Adaptation of The Orchid Thief

To conclude writers’ craft, we watched a film titled Adaptation. The film was based Susan Orleans non-fiction book The Orchid Thief. This movie is about a self-loathing screenplay writer named Charlie Kaufman who seems unsure and doubtful of writing abilities and suffers from writers block. In the movie Charlie Kaufman is assigned to write a movie script based off The Orchid Thief. Charlie Kaufman finds it challenging and encounters many obstacles when trying to adapt The Orchid Thief. He finds it challenging because he find the book boring and wants to make it more exciting, however without adding the Hollywood cliches. He wanted to make a screenplay that was accurate to the book and bring it justice but he didn’t want to make identical because it would lack a certain element. He struggles to do so throughout the movie while his identical twin brother Donald creates a script that contains all ideas and cliches that Charlie despises. What makes Charlie even angrier is that his brother’s script becomes quite a successful accomplishment. After seeing his brothers success Charlie questions his reasoning. Charlie decides to visit Susan Orlean in New York for advice on his screenplay, however he cant find the confidence within himself to face her and attends one of Robert McKee’s seminars to seek advice on current writers block situation. Donald accompanies him to help him with the story structure and to pose as Charlie when he interviews Susan Orlean. However when Donald interviews her he finds her doubtful on the account of the events and because her story line seems flawless. So they decide to investigate. In conclusion they discover her storyline was perfect, too perfect because it wasn’t true Susan Orlean fell in love with the orchid thief (Laroche). It is also revealed that Laroche was stealing the orchids to make a drug. Unfortunately while Donald and Charlie were investigating Donald was killed In conclusion I find it very ironic that the clichés that Charlie Kaufman was trying to avoid when writing the screenplay for The Orchid Thief were the exact same clichés used to write the screenplay for Adaptation. What I learned about the creative process from this film is that writing takes time depending on who you are and how you think. Sure you may use the typical clichés but that doesn’t mean it will make a bad story, depending on how you use them and place them within your story. Nevertheless, Adaptation was a very entertaining film, which started out dull but took a very unexpected twist thus making the film entertaining.