TIME Magazine: TIME 100: Charlie Kaufman


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Charlie Kaufman

Artists & Entertainers
	Mark Burnett Frank Gehry John Galliano Peter Jackson Nicholas Hytner Simon Cowell OutKast Norah Jones Jerry Bruckheimer J.K. Rowling Ken Kutaragi Bruce Nauman Katie Couric Charlie Kaufman Hideo Nakata Aishwarya Rai Ferran Adrià Nicole Kidman Sean Penn Guy Laliberté
	Leaders & Revolutionaries Builders & Titans Scientists & Thinkers Heroes & Icons Introduction Essay FROM THE ARCHIVE: Artists & Entertainers from 1900-1999

Hollywood's Idea Man

By JOEL STEIN

SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

FROM THE TIME ARCHIVE

	Do I Love You? (I Forget) Jim Carrey and Charlie Kaufman bring sunshine to the plexes with a strange and splendid romance [3/22/2004]

Charlie Kaufman has ideas, which for a screenwriter is rarer than you would think. And not just obvious ideas like killer aliens or making your children really, really small. Kaufman's ideas for movies (Being John Malkovich, Human Nature, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) come from the part of your psyche you avoid. His scripts upend time, logic and the laws of physics, and in the process of writing them, he has upended many of the conventions of Hollywood films. But what makes Kaufman, 45, the screenwriter to watch in Hollywood isn't his ideas or that he has created sadly sweet protagonists more convincing than Woody Allen's; it's that Kaufman writes movies like they're poems.

The three-act structure of most movies, Kaufman proved, may be satisfying, but it doesn't unearth honesty. "I don't know what the hell a third act is," says Kaufman, a former sitcom writer. "It's not a concern of mine." So after being embittered by George Clooney's conventional direction of his script for Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, the painfully shy Kaufman (who until last month's appearance on The Charlie Rose Show didn't show his face in the media) is going to write a new script, pick his own actors and ask a studio to let him direct it. "I have a tendency to hire people who tend to be unattractive to the studios," he says. "Maybe this is a bad idea." Which, of course, will only make him like it more.

June 23, 1975	July 8, 1998	Sept. 20, 1963

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