Hollywood's New Flavor

Cha

rlie Kaufman is having trouble getting the waiter's attention. We're at one of those Los Angeles restaurants where good-looking tan people talk earnestly over expensive salads. Kaufman, not Hollywood handsome, not tan, half eating a burger, would like more iced tea, please. But the waiter just doesn't see him. It could be his paleness. It's more likely his ability to disappear, forged from years of trying to avoid getting beaten up in high school. Or it could be that here, as elsewhere in this town, nobody really gives a toss about screenwriters.

Only in this case the waiter would be wrong. Charlie Kaufman is one of Hollywood's hottest It boys. At a time when so many movies seem formulaic--sequels, prequels and comic books--Kaufman's scripts are like the products of chaos theory. His first movie, Being John Malkovich, stunned even jaded moviegoers with its tale of a puppeteer who discovers a portal into the mind of actor John Malkovich. His next offering, Human Nature, in cinemas now, is another head snapper. Patricia Arquette plays Lila, an abnormally hirsute woman who falls in love with a light-in-the-shorts behavioral scientist, Nathan Bronfman (Tim Robbins). Bronfman is trying, with some success, to teach mice to eat with the correct salad fork (yes, really). When the lovers while hiking one day find a man raised as an ape, Bronfman switches his attention to him.

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"Charlie's amazing. Any actor would love to work with him," says Arquette, who admits to having been especially nervous when Kaufman arrived on the set. She was so committed to her less-than-glamorous role that she stayed around even when the production had money woes.

George Clooney is another acolyte. He wanted to work on a Kaufman project so badly that he decided to direct the one he was going to act in. The film, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the life story of Gong Show creator Chuck Barris, is one of three Kaufman-penned movies due out this year. Another, Adaptation, is the result of Kaufman's failed attempt to adapt Susan Orlean's novel The Orchid Thief into a movie script. Nicolas Cage plays Kaufman. This is the definition of power: stars want to play you in movies about your failures.

So how does a fortysomething guy from Long Island, N.Y., get to be one of the most dangerous minds in Hollywood? It's not clear, since Kaufman is beyond miserly with life details. He is also loath to pose for photos. The son of an engineer and a homemaker, he studied film at New York University, and now lives a quiet life with his wife and young child outside Los Angeles. He doesn't go to parties or take meetings. "I do a lot of walking," says Kaufman, politely deflecting inquiries. "I walk and write. I walk and think, and then I stop and take out my pad and write something." And then he doesn't care if you buy his script or not, but it's going to be made the way he wants it made. He's shy, but he's not a pushover.

Before Malkovich, the only credits he had were for some National Lampoon articles and failed TV shows. His insistence on owning Malkovich rather than surrendering all rights to a studio kept the movie in search of funding for a few years. "I was perfectly happy with it not being made," he says. "I said, 'If this movie is going to be made, this is how it works.'" His stubbornness has paid off. Kaufman has a say in casting and editing decisions on the movies he owns and is even welcomed on the set, where the screenwriter is usually regarded like a nun in a brothel. And he gets repeat business. Spike Jonze, who directed Malkovich, also directed Adaptation, and Kaufman is working on another movie with Michel Gondry, the director of Human Nature.

Yet success still doesn't sit well with Kaufman. Media interest makes him fidget. "Ten years ago, I would read an article about somebody, and it would talk about how great their life is," he says. "And I wasn't in that situation. I felt less then as a human being." He finds it incomprehensible that anybody would want to be him. His own yearning to be someone else has only recently "leveled off into just a feeling of missing something," he says. But his youthful days as a loser served him well. They have given his misfits the stamp of humanity. "I guess I don't think of them as misfits," he says. "I'm interested in people outside looking in, I guess because that's maybe how I feel." What's the best revenge for getting beaten up in high school? Writing well--and having a say about casting.