Director Spike Jonze's Adaptation is a fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggles to adapt the non-cinematic book The Orchid Thief into a Hollywood blockbuster. As his onscreen self succumbs to the temptation to commercialize the narrative, Kaufman incorporates those techniques into the script, including tropes such as an invented romance, a car chase, a drug-running sequence, and an imaginary identical twin for the protagonist. (The movie also features scenes about the making of Being John Malkovich, previously written by Kaufman and directed by Jonze.) Similarly, in Kaufman's self-directed 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, the main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays who receives a grant, and ends up creating a remarkable theater piece intended as a carbon copy of the outside world. The layers of copies of the world ends up several layers deep. The same conceit was previously used by frequent Kaufman collaborator Michel Gondry in his music video for the Björk song "Bachelorette," which features a musical that is about, in part, the creation of that musical. A mini-theater and small audience appear on stage to watch the musical-within-a-musical, and at some point, within that second musical a yet-smaller theater and audience appear.
Director Spike Jonze's Adaptation is a fictionalized version of screenwriter Charlie Kaufman's struggles to adapt the non-cinematic book The Orchid Thief into a Hollywood blockbuster. As his onscreen self succumbs to the temptation to commercialize the narrative, Kaufman incorporates those techniques into the script, including tropes such as an invented romance, a car chase, a drug-running sequence, and an imaginary identical twin for the protagonist. (The movie also features scenes about the making of Being John Malkovich, previously written by Kaufman and directed by Jonze.) Similarly, in Kaufman's self-directed 2008 film Synecdoche, New York, the main character Caden Cotard is a skilled director of plays who receives a grant, and ends up creating a remarkable theater piece intended as a carbon copy of the outside world. The layers of copies of the world ends up several layers deep. The same conceit was previously used by frequent Kaufman collaborator Michel Gondry in his music video for the Björk song "Bachelorette," which features a musical that is about, in part, the creation of that musical. A mini-theater and small audience appear on stage to watch the musical-within-a-musical, and at some point, within that second musical a yet-smaller theater and audience appear.