Perhaps the best example of a writer taking a book and just doing whatever the hell he wants with it is the Charlie Kaufman-penned and Spike Jonze-directed 2002 film Adaptation. I would imagine fans of the book on which Adaptation is “based,” Susan Orlean’s non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, may not have been all that satisfied when they saw the finished film. Or maybe they were. At any rate, this is one example of the very process of adaptation being deconstructed to the point where its meaning is stretched to its limits.
Unpacking the plot of Adaptation just ends up sounding stupid because it requires terms like the Droste Effect or mise-en-abyme, and makes it sound more complicated than it actually is. It’s just Charlie Kaufman writing a movie about Charlie Kaufman writing a movie and on and on. But in the process we see how absurd it can be to take material deemed as the “source” and turn it into something almost unrecognizable to the original author. But this is also the point. Adaptation allows for this level of experimentation and self-expression. This was obviously something Charlie Kaufman had wanted to get off of his chest in the process of his earnest attempts to adapt The Orchid Thief in a more straightforward way. So the book ended up serving as a platform upon which he could base this crazy story. In this case, with the direction of Jonze, the movie turned out to be tremendously successful, but it’s important to recognize the riskiness of Kaufman’s screenplay.
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