How’s this for a contract a journalist had to sign to grant screen rights for their work? “I understand you may desire to portray and/impersonate me in the Picture and use my name, likeness, and biography in connection therewith… and that the Picture may be based on fact, be partially fictitious or completely fictitious.”
This, for work produced by Susan Orlean at the New Yorker, home of a famously fastidious fact-checking department.
The contract went on to contemplate a screenplay that would incorporate parts of Orlean’s life but would allow changes — for which permission was “not to be unreasonably withheld” — that included imaginary felonies, illegal drug use, alcohol abuse and changes in sexual orientation.
Orlean, whose 1995 New Yorker article “Orchid Fever” was extended into the 1998 book The Orchid Thief, was initially bemused by the idea of her contemplative, meandering book about flowers being adapted for a Hollywood film, then shocked when she read the initial screenplay.
Not only had the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman, changed the title to “Adaptation” but one of the first scenes she read “involved a character named Charlie masturbating to an image of Susan Orlean on a porn site.” You won’t be surprised to learn, dear reader, that at this point she “slapped the script shut.”
In her fascinating memoir, Joyride, Orlean recalls telling the film’s producer, Ed Saxon, she refused to appear as a character in the film, especially as it portrayed her having a fictitious affair with John Laroche, the person at the centre of the book. Laroche was the plant dealer determined to profit from finding and cloning the rare ghost orchid.
But the producer had already obtained releases from all the people being portrayed in the film — including Orlean’s parents, who treated the experience as if Orlean was a child “putting on a show in a garage.” Her father was fine with being portrayed as a “drunken astronaut” if that’s what the producers wanted.
Saxon tried assuaging Orlean’s fears: “Just think about Charlie,” he told her. “He portrays himself as a loser who’s constantly masturbating. What we’re asking of you is so much less embarrassing.”
Friends she consulted all advised against signing the contract. Then, without really knowing why, she did. “I began to feel like I had been offered a ticket to a very strange amusement park ride and that I might regret it if I didn’t try it.”
It was a very strange amusement park ride. The Orchid Thief is not exactly Hollywood material. It induced in Kaufman a severe case of writer’s block he eventually resolved by making the difficulty of adapting it central to the film, changing its name to Adaptation and inventing a fictional brother, Donald, who represented the slick, narrative-arc-obsessed world of Hollywood in sharp contrast to his anxiety-ridden self.
Nicholas Cage played both brothers in the 2002 film, which earned Kaufman (Charlie, that is) an academy award nomination for best adapted screenplay. (He won the category two years later for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.)
Orlean consoled herself knowing she was going to be played in the film by Meryl Streep, an experience she describes as “like riding in the sidecar of a fast motorcycle”.
Befitting for someone who has earned a living as a writer since graduating from college in 1978, primarily at one of the world’s great magazines, Orlean loves words and books. But she still marvelled at the “cultural currency” of film.
Some of her readers, she reports, hated the film and were angry at her for allowing the book to be made into something so different from the original. She reminded them the book itself remained unchanged and she had drawn many new readers intrigued to know more because of the film.
Orlean’s willingness to pursue unconventional, even unpromising ideas for stories is probably her hallmark. Her first book was about what Americans do on a Saturday night, and in the late 1990s she wrote about a group of young female surfers for Outside magazine that was the basis for the film, Blue Crush. In 2018 she released The Library Book, a paean to the value of public libraries.
I still remember the first article of hers I read. It was in the early 1990s, when Macauley Culkin was starring in Home Alone and a magazine editor at Esquire wanted to publish a profile of him. Recoiling at the prospect of yet another celebrity profile, Orlean pitched the idea of profiling an ordinary ten year old.
To her surprise, the editor, Terry McDonell, agreed, throwing her into a panic. Now she had to deliver on an idea that had “simply tumbled” out of her. “Aaargh, why not profile Macauley Culkin?” she thought. “It would be so much easier.”
It took her time to find a suitable subject whose parents would agree to the piece. He was bemused by the idea of an adult hanging around with him every day at school, but the pair eventually developed a rapport evident in the opening paragraph of “The American Man, Age 10”:
If Colin Duffy and I were to get married, we would have matching superhero notebooks. We would wear shorts, big sneakers, and long, baggy T-shirts depicting famous athletes every single day, even in the winter. We would sleep in our clothes. We would both be good at Nintendo Street Fighter II, but Colin would be better than me. We would have some homework, but it would never be too hard, and we would always have just finished it. We would eat pizza and candy for all our meals… We would be good at football, have best friends, and know how to drive; we would cure AIDS and the garbage problem and everything that hurts animals. We would hang out a lot with Colin’s dad. For fun, we would load a slingshot with dog food and shoot it at my butt. We would have a very good life.
More than three decades later, Orlean still doesn’t know how she hit upon the startling idea of opening a story about a seemingly mundane subject with the “off-kilter, transgressive” idea of an adult female speculating on marriage to a boy. By playing with the inherent incongruity of trailing around with a ten-year-old for two weeks, she allows the reader to see the world from the child’s perspective.
“At first,” she writes, “when I sat down to write the story, nothing came out my head, and then abruptly it did, fully formed. If writing always made sense to the writer, it wouldn’t be nearly as interesting.”
For anyone wanting to write for a living, Joyride contains a wealth of such advice and reflections, offered in Orlean’s fluid prose. She delivers arresting metaphors seemingly at will. Parked one night at a hotel preparing to meet an interviewee the next morning, she writes: “lights from oncoming cars swept my room like the beacon from a lighthouse.”
For these and other readers she pulls back the curtain to tell the stories behind the stories, many of which are as illuminating as the stories themselves. •
Joyride
By Susan Orlean | Atlantic Books | $34.99 | 353 pages
