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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1995, "Orchid Fever," by Susan Orlean
"Adaptation," the new experimental comedy by the team of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman ("Being John Malkovich"), begins with the crisis of a screenwriter--the crisis of Charlie Kaufman himself (Nicolas Cage), who has been hired to adapt the book "The Orchid Thief," by Susan Orlean (Meryl Streep), a staff writer for The New Yorker. Kaufman, as he's portrayed in the movie, is a self-doubting wreck at forty--a sweaty man with thinning hair who wears a flannel shirt in Los Angeles. Charlie's problem is serious. Susan Orlean's book, which grew out of an article published in 1995, chronicling her adventures among the orchid lovers of Florida, is "great sprawling New Yorker stuff." That is, it's a nightmare--observant and ruminative but lacking the kind of clear arc that can be easily shovelled into a movie. "Let it exist!" Charlie shouts, in celebration of the book's special tone. It is one of the many hortatory messages he delivers to himself or to his glib brother Donald (Cage again), also a screenwriter, who moves in with Charlie and whose brain, in a mockery of Charlie's troubles, is teeming with trashy but highly producible movie ideas. Donald loves violent melodrama and startling character turns, exactly the sort of reverberant...
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