want to talk about (his character’s hair) around (Kaufman) because he didn’t want him to feel like he was making fun of him,” Waggoner says. “But Nic had his moments with me where he was like, ‘Crazy-looking hair like that. Look at that guy. Look at that guy.’”

[...] Waggoner took Cage’s suggestions and then figured out how to implement them. “Andy’s hair was a little bit wild and messy — it wasn’t quite as curly,” Waggoner explains. “So I tried to tighten up the curl a little bit so I could keep it more of a short style that wouldn’t move too much — that would just be in place. Charlie Kaufman had a little bit of thinness up top, so I said, ‘Maybe we should make it look like you’re going bald, almost like you’re thinning there.’ And he goes, ‘Yeah, I like that.’ He’d really worked this guy out in his head.” (Source)

Much more at the link.

Adaptation turns 20 in a week(!!) and Collider's Ron Evangelista has taken a little trip down memory lane for the occasion. It's mostly a recap of the movie, but well worth a read if you feel like a little motivation to watch the flick again. (Or for the first time!)

... the striking self-awareness of not only his film, but of Hollywood's conditions and characteristics is what makes this meta-comedy anchored on some sense of realism. One of meta-cinema's conventions is to inform the audience that what they are watching is a film, while mixing some things that would make the audience still immersed in its fictionality, or lack thereof. In Adaptation, Charlie directly mentions to movie adaptation proponent Valerie Thomas (Tilda Swinton) that he does not want to make it the run-of-the-mill film that turns it into an "ordinary Hollywood thing" (such as the aforementioned flower heist film, turning it into a drug-centered story, etc.), and why it cannot be just a movie about flowers. However, the film becomes a gray area of sorts. It embraces what Kaufman reflexively hesitates to become. (Source)

Adaptation turns 20 at the end of the year (!!) and to celebrate, Sony Pictures is giving it the 4K Ultra HD treatment. If you're interested, December 6 is the date to stick in your calendar. Via High-Def Digest:

As per the course with Sony as of late, the 4K UHD Blu-ray edition doesn't include a standard Blu-ray, but it does have a Digital Copy. The release features Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and a legacy featurette and theatrical trailer.

DISC DETAILS & BONUS MATERIALS

4K ULTRA HD DISC

• Newly remastered in 4K resolution from the original camera negative, with Dolby Vision
• All-new Dolby Atmos audio + original theatrical 5.1
• Special Features:
  • Behind the Scenes in the Swamp Featurette
  • Theatrical Trailer

This 4K UHD release does not include a Blu-ray™ (Source)

Snazzy cover art, too.

Pretty safe bet I've never linked to the American Bar Assocation Journal before, but here we go!

Philip N. Meyer has a cool essay about how films like Adaptation can help lawyers in a courtroom. Snippet:

Adaptation offers a lesson on how seemingly unstructured narratives can take form. It also provides a timely and ironic meditation on the struggle all lawyers face when repackaging “reality” into stories, especially into courtroom litigation stories.

[...] Years ago, like Charlie Kaufman, I attended Robert McKee’s storytelling course in New York City. Like many lawyers, I hoped to convert experiences from law practice into a screenplay I could sell to Hollywood. (Source)

Meyer has also written a book, Storytelling For Lawyers.

HAPPY NEW YEAR.

BCK was launched at the end of 2001, so we're into our 21st year. SOON BCK CAN DRINK IN THE U.S.A. (Our birthday is December 18. I usually post about it on the day. But I was lazy this time. Sue me.)

Anyway. A lot of you have probably seen this, it's meta-meta. Nicolas Cage, who once played Charlie Kaufman in a film about a book Charlie adapted into a film, will star this year in a movie about himself, sort of: The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.

Personally I think Charlie should've starred as Cage.

Here's a gorgeous, short documentary from 2020 in which explorers wade through the Florida wetlands to try and find the elusive Ghost Orchid and to learn how those orchids are pollinated. Chasing Ghosts was a Vimeo Staff Pick and has screened at various film fests.

Did you know your humble webmaster is an Aussie? You probably knew this. Anyway, Mark Zuckerberg is having a minor feud with the Australian government at the moment--our goverment wants FB to pay Australian news websites for using their content--and as a result, Zuck has said "Nope" and frozen a bunch of Aussie news sites. Including, apparently, BCK's FB page, despite BCK not being Aussie-centric.

Supposedly a deal has been struck, though, and I expect the FB page will be working again soonly. For now, however, I can't post stuff there. Twitter still works, of course.

No biggie, but a bit of a pain.

Here's a supercut of typewriters in action, featuring a bit of Nic Cage as you-know-who. Consider it BCK's "hold" music between the last update and the next one, which will probably involve me mentioning that Ending Things ISN'T GETTING NOMINATED FOR MUCH OF ANYTHING. Bastards.

The Typewriter (supercut) from Ariel Avissar on Vimeo.

Son’s response to Adaptation: “Mom, we have to talk.”

— Susan Orlean (@susanorlean) August 17, 2020

Slate's Jeffrey Bloomer got in touch with Susan Orlean this week to find out what happened when her 15-year-old son watched Adaptation for the first time, 18 years(!!) after the film came out. It's a pretty cute article.

Slate: Why on earth did this happen?   

Susan Orlean: Well, actually, it’s kind of funny, because I didn’t make the decision. I’m sure at various times I have suggested to my son that he should read The Orchid Thief, which he’s exhibited no interest in doing. And I figured, First, have him read the book, then he can see the movie. In any case, out of the blue the other night, my husband said, “So, we’re going to watch—Austin and I have decided we’re going to watch Adaptation tonight.” And I said, “Oh, OK. Cool … I’ll watch with you.” So it was an involuntary commitment rather than one that I sought out purposefully. And it also did kind of undercut my theory that the movie—It would be better for him to read the book first so he could put the movie in context. It didn’t work that way. (Source)

Was it released on Blu-ray at an earlier point, somewhere in the dim dark past? I can't remember. [Update: it was. Thanks to Bryan for confirming.] No problem, though, cos Adaptation will be coming to Blu-ray later this year thanks to Shout! Factory:

Bonus Features:
· Original Featurette
· Trailer
· Still Gallery

So nothing new, but if you need to update or upgrade your collection of CK paraphernalia, this one's for you!

She was a little drunk, and the resulting tweets were trending.

The thread began with a tweet that simply read “Drunk” and began ending with one that read, “I am goi f to sleep. My husband has asked me five hundred rimes@if I am alright. That means it’s go to sleep o’clock.” At some point in the middle, she tweeted: “Ok a newborn colt rocks it totally and he thought my hand was his mom. It was not. He has tasted life’s infinite tragedy. As I mentioned Earlier I am inebriated.”

Entertainment Weekly pronounced that she stole “our hearts with drunken tweetstorm.” The A.V. Club dubbed the thread a “choice read,” and Vogue called it “the pandemic comic relief we needed right now.” Comedian Craig Cackowski performed a dramatic reading. (Source)

Drunk, or smoking orchids?

Joshua Landy takes an in-depth look at Adaptation in his paper, Still Life in a Narrative Age: Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, and you can grab it for free online (sign-up required, PDF download). Here's the summary:

We are living in an age that is narratively obsessed: both in the academy and in popular culture, temporally articulated phenomena currently exert a vice-like grip over the collective imagination. Under such conditions, how may non-narrative sources of aesthetic power be made available once again to human observers? Charlie Kaufman’s response, in Adaptation, takes the form not of statements but of actions, of “philosophical therapy” for our insatiable narrative hunger. It leaves us, in the end, with two phenomena that have (in the full sense of the word) no history at all: the beauty of flowers and the intricacy of a human soul. (Source)

Awesome! If your brain is ready for that sort of thing, head on over for a look!

From Uproxx:

The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent is an extremely meta movie where Cage, playing famous actor Nicolas Cage, begrudgingly agrees to attend the birthday of a Mexican billionaire (for a cool $1 million), but “when things take a wild turn, the Oscar winner is forced to become a version of some of his most iconic and beloved characters in order to extricate himself from an increasingly dangerous situation.”

[...] “It’s a stylized version of me, and the fact I even have to refer to myself in the third person makes me extremely uncomfortable,” Cage told Empire. “There are many scenes in the movie where modern or contemporary – here we go – ‘Nic Cage’ and then young ‘Nic Cage’ are colliding and arguing and battling it out. It’s an acrobatic approach to acting.” (Source)