Adaptation · written by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman · 2002

Orlean describes Margary’s murder and reflects that Laroche loved the peril as much as the flowers.

Scene 22 of 202 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act one

Orlean

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 12 min into a 1:57 film

The story so farBefore scene 22

Unable to find a conventional story in The Orchid Thief, screenwriter Charlie Kaufman turns his own crisis into an increasingly self-referential adaptation.

Scenes 1–9
Charlie inhabits an isolated, self-condemning world while Orlean’s book supplies a distant model of obsession.
Scene 10
Valerie and Margaret give Charlie the assignment to adapt The Orchid Thief.
Just before
Scene 19
Orlean recounts Victorian collector William Arnold’s drowning on an expedition.
Scene 20
Orlean recounts Schroeder’s fatal fall while collecting orchids.
Scene 21
Orlean recounts Endres’s death by shooting during an orchid hunt.
Scene 22
This scene

22EXT. RIVER - DAY

SUBTITLE: YANGTZE RIVER

An emaciated, limping, wheezing man with a makeshift bandage wrapped around his head, docks his boat.

ORLEAN (V.O.)

Augustus Margary survived toothache,

rheumatism, pleurisy, and dysentery...

Someone steps from behind a bush, stabs him, steals his boat.

ORLEAN (V.O.) (cont'd)

... only to be murdered when he completed

his mission and traveled beyond Bhamo.

The murderer sails down river.

ORLEAN (V.O.) (cont'd)

Laroche loved orchids but I came to

believe he loved the difficulty and

fatality of getting them almost as much

as he loved the orchids themselves.