Synecdoche, New York trailer

The trailer for Synecdoche, New York, the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A.O. Scott liked it at Cannes. The film will be out in limited release (NY & LA?) on Oct 24. Say sih-NECK-duh-kee…kinda like Schenectady. (via crazymonk)

Update: I removed the embedded video…I didn’t know it came with all that extra cruft around it.

Update: The video is back, YouTube-style.

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• synecdochenewyork
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How a Wired article comes to be

Wired is keeping a blog that details the process of writing an upcoming story on, appropriately, writer/director Charlie Kaufman.

An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich’s SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.

We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.

Reading through, I’m not sure I want to know how the sausage is made. With the well-established processes and tropes that magazines follow in publishing each and ever month, stuff like this has a tendency to come off as cynical and overly mechanical (e.g. the piece is already mostly written…they just need Kaufman to fill in the details). I also keep thinking…what if Kaufman reads this before his interviews take place? Is it better or worse for the finished piece that he knows their whole angle going in? (via snarkmarket)

Update: Clarification from Jason Tanz (the author of the Kaufman piece) at Wired…most of the interviews with Kaufman have already been conducted and a rough draft of the story has been completed. They wanted to be at least this far along before they posted any of these materials so as to avoid complications with the interview process. Tanz says that they hope to be “pretty close to real time [on the storyboard blog] by the end of next week”.

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• jasontanz
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Synecdoche, New York script

Jay Fernandez of the LA Times gets his hands on the screenplay for Charlie Kaufman’s new movie, Synecdoche, New York — which Charlie will also be directing (in the absence of Spike Jonze) — and loves it. “No one has ever written a screenplay like this. It’s questionable whether cinema is even capable of handling the thematic, tonal and narrative weight of a story this ambitious.” Incidentally, synecdoche.

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• Spike Jonze
• synecdochenewyork