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I went ahead and did it--BCK's aforementioned webhost migration is complete, and seems not to have broken anything.

Now for the slow process of executing a little makeover, for better performance on mobile devices and whatnot.

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I'm thinking I might move BCK to a different host within the next month. I've done this before. Sometimes the migration process leads to the site going down for a day, so if we disappear, fear not. And you can always check us on FB and Twitter, and I'm on r/kaufman.

Also, I want to FINALLY re-design the site so that it plays nice on mobile devices and doesn't look like it was last redesigned 10 years ago; the re-design process usually gives me headaches and takes forever and causes things to break and I begin to wonder why I bother to do anything. But it needs doing! So be prepared for that. (But again: FB/Twitter if BCK is ever inaccessible.)

Happy New Year!.

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If you're in New York on January 4, you might want a ticket to the reading of David Berman's Actual Air at Union Temple House of CBE. Charlie's gonna be reading, among others:

Actual Air

Join us in celebrating David Berman's life, work, and birthday with a reading of "Actual Air."

Readers: Eric Amling, Cristine Brache, Sam Brumbaugh, Kevin Corrigan, Cyrus Gengras, Bianca Giaever, Eva H.D., Gideon Jacobs, Cassandra Jenkins, Jeff Johnson, Charlie Kaufman, Braden King, Sam Lipsyte, Christian Lorentzen, Kathleen McDonell, Dasha Nekrasova, Leon Neyfakh, Guy Pettit, Zach Phillips, Amos Poe, Natasha Stagg, Dara Wier, Joanna Yas, Caveh Zahedi, and more to be announced (Source)

Tickets at Eventbrite. One of those readers, Eva H.D, authored "Bone Dog," the poem Jessie Buckley recites in I'm Thinking of Ending Things. (Thanks agaetisbyrjun22)

(Via r/DavidBerman and r/kaufman)

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BCK turns 21 today!

The site's a mere 3 years younger than Google. It's been around longer than Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Reddit. (Which is one good reason to maintain a site like this: social media platforms come and go, taking with them all the content you've posted there, not to mention your audience and community. Build your own site, however, and you're not at the mercy of Zuckerberg, Musk, or whatever today's internet hotspot might be.) I remember when LiveJournal was in and Tumblr was big. I was here in the days when it took 5 minutes to download a jpeg on a dialup modem, man.

BCK started out as a stack of hand-coded static HTML pages hosted on a free Tripod account. We've had 4 different webhosts (possibly a 5th next year, though I haven't decided) and we're still chugging along. Sony Pictures once paid our bills, John Laroche was briefly active here, I've heard from Eternal Sunshine's editor and Charlie's former writing partner Paul Proch, and Duke Johnson, and Antkind's publisher, and old friends and family members of CK's, various media outlets, and of course the major contributors to BCK's existence: regular everyday folks who just like Charlie's work and want to talk about it or contribute something to the site.

I was 24 when I launched BCK and I'm 45 now, holy freaking God, and the site is what it is because of the people who visit here and the people who contact me. BCK wouldn't exist if I felt like nobody was interested. (On that note, I've made a lot of really good friends through BCK, too.)

ANYWAY.

Happy Birthday us! Here's hoping Charlie is able to put his art out into the world for years to come.

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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.

 

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Kate Winslet recently dropped by the Intelligence Squared podcast and gave a nice shoutout to Eternal Sunshine's Clementine as one of her favourite, pivotal roles. Via Far Out Magazine:

“I think a favourite for me is Clementine from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” she began. “But you see, the period from Titanic till then, which is about six or seven years, that period of time, making those choices to do smaller films and take risks and be in things that sometimes barely even saw the light of day, I think all of that instinctive behaviour on my part as an actor in making those smaller choices, I think all of it paid off. So I think Clementine is probably one of my favourites, yeah.”

Written by the acclaimed Charlie Kaufman, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is undoubtedly Winslet’s best film and it also features the best performance of her career. Unlike the period pieces she mostly featured in, this 2004 work of art conducts a surreal psychological examination of the nature of a romantic relationship. Kaufman won the Academy Award for his screenplay, and Winslet earned an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

Winslet said, “It’s really fun to take risks and it’s really fun to play lots of different characters. Clementine was the most eccentric part that I’ve ever played. I just had so much fun doing her. What an unlikely pairing. I mean, you wouldn’t imagine that Jim Carrey and I would ever do a movie together.

“When I was sent the script and was asked to do it, I just thought, ‘Well, there’s no way I’m not going to do this’ because I knew that it would be a totally new experience and very challenging, which it was both of those things.” (Source)

 

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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)

 

 

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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.

adaptation 4K cover

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This is a bit of a fluff piece, really, but Kate's fans might be interested in The Things' write-up on how Eternal Sunshine opened people's minds to the kinds of roles she could play.

“[Kate] got the part because I’d interviewed all the most famous actresses of the time – because Charlie Kaufman’s script was very good – and she was the only one to give any negative comments on it. Basically, she was the only one not licking my ---,” Gondry said in an interview with The Daily Beast on the 10th anniversary of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Gondry went ahead to explain the elements that didn’t sit well with Winslet in the script, saying: “She said that it was a little bit repetitive in some places, and we shouldn’t shy away from being more sentimental.”

[...] “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind was the biggest turning point for me because that was when people stopped seeing me as the ‘English rose in a corset’ from an industry perspective. People saw that I was capable of other dimensions,” said Winslet. (Source)

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Did you guys see The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's recent HBO series? It has things in common with Synecdoche, New York--upon the first season's conclusion, Jessica Winter noted the similarities (and differences) in the New Yorker.

Other viewers, including my colleague Naomi Fry, have pointed out the many similarities between “The Rehearsal” and the 2008 film “Synecdoche, New York,” written and directed by Charlie Kaufman. Both center on a protagonist who is simultaneously passive and a control freak, who directs his actors to stalk the real figures whom they are playing, and who dumps insane amounts of other people’s money on giant film sets that are replicas of actual places. But “Synecdoche” is death-haunted, dirge-like, intentionally airless, whereas “The Rehearsal” is a thrilling paradox: ostensibly designed and mapped and thought through to all logical extremes, and yet it feels as though anything can happen. “Synecdoche,” in a typical flourish, enacts its parental anxieties by making the lead character’s daughter renounce him on her deathbed before expiring of tattoo-ink poisoning; “The Rehearsal,” in contrast, depicts every parent’s worst nightmare, then simply reincarnates the kid. (Source)

Later in the piece, she also brings up Adaptation. Well worth reading... and watching!

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