Charlie Kaufman

Charlie Kaufman didn't just enter Hollywood; he infiltrated it with a deeply personal, defiantly weird sensibility. After years of writing for television comedies, he exploded onto the film scene with 'Being John Malkovich,' a script so bizarre it languished for years before Spike Jonze brought it to life. That film established his signature: neurotic, self-loathing protagonists trapped in surreal conceits that externalize their inner chaos. He turned the struggle to adapt a book about orchids into the dizzying, self-referential masterpiece 'Adaptation.' He collaborated with Michel Gondry to map a dissolving relationship onto the architecture of memory in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.' As a director, his visions grew even more ambitious and despairing, from the sprawling, life-consuming theatrical production in 'Synecdoche, New York' to the stop-motion midlife crisis of 'Anomalisa.' Kaufman writes not about heroes, but about the terrifying, funny, and often pathetic experience of being a person thinking about being a person.