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"What's interesting about you bringing up the theater thing," he continued, "is that when I wrote a series of pilots for TV, I would often get the response that what I wrote 'seemed like plays' -- which is weird because TV is generally more like theater anyway. Maybe part of it is that my characters speak in stylized ways that seem to be anti-cinema."

Kaufman contributed to "The Dana Carvey Show" as well as "Get a Life" (the Chris Elliott series) and "Ned and Stacey" (which starred Thomas Haden Church). But more to the point, he kept reading writers ranging from Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K. Dick and Steven Dixon to Shirley Jackson and Patricia Highsmith, who are both specialists in "the queasy, really subtle shit that happens between characters; it can seem like nothing's happening, but it's horrible just the same."

Another favorite of Kaufman's is Flannery O'Connor, who believed that Southern writers aptly render "the grotesque" because they can still recognize what it is. Reading O'Connor made Kaufman fear "that I wouldn't have a voice because I didn't seem to come from anywhere -- I was jealous of other parts of America. I don't want to veer into that personal area, but I grew up in the equivalent of Levittown, that kind of post-World War II development." Part of Kaufman's own development came from recognizing the "weirdness" within his purview.

Michael Sragow Michael Sragow's column appears every Thursday in Arts & Entertainment + Archives

"I don't think my characters are a joke," said Kaufman. "I take them seriously. And no matter how outlandish or weird their situation, their situation is real and a little tragic. I think that's what gives people something to hang onto as they watch the film. We had to find a way to make everything play on a very naturalistic level, so it didn't just turn into wackiness. I'm not interested in getting crazier and crazier."

At the same time, Kaufman has a classic gag-man's instinct for goofiness. Malkovich was picked at least partly because of how funny his name sounds in repetition. "When we were thinking of alternatives, we found that a lot of them weren't fun to say." Yet the script's version of Malkovich turns out to be a somewhat piteous figure: "There's never anyone else there with him; his life seems kind of sad and empty." On a recent Charlie Rose show, the real John Malkovich said he figured out how to play the movie's Malkovich manque by getting into the writer's head. So in a sense, I suggested to Kaufman, Malkovich was portalling into him. "I can't say how much I admire his courage in doing this," said Kaufman. Malkovich was the writer's first choice -- unlike the guy in the movie who says the actor is his second choice. "I love that we never find out who his first choice is -- in the original script I brought that up more than once."

It was Malkovich himself who suggested Charlie Sheen for the role of "his" best friend. (Sheen's performance is a career-saver on the order of Bruce Willis' in "Pulp Fiction.") And Orson Bean was the last person cast, though the role of Schwartz's zany old boss could have been written for him. All the other outré and risky jokes, from the hanging questions about Elijah the chimp cited above to a sight gag about a nondescript plank of wood, belong to Kaufman. He tried to convey the look and meaning of virtuoso puppet turns like "The Dance of Despair and Disillusionment" in his prose. He also sweated to make sure that the fictional Malkovich's theater jobs would augment the movie's main action.

It's ticklishly apt to have Malkovich read Chekhov's "The Cherry Orchard" into a microcassette recorder while studying the text at his home; the air of deluxe ennui suits his apartment. "I knew I wanted Chekhov, and I went through a bunch of his plays to find lines that would be both overwrought and silly-sounding. I also like that Lotte is learning the lines through Malkovich's eyes" -- thus giving new meaning to the concept of two people being on the same page. And Kaufman set one scene during a run-through of "Richard III" because "I liked the idea that Malkovich would have to rehearse in a hump." Naturally, it also aided Kaufman's convoluted erotic story line to hear Richard pondering the wonderment of his twisted wooings.

Now that Kaufman himself is a celebrity of sorts, does he find himself constructing an alter ego of his own for the movie-going public? "Well, I'm making every effort not to allow that to happen. I don't consider myself a public person. I am more careful; it's weird to see myself quoted out of context. But when I'm talking like this, the only difference from the way I am normally is that maybe I'm a little less morose. I just don't want to confuse myself. I'm confused enough, so I don't want to add another element of ... confusion. Confusion," he said, with a laugh the size of a hiccup, "is my favorite word."

And what about the Kaufman scripts yet to be produced? (He is reportedly working on another comedy, "Human Nature," starring Patricia Arquette.) "I hope to do things that are somehow complicated but that won't be repeats. Maybe I'll try to do things that are different, and they won't be so different, but the similarities are more for a critic to say. What would be funny is if the movie stays this 'hot' -- and that everyone starts to want something like 'Being John Malkovich,' a film that took five years to get made. That would be like an episode of 'The Twilight Zone.'"
salon.com | Nov. 11, 1999

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