The Green Awning II: The Awning Goes West

So I saw Adaptation. The trusty RT consensus says it's

Dizzyingly original...loopy, multi-layered...both funny and thought-provoking

I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling it. I will say this, though. I've just been reading The Sundance Kids: How The Mavericks Took Back Hollywood, by James Mottram. His thesis is that the success of filmmakers like Spike Jonze (who directed Adaptation) has made them, in so many words, a new kind of establishment, or "power players" in Hollywood.

To a lesser extent this is also true of screenwriters like Charlie "bees knees" Kaufman, who wrote it, and is now considered worthy of being mentioned in the same breath with Raymond Chandler, with paychecks (and powers) given in the past only to screenwriters like Shane Black and Joe Eszterhas.

That these powers are a double-edged sword could not be better demonstrated than by the fact that Adaptation ever got made and released to theaters.

There's a story Mel Brooks used to tell to explain the notion of power in Hollywood. He called it "the green awning theory." Picture a young director who has just had a smash hit. I think Brooks used as his example Mike Nichols after The Graduate.

Nichols (or whoever) goes to a studio and he says

"For my next movie, I want to make The Green Awning."
"What's it about?"
"It's just a picture of a green awning. For an hour and 55 minutes."
"Will there be any rap music playing over this picture of a green awn-"
"No! No music. Just the picture."
"Will there be naked girls under-"
"Nothing underneath the awning."
"Will anyone learn a very impor-"
"No."
"Can we put any of the hot kids from the CW shows in-"
"No."
"They could arrive at a new maturi-"
"Listen to me very carefully. It's a green awning."
"For an hour and 55 minutes."
"That's right."
"Tell me more..."

The obvious strength of this theory in action is that it gives filmmakers an opportunity to take chances and be bold. The obvious weakness is that sometimes it leads to an hour and 55 minutes of a green awning.

By the way, "Dizzyingly original...loopy, multi-layered...both funny and thought-provoking" are all words reviewers use when they don't want to say utterly fails to tell a story.