hen you think about it, Hollywood must be one godawful place. Sure, there’s all the fairy dust bullshit that Frank Capra and Walt Disney filled us with, but at its core, as any tell-all bio or episode of E! True Hollywood Story will tell us, it’s pretty much as backbiting, nasty and rotten as you’d imagine – a place where every picture’s worth a thousand blowjobs.


So what’s the big deal then? Why are we all still so damned fascinated with a culture that gave us, say, Armageddon, to this day the most turgid three hours of my life? Is it because, deep down, we still seem to have a little love in our hearts, that we believe that Capra-esque horseshit? Is it because we still somehow believe that Hollywood is the personification of the American Dream, the place where dreams come true and stars do shine, where we can finally, truly communicate all those deep thoughts and meaningful insights just dying to get outside of us? Is that really it?


Well, according to Charlie Kaufman, the brain behind Adaptation and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the answer is a complicated “yes.” But without having even gotten to my point, I’ve already gotten ahead of myself, so let’s go back a bit.


Three years ago, Kaufman was the celebrated screenwriter of indie mega-hit, Being John Malkovich. The best way to describe Malkovich was that it was really “meta” – by which I mean a film that knew it was a film and that played upon the fact that we knew that it knew it was a film. The end result? A film that challenged our notions of film, celebrity and artifice.


Or so we were told. I, quite frankly, didn’t really care for it as a movie. Yes, it was better than Armageddon, but that’s giving Armageddon too much credit. After about an hour, Malkovich had turned its title character into a puppeteer and become too clever by half – if not four-fifths or more. But the film was certainly entertaining. And hey, that Spike Jonze directed it, the guy who’d given us Weezer’s beloved “Buddy Holly” video and the Beastie Boys’ cop show pastiche, “Sabotage,” so we had good reason to believe there was more good stuff to come.


So with one more brilliant video under Jonze’s belt (the Christopher Walken softshoe vehicle, Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”) and something of a dud under Kaufman’s (Human Nature), it was with great anticipation that the duo’s next collaboration would be greeted. So what did Jonze and Kaufman do to follow Malkovich up? Well, they made a movie about...following Malkovich up!


You could almost hear the collective whoop of ten thousand film students. Because let’s face it: any one of those poor, talentless slobs could have come up with this concept. But pulling it off, as Malkovich showed, isn’t easy; you need to be careful. And while Jonze and Kaufman are two right clever bastards with a track record, there still remains the altogether real potential of the two turning the entire project into a self-congratulatory mess – sort of an indie-flick version of the high-five.


So, with that in mind, the film: Adaptation stars Nicolas Cage, taking a break from Jerry Bruckheimer movies, as—you guessed it!—Charlie Kaufman, a balding, frumpy, screenwriter trying to figure out how to adapt a book about rare flowers into something acceptable to Hollywood’s less-than-delicate palette – all the while struggling with girls, his own inner neuroses and his meddlesome twin brother, Donald. We also see the plot of the book, Susan Orleans’ The Orchid Thief, as Charlie envisions it, with Meryl Streep’s Orleans following “thief” Chris Cooper into the Florida swamps in search of the elusive flower.


You can see Charlie’s dilemma: taken on its own, the Orchid Thief story is sweet, funny and touching – not altogether unlike a hundred other films Streep has made over the years. But he wants to do something deeper, more meaningful – something less Hollywood.


Consequently, the real fun of Adaptation is seeing how the movie evolves in Charlie’s mind; one minute it begins modestly with Charlie’s own voiceover setting the pace, the next it’s a hilariously overblown mix of 2001 and a PBS Nova special, with plants growing, volcanoes erupting and Life Beginning. And the more we get to know Charlie, the more we realize that this kind of spastic creative overload is what it will take for him to finally get the script just right.


Worth noting here is that, at this point, the aforementioned “meta” is only about three levels in: the real Charlie Kaufman writing a movie about “Charlie Kaufman” writing a movie that he keeps revising. It’s entertaining, but, really, nothing compared to when Charlie decides to write himself into the screenplay, leading to the complete obliteration of the line between artifice and reality that is the film’s final act. Which is where we run into some problems.


For much of the film, Adaptation is a fascinating window into the twists and turns of the creative process and why people put themselves through it. It lays bare how artists act out of some clear need in their lives to shape reality more to their liking. Just as we see Charlie grappling with some detail of the script, the film lets us in—just enough—to show us that the filmmakers are toying with us, that this may or may not be the actions of the “real” Charlie Kaufman and leaving the viewer unsure of whom to trust.


It’s a brilliant ploy that works...right up until the moment Jonze and Kaufman purposefully take the film off the rails and disappoint the viewer to prove a conceptual point – one that’s more fun to think about than actually watch on screen. Almost entirely free of missteps to that point, here Jonze and Kaufman make a doozy; they wind up crossing the line and abusing the audience’s trust to the point of being greedily manipulative. If it doesn’t ruin the film exactly, going to the well once too often does serve to make the whole of Adaptation somewhat less than the sum of its parts. Bummer.




Where the Kaufman of Adaptation expends much of his energy poking fun at the absurdity of Hollywood from the outsider’s perspective, his Confessions of a Dangerous Mind shows us how the insiders make that absurdity work to their advantage. Here we see the rise and fall of game show guru, the lascivious Chuck Barris (Sam Rockwell), writer of “Palisades Park,” creator of The Dating Game and The Newlywed Game and, most famously, host of trash-TV classic, The Gong Show. It’s easy to see why Kaufman and unknown first-time director George Clooney wanted to take on Barris’ “unauthorized autobiography,” because its pitch is, frankly, brilliant:


“The purported true-life story of The Gong Show host and creator, Chuck Barris, and his secret life as a paid assassin for the CIA.”


It’s a goofy premise to be sure, but Clooney, who reportedly directed Confessions under the watchful eye of pal, Steven Soderbergh, seems eminently qualified to handle this material. As the son of a Cincinnati variety show host and nephew of singer Rosemary Clooney, the former ER star clearly “gets” show biz in a way only someone who grew up in it would. With swirling, dizzying camerawork, impressive set pieces and subtle sleight-of-hand cuts seamlessly blend different locations within a single shot, Confessions nails the rush of the Hollywood hustle at which Barris so clearly excelled.


But if Adaptation tells us about the creative process, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind is more concerned with creative impulse—for men, anyway—in particular, the impulse to get laid. As he tells it himself, Barris used every opportunity imaginable to exploit his success (or moon-eyed career trajectory) to lure women into the sack; it’s essentially his life force. But Confessions takes the notion one step further, by arguing that the key to Barris’s astonishing career was not that he was particularly brave or smart but rather that he was a strikingly empty man, concerned with little but himself – and thus perfectly attuned to the fundamental qualities of the TV-obsessed American heartland. In fact, it’s a quality that Kaufman seems to be implying was the impetus behind Barris fabricating the CIA assassin story (which here is told as fact); how else to give a fabulously successful life dedicated to nothingness a little meaning?


It’s a theme well explored in Confessions, one aided by Clooney’s formidable hand at humor and working with actors (including the director himself, as Barris’ CIA recruiter). More surprisingly, though, the first-time director also displays a real flair for constructing not only elaborate scenes, but also complex themes – hardly the stuff one imagines a marquee star like Clooney taking on right out of the gate. Even if some of them are undernourished (in particular, the “Mom-As-Virgin-Mary” scene that looks like a bad out-take from Easy Rider), his ambition here is commendable.


Still, with a two-hour plus running time, Confessions becomes fairly tedious, rendering Barris’ comment on his state of affairs, “I dispose of people, and I’m disposable” truer than he likely knows. Even with the laughably far-fetched CIA stuff (which even the real-life Barris merely describes as “plausible”), the wacky life of a game show host proves to be a pretty thin premise. It’s nearly saved by sharp, at times almost absurdist comedy (particularly in the scenes Robert John Burke’s certifiable Inspector Jenks), and Rockwell’s deep, naked performance as the entertainer himself.


But for all his impressive sense of timing, a sense of pace almost completely eludes Clooney. By the mid-way point, Drew Barrymore’s long-suffering girlfriend is already played out, the “mole-in-the-CIA” subplot is uncompelling and vague and the extended montage sequences are unremittingly repetitive. Initially reminiscent of Blow’s exciting first act, Confessions unfortunately downshifts into a tempo and tone similar to that film’s bloated, molasses-paced second half, in which the downward spiral and the viewer are locked in a slow-motion race to see who makes it to the credits first. “Ponderous Bio-pic” isn’t likely the effect Charlie Kaufman—real or otherwise—was going for, but with Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, it’s what he got. Fucking Hollywood.




It’s funny: there’s a scene near the end of Confessions of a Dangerous Mind in which Chuck Barris follows a stunningly woman swimming in a luxury pool into an alcove where they find themselves alone. The viewer almost completely expects the scene to end with the woman in the Gong Show lady-killer’s arms. Not only doesn’t she, but she doesn’t for reasons that aren’t expected in the slightest.


The scene’s engaging, but it doesn’t really work, largely because, by then, our expectations have been confounded so relentlessly that the effect is diluted; whether it’s seeing Rockwell and Julia Roberts lick each other’s faces or noticing Brad Pitt on a game show, we’ve pretty much stopped caring.


And it’s a problem neither Confessions nor (to a lesser extent) Adaptation resolve. Both films use the medium of Hollywood both on screen and as subtext to play with what the audience expects. By purporting to tell the stories of real people like Barris and Orleans, Kaufman has successfully lured us into a world of dubious reality, where nothing—not the story, the CIA subplots, not even the screenwriting credit—is reliable. But in the end, by immersing the audience in Hollywood subculture—the star cameos, the parties, the pitches—and then pulling the rug out from under us, it’s almost as if Kaufman is sticking the ploy in our face, as if to say “Hey, if you see the wheels turning, but still feel a little confused, tough shit. I gave you some laughs, but it’s Art.”


It’s the ultimate in “Is It Live Or Is It Memorex?” filmmaking aesthetic – brilliant in its way, but a little insulting to its audience. And, at the end of the day, funny and insightful, but kind of unsatisfying.