Adaptation, the work of genius incarnate from which this blog takes its name

Or, dude this movie is frickin' sweet.

And has inspired me to realize what it is that I really want to do with my life: screenplay theory. It's so obvious, I don't know why I didn't think of it earlier. I like writing and studying screenplays, I like academia, surely those things can be combined in some useful/meaningful way. Score!

I have decided to write a paper (or an article, I suppose, as they're called in the real world) on said topic for my next round of grad school applications. Since I have managed to fail so very terribly at the grad school game this year, I have already begun to plot and machinate my successful entrance into film programs next year. I am now officially a lapsed Lutheran *and* a lapsed English major. I'm a little afraid to write something without the opportunity for professor input, but perhaps it's time I lose my intellectual training wheels and grow a pair o balls.

I haven't completely decided what aspect of Adaptation I'll write about, though... there are so goddamn many awesome pretentious intellectual things to study in that film. There's the obvious riffing on"pop screenplay theory" a la Robert McKee-- 3 act structure, voiceover=bad, wow them in the third act, etc etc-- in that he completely disregards the "rules" in the first two acts and then whips out every single one in the last. Except for the no deus ex machina rule. Kaufman whips out a pretty tasty deus ex machina.

Beyond the playing with screenplay tropes and the supposed rules all screenwriters are supposed to follow, there are even more interesting things going on with words and structure in Adaptation. The most basic rule, the one thing that everyone is told when they're writing a screenplay, is "show it, don't tell it." But in Adaptation, there are *multiple* levels of telling-rather-than-showing; it's about a guy writing a screenplay about a woman writing a book. It's completely inundated with words (or at least for the first two acts).... at one point, it's nothing but Kaufman reading a passage from Susan Orlean's book aloud, which gradually fades into her own voice reading the book. It's all words, no image. But then in the third act he turns 360 and the plot becomes action and image-driven to the point of ridiculousness. Did I mention the deus ex machina?

Anyway, I'm not going to write the paper yet. I'm working frantically on a screenplay right now actually, and the deadline for the Bluecat screenplay contest is April 1st, so I have 3 weeks to write another 40-50 pages of script. But I did want to mention, since I thought of my life today and all.

That is all.