''Well, then, it's settled,'' Jensen said. ''I'm stuck doing a conventional story. And seeing that I've got, um, zilch, I'd better return to my own private hell now.''
As I walked away from his office, all I could think was, Boy, sucks to be him.
Bunnies and unicorns, Jensen repeated to himself the next night, rocking back and forth in his office chair. Go to a happy place.... You can do this! Ignoring three e-mails from his editor about a looming deadline, he started typing:
''Adaptation is the twisted tale of Charlie Kaufman (Cage), a highly neurotic screenwriter who's taken the daunting task of adapting The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean's critically acclaimed nonfiction book about an eccentric orchid collector named John Laroche (Chris Cooper). The assignment soon brings him to his knees. Can't write. Can't sleep. Can't stop sweating. Can't stop sexually obsessing over Orlean (Streep). Making matters worse, his photonegative twin brother, Donald (Cage, again), has found instant success by penning an incredibly formulaic action film. One day, in a fit of delusional genius, Kaufman inserts himself -- along with some drugs, gunfights, car crashes, and a completely implausible romance -- into his screenplay and things get really weird.''
Jensen stopped pecking. He could check off the obligatory synopsis paragraph. Now he needed to convey how closely Kaufman's screenplay mirrored Kaufman's own life. Why not copy, paste, and edit the first three sentences from the previous paragraph? They were ripped from reality. In 1998, Kaufman -- a former middling sitcom writer who'd just penned the quirky Being John Malkovich -- had been approached by the production company headed up by Jonathan Demme, the Oscar-winning director of The Silence of the Lambs, to adapt Orlean's book. All parties knew that bringing The Orchid Thief to the big screen would be challenging, given that the book was basically a nonlinear rumination on flowers. But as it was explained to Jensen by Demme's producing partner Edward Saxon, who (along with then VP of development Valerie Thomas) had helped woo Kaufman: ''I thought that John Laroche was completely singular.... I thought it could be one of those films about unlikely heroes -- about a guy who isn't rich and beautiful but who is extremely special. And a little cracked.''
These facts could be superglued into place later. Right now, though, Jensen was scanning his Kaufman interview transcript for illumination on his struggle to write this film. On page 2, he underlined where Kaufman revealed a source of creative trouble not depicted in the movie: He unexpectedly sold a second pitch, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind -- which will star Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet -- around the same time as Adaptation, giving him double deadline pressure. (''There were people who I was working for that were waiting for a screenplay,'' Kaufman had said. ''And there were people who I had not yet started working for that were waiting for a screenplay.'') More marker on page 4, where Kaufman expressed debilitating guilt over inventing scenarios and dialogue for real people. And on page 7, Jensen circled the part where Kaufman admitted that many times he'd almost quit Adaptation, but had strung along Demme's people for too long -- seven months! -- not to mention that he'd already been paid.
