Wanna Read The Script For Charlie Kaufman's Latest Opus?
I'm sure most of you are familiar with Mr Charlie Kaufman's work - Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and one of my favorites, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, amongst a few others. He of course wrote the screenplays for all of those films, while someone else directed them. With Synecdoche, NY, he not only wrote the screenplay, he also directed the film, which debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May, and stars notable thespians, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, and Tilda Swinton.What's it about?
As his nervous system shuts down, a theater director (Hoffman) struggles with his work, and the women in his life, as he attempts to create a life-size replica of New York inside a warehouse as part of his new play. Catherine Keener plays his first wife, Michelle Williams his second wife, and Samantha Morton his lover. Like previous Kaufman films, this one is said to exist in a blurred reality/fiction, and it's described by Kaufman himself as being ""creepy" but not a traditional horror movie!"
One critic who saw the film at Cannes said this about it: "... two hours of mental-mindf*ck... everyone is way too fried at this point to really sink their teeth into a film requiring this level of intellectual attention, and most of the folks I talked to after the screening felt they really need to see it at least once more to really wrap their minds around it."
Reviews of it have been mostly positive, but, to my knowledge it has no American distributor, which is a surprise given the talent involved. It doesn't sound like it'd be a hard sell! It already has foreign distributors (go figure, right?). So, no word on when the film will make it to American theatres.
Anyway, Kaufman is a master scribe, in my humble opinion. Everytime I watch Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, I always wish I was the one of came up with it! So, this should be well written and an interesting read, at the very least, and I'm looking forward to digging into it!
Help yourselves to it if you want to read it as well, before it disappears.
Here's the link: SYNECDOCHE, NY SCREENPLAY.
Thanks to "zdenek" for the connection.
You're killin' me with this screenplay access. I had never had the opportunity to read one until you gave us the link to "Inglorious Bastards". Now I'm hooked! Keep them coming. :o)
- P
I'm suddenly getting access to them, so I'll post them as people notify me of them. Except for the Hancock script which I got after the film was already out, the other 2 films haven't been released yet. One of them hasn't even been made yet. So, for me that's kind of exciting to be made privy to the filmmaker's main source that he/she will direct from. It'll be fun comparing the what I read with what I see on screen.
I also wish I had written ESOTSM. It is one of the few scripts I own in book form (regrettably I also have Deathproof and the Kaufman wannabe Stranger Than Fiction). Do you have the scripts for either Brick, Waitress, Away From Her, Half Nelson or The Savages? Daily Scripts are slow to update their script rosters.
-bChick