Adaptation · written by Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman · 2002

Orlean introduces her reporting trip to Florida and the orchid theft that began her book.

Scene 7 of 202 · ≈ 1 min on screen · Act one

Orlean

Act oneAct twoAct three

Begins 2 min into a 1:57 film

The story so farBefore scene 7

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

Scene 2
Charlie paces alone, defining himself through the self-hatred that the finished screenplay will challenge.
Just before
Scene 4
Laroche spots the preserve road and swerves off the highway with his Darwin tape sliding into the soil.
Scene 5
Russell, Vinson, and Randy joke as they follow Laroche’s erratic van.
Scene 6
Orlean’s narration leads from a New York street up to the single window where she is writing.
Scene 7
This scene

7INT. APARTMENT - CONTINUOUS

We glide over the desk piled with books about orchids, past a photo of Laroche tacked to an overwhelmed bulletin board, and come to rest on a woman typing. It's Susan Orlean: pale, delicate and blond. We lose ourselves in her melancholy beauty. She turns to the camera and talks to us.

ORLEAN

Two years ago I went to Florida to meet

Laroche after reading a small article

about a white man and three Seminole men

arrested with rare orchids they'd stolen

out of a place called the...