After turning over brilliant scripts for films such as Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind to other directors, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman will finally step behind the camera to direct a film called Synecdoche, New York. The story concerns a theater director whose world changes when he becomes convinced that he’s dying, but according to a salivating early report, that’s merely a springboard into something truly mind-blowing:
If this film gets made in any way that resembles what's on the page — and with the writer himself directing, it will likely gain even more color and potency in the translation — it will be some kind of miracle. "Synecdoche" will make "Adaptation" and "Eternal Sunshine" look like instructional industrial films. No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It's questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.
Boy, you’ve got to hand to those cats over at Ain’t It Cool News: They can sure get you psyched about seeing a movie, even when not a foot of celluloid has been run through the camera. Only this report comes not from AICN, but from a new L.A. Times feature called Scriptland, which offers advance reports on scripts prior to their production. By the author’s own admission, “many people, beginning with Kaufman, do not want me to have the script, do not want me to read the script, and without question do not want me to write anything about the script.”
Based on the chorus of entertainment columnists damning the Scriptland feature, Kaufman is not alone. Is it fair for writers to speculate on scripts and movies still in the early stages of development? Is this a desperate attempt for traditional media outlets to catch up with the Internet buzzmeisters? You decide.