"The movie is, in part, about the labor pains of its creator, the screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman had been hired to adapt " The Orchid Thief," a book by Susan Orlean based on her New Yorker profile of an orchid poacher. Feeling stuck, Kaufman wrote himself into the script. In the movie, Kaufman (Nicolas Cage) complains to his agent, "I can't structure this. It's that sprawling New Yorker shit.""
"a self-satisfied smile revealing his missing front teeth. He gives Orlean, pen and pad in hand, a quote for the record: "I don't care what goes on here. I'm right, and I'll take it all the way to the Supreme Court, cuz that judge can screw herself." As Orlean jots down that last bit, Laroche looks shocked-but also a little charmed."
In high school, the narrator waited tables at a Chestnut Hill restaurant where framed covers of The New Yorker conveyed an association with a moneyed, genteel clientele ordering exotic items like ricotta blintzes and croque-monsieurs. A later viewing of the film Adaptation, which dramatizes Charlie Kaufman's struggle to adapt Susan Orlean's profile of an orchid poacher, revealed the magazine's narrative depth and idiosyncratic voice. A courtroom encounter between Orlean and the orchid thief John Laroche, capped by Laroche's incendiary quote about taking a case to the Supreme Court, suggested a rawness and edge beneath the magazine's polished surface.
Read at The New Yorker
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