Charlie Kaufman's feelings of eternal sunshine seem to be over.
"Frank or Francis," the Oscar-winning screenwriter's newest film, is a twisted and bitter broadside against nearly every aspect of the movie business, from filmmakers to critics to audiences.
TheWrap got an early look at the script, which Kaufman will direct. Here's his Hollywood 101:
Moviegoers are dumb sheep who flock to idiotic movies and don't know how to handle anything the least bit out of the ordinary.
Movie bloggers are ill-tempered losers who live with their parents, except when they're pretentious snobs scared to be creative and desperate to tear down other people's creativity.
Actors make deals with the devil (or whatever equivalent they can find) to have success.
Oh, and it’s also a musical.
Though none of Hollywood escapes Kaufman's withering gaze, "Frank or Francis" -- which Kaufman is slated to begin shooting in January with Nicolas Cage, Jack Black, Steve Carell and Kevin Kline -- reserves particular vitriol for the Academy Awards.
Despite the fact that the Academy has nominated Kaufman three times (plus another nod that went to his alter ego and nonexistent brother Donald Kaufman) and sent him home with a gold statuette for "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind" in 2005 (below), his screenplay essentially paints the iconic awards show as an empty pageant designed to celebrate mediocrity.
"Everything wrong with our society is on display here tonight," says one character at the outrageous Oscar ceremony that makes up the screenplay's climax. "Vanity, greed, political corruption."
He goes on, addressing the audience: "What does your bottomless need for money and glory and power and pathetic substitutes for the love and attention you never received as children lead you to? Do you really need this bowling trophy?"
I won't spoil things by going into any detail about what happens next – or about what happened to bring the character to that point – but "Frank" is the dark underbelly of Christopher Guest's "For Your Consideration," which treated the Oscar circus as the height of silliness, fit mostly to be mocked.
In truth, the movie's really not about the Oscars or about Hollywood so much as it's about the gluttony and anger that courses through the internet.
"America is a country of over-entertained, overfat, under-schooled asshats," says one voice of relative wisdom. "Can you expect the Academy to be any different?"
Given Kaufman's track record (his directorial debut, "Synecdoche, New York," along with "Eternal Sunshine," "Adaptation" and "Being John Malkovich"), it's no surprise that "Frank" is strange. The script is dense and complicated and wicked, at times very funny and at other times damn near unfilmable.
Its credit sequence, for instance, is deliberately jumbled with credits of two other movies-within-the-movie.
