We’ve been on a Charlie Kaufman drought ever since 2008’s Synecdoche New York, and in the meantime, his fictional brother Donald from Adaptation seems to have been busier than ever, ghostwriting
The Carnegie Medal winning book [The Knife of Never Letting Go, the first book of Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking series] is set in a dystopian future with humans colonizing a distant Earth-like planet. When an infection called the Noise suddenly makes all thought audible, privacy vanishes, chaos ensues, and a corrupt autocrat threatens to take control of the human settlements and wage war with the indigenous alien race. Only young Todd Hewitt holds the key to stopping planet wide-destruction. [Deadline]
That actually sounds very Kaufman-esque. I look forward to it being much more darkly comic, and for the theme to change from love conquering all to the fictionalized Charlie Kaufman-as-protagonist overcoming his fear of commitment.
This is neither here nor there, but I thought this was a perfect opportunity to re-post a paragraph from the Frank or Francis synopsis:
Confusing matters more is Robert, a robot head programmed by Jonathan Waller, the director of a hit epic called, “Hiroshima.” When “Hiroshima” fails to win Best Picture, Jonathan and his brother Richard create Richard’s Head, the superwiz computer-brain programmed to write a screenplay that mathematically examines every successful screenplay in the history of movies and then makes one super-perfect script called, “God.” [original post]
As much as I want to see Frank or Francis, what I’d like even more is for Charlie Kaufman to write an entire book made up of paragraph-length movie pitches. That paragraph is easily better than any film I’ve seen all year.