Charlie Kaufman

• 1. Early Life And Education

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  Charles Stuart Kaufman was born on the 19th of November 1958 in New York City to a Jewish family. His parents were Helen and Myron Kaufman. He grew up in Massapequa, New York before moving to West Hartford, Connecticut during his childhood years. In high school he joined the drama club and performed in numerous productions. During his senior year he landed the lead role in a production of Play It Again Sam. After graduating from high school he attended Boston University. He later transferred to New York University where he studied film. While at NYU he met Paul Proch. The two wrote many unproduced scripts and plays together.

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• 2. Television Writing Years

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  Between 1983 and 1984 Kaufman and Proch wrote comedic articles for National Lampoon magazine. Their work included parodies of Kurt Vonnegut and the X-Men. They tried to get their screenplays produced but received only one response. That single letter came from Alan Arkin regarding their screenplay Purely Coincidental. To find an agent he wrote spec scripts based on television series like Married with Children and The Simpsons. During the late 1980s he lived in Minneapolis working at the Star Tribune circulation department for four and a half years. He also worked at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. In 1991 he finally gained a talent agent who suggested he move to Los Angeles. He moved alone for two months interviewing for various jobs. The only offer was for Access America hosted by Fred Willard. He accepted a job writing for Get a Life instead. He wrote two episodes before its cancellation in 1992. At first he did not speak in the writer's room for several weeks. After his work was well received he overcame his timidity. He later struggled to keep material from being adulterated on shows like The Dana Carvey Show.

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• 3. Breakthrough Screenplays

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  Kaufman first gained mainstream notice as the writer of Being John Malkovich directed by Spike Jonze. He wrote the script on spec in 1994 sending it to many companies that all turned it down. Francis Ford Coppola passed it to Jonze who agreed to direct the film. Kaufman earned an Academy Award nomination and won a BAFTA for the effort. Human Nature followed as another produced screenplay directed by Michel Gondry. Adaptation featured a fictionalized version of Kaufman and his twin brother Donald credited as co-writer. The idea came while attempting to adapt Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief into film. Struggling with writer's block he turned the script into an account of his struggles. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind released in 2004 won him his first Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. He shared the win with Gondry and French artist Pierre Bismuth. The trio also received the PEN American Center 2005 prize for screenplay. David Edelstein described the film in Slate as the greatest dramatists of our modern fractured consciousness woven together by Kaufman.

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• 4. Directorial Debut And Struggles

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  Kaufman made his directorial film debut with Synecdoche New York starring Philip Seymour Hoffman. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008. The idea originated when Kaufman and Spike Jonze were approached to direct a horror film. They decided to deal with things they found frightening such as mortality and life's brevity. Kaufman chose to direct after Jonze left to direct Where the Wild Things Are. Critics split on the release with some calling it the best film of the year. Others found it pretentious despite its later appearances on lists ranking the best films of the 21st century. The film's poor box office resulted in Kaufman finding it difficult to gain funding for future scripts. A project titled Frank or Francis was slated to star Jack Black and Nicolas Cage but funding fell through in July 2012. The studio remained unsure about success after the financial failure of Synecdoche New York. He sold a series to HBO in May 2012 with Catherine Keener attached to star but it never passed scripting. An FX pilot titled How and Why also failed to get picked up in 2014.

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• 5. Animation And Novel Debut

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  Dino Stamatopoulos became interested in adapting Kaufman's Anomalisa play script into a stop motion animated film. Stamatopoulos turned to Kickstarter to fund the project in August 2012. By the time funding ended $406,237 had been pledged. The rest of the eight million dollar budget came from Starburns Industries. Kaufman co-directed with Duke Johnson who had previous experience in stop motion filmmaking. It premiered at the Telluride Film Festival on the 4th of September 2015 receiving universal acclaim. The film won the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival and earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Animated Feature. Like Synecdoche it did poorly at the box office. His debut novel Antkind released in July 2020 was written to be unfilmable. The story follows film critic B Rosenberg attempting to recall a three-month long stop-motion animation that perished in a fire. The book spans 706 pages exploring comedy film theory philosophy and social commentary. In January 2018 he began working on an adaptation of Iain Reid's 2016 novel I'm Thinking of Ending Things. The film starred Jessie Buckley and Toni Collette before releasing on Netflix in September 2020.

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• 6. Recent Projects And Future Work

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  In 2023 Kaufman directed his first short film Jackals Fireflies based on a poem by Eva H.D. She also portrays the lead character. The film was shot entirely on a Samsung Galaxy S22 smartphone by cinematographer Chayse Irvin. He wrote a script about dreams for Ryan Gosling's production company titled Later the War. This project is based on Iddo Gefen's short story Debby's Dream House. Eddie Redmayne Tessa Thompson and Patsy Ferran are slated to star with Kaufman directing. An adaptation of the novel The Memory Police is set to be directed by Reed Morano. He won an Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement for Writing in an Animated Television Broadcast Production for Orion and the Dark in 2024. A short film titled How to Shoot a Ghost remains as an executive producer credit only. Darkest Miriam and The Actor remain upcoming projects listed in his works.

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• 7. Thematic Frameworks And Influences

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  Kaufman's works explore universal themes such as identity crisis mortality and the meaning of life through metaphysical frameworks. His work resists labels but is sometimes described as surrealist. He uses metafiction as a literary device including fictionalized facts about his life in Adaptation Hope Leaves the Theater and Antkind. Gender identity appears as a recurrent theme throughout his body of work. Non-human primates recur in his early work including a pet chimpanzee named Elijah in Being John Malkovich. In Human Nature a character named Puff was raised as a chimpanzee. Penny dreams about a monkey in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind while Adaptation originally featured a Bigfoot-like Swamp Ape. Some writers he names as favorites include Franz Kafka Samuel Beckett Eugene Ionesco Stanisław Lem Flannery O'Connor Shirley Jackson Philip K Dick Patricia Highsmith Stephen Dixon David Lynch Lars von Trier Roy Andersson Woody Allen and the Coen brothers. He has also mentioned Tom Noonan's What Happened Was as a favorite of his.

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