Plot
The self-loathing Charlie Kaufman is hired to write the screenplay for The Orchid Thief. Kaufman is going through melancholic depression and is not happy that his twin brother Donald has moved into his house and is mooching off him. Donald decides to become a screenwriter like Charlie and attends one of Robert McKee's famous seminars.
Charlie Kaufman, who rejects simplistic formulaic script writing, wants to ensure that his script is a faithful adaptation of The Orchid Thief. However, he comes to realize that the book does not have a usable narrative and that it is impossible to turn into a film, leaving him with a serious case of writer's block.
Meanwhile, Donald's spec script for a clichéd psychological thriller, called The 3, sells for six or seven figures. Kaufman accidentally starts writing his script with self-reference. Already well over his deadline with Columbia Pictures, he visits Orlean in New York for advice on the screenplay. Unable to face her, Kaufman visits McKee's seminar in New York and asks him for advice. He brings his brother Donald to New York to assist with the story structure.
Donald pretends to be Charlie and interviews Orlean, but is suspicious of her account of the events of her book because it seems like too perfect a story line. He and his brother Charlie follow Orlean to Florida where she meets Laroche, the orchid-stealing protagonist of Orlean's book and her secret lover. It is revealed that the Seminole wanted the Ghost Orchid in order to manufacture a drug that causes fascination; Laroche introduces this drug to Orlean. After Laroche and Orlean catch Charlie observing them taking the drug and having sex, she decides that Charlie must die.
She forces Kaufman at gunpoint to drive to the swamp, where she intends to kill him. Charlie and Donald escape and hide in the swamp where they resolve their differences and Charlie's problems with women. Laroche accidentally shoots Donald. Fleeing, Charlie and Donald drive off but crash into a ranger's truck; Donald dies in the accident. Charlie runs off into the swamp to hide but is spotted by Laroche. However, Laroche is killed by an alligator before being able to kill Charlie.
Orlean is arrested. Charlie makes up with his mother, tells his former love interest Amelia that he is still in love with her, and finishes the script. It ends with Charlie in a voice-over announcing the script is finished and that he wants Gérard Depardieu to portray him in the film.
Read more about this topic: Adaptation (film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“The plot was most interesting. It belonged to no particular age, people, or country, and was perhaps the more delightful on that account, as nobody’s previous information could afford the remotest glimmering of what would ever come of it.”
—Charles Dickens (1812–1870)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme—
why are they no help to me now
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—Robert Lowell (1917–1977)