Adaptation (2002)

"With a person, adapting's almost shameful. Almost like running away."

Near the middle of Adaptation, Spike Jonze’s film from the screenplay by Charlie Kaufman—which is itself an adaptation of Susan Orlean’s book The Orchid Thief, based on her own New Yorker article “Orchid Fever”—Charlie Kaufman the character (Nicolas Cage), overwhelmed by the complexities of adapting Orlean’s book into a screenplay, attends a screenwriti…