Popular Culture
In the Charlie Kaufman-penned film Adaptation., McKee's character was portrayed by the Emmy Award-winning actor Brian Cox. In the movie, the desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) reluctantly goes to McKee’s course, but then – after being “shaken” by McKee’s tough-style response to his claim that “nothing happens in the real world” – Kaufman asks McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film adaptation he is working on.
Though the story depicts McKee as little more than an amalgam of hack clichés on the subject of screen writing, Charlie's slacker brother Donald uses the knowledge obtained attending the famous seminar to write a spec script he then sells for a large amount of money through his brother's agent. The film then concludes rather cynically with the very hackneyed, bang-up ending McKee is ridiculed for recommending, as well as a voice-over epilogue in which—by means of voice-over narration—Cage's Kaufman character admonishes himself for disobeying a cardinal rule of McKee's to avoid voice-over narration.
Read more about this topic: Robert Mc Kee
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Vodka is our enemy, so let’s finish it off.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“As the traveler who has once been from home is wiser than he who has never left his own doorstep, so a knowledge of one other culture should sharpen our ability to scrutinize more steadily, to appreciate more lovingly, our own.”
—Margaret Mead (1901–1978)