Being Charlie Kaufman: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Genius

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Being Charlie Kaufman: A Glimpse into the Mind of a Genius

Movies suck these days. All Hollywood seems to care about anymore is making profitable movies, not thinking twice about what the movie might actually be about. Whether it’s another special effects-ridden clunker, a giddy romantic comedy, or another lame-plotted action flick, they just don’t seem to get it. Although a small handful of films over a year’s time are occasionally worth seeing, for the most part it’s all about making money and not about the true art that filmmaking can be.

Charlie Kaufman is exactly the kind of anomaly that the film industry needs. Kaufman was born in November 1958 in Massapequa, Long Island and spent his childhood there. Later his family moved to West Hartford, Connecticut, where he went to high school. After graduating, he attended Boston University for a short time, but soon transferred to New York University to study filmmaking. Kaufman got his start in writing for television for sitcoms such as Ned and Stacey and The Dana Carvey Show (Couzens). After his work with sitcoms, however, he began writing some of the oddest scripts that have ever been conceived. It was just over four years ago when Kaufman presented his very first film, Being John Malkovich, which was nominated for both Oscar and Golden Globe awards, as well as winning many others, such as the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay and Best Screenplay from the National Society of Film Critics. That is not something every screenwriter is able to do with their first script. His fortune of being nominated came again with his third film, the genre-bending Adaptation, which was a fictional movie about him working on writing the screenplay for a movie adaptation of a book that was based on a true story. His work on this won him the Golden Satellite Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. His latest work, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, is being hailed as “remarkable” with “groundbreaking performances,” which gives it a very likely chance of being nominated for awards (Travers, 2004). Although his reputation is already respectable, Kaufman didn’t easily get to where he is now. His struggles of becoming a film screenwriter were not without boundaries, but every time he tripped, he got back up and kept going.

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