Robert McKee’s Monologue from Adapatation
Posted on August 18, 2011 in General Screenwriting | 1 Comment
In the Charlie Kaufman-penned film Adaptation., McKee’s character was portrayed by the Emmy Award-winning actor Brian Cox, who was McKee’s personal choice for the role. In the movie, the desperate screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) reluctantly goes to McKee’s course, but then – after being “shaken” by McKee’s tough-style response to his claim that “nothing happens in the real world” – Kaufman asks McKee to meet in person to discuss his failure to write the film adaptation he is working on.
Though the story depicts McKee as little more than an amalgam of hack cliches on the subject of screen writing, Charlie’s slacker brother Donald uses the knowledge obtained attending the famous seminar to write a spec script he then sells for a large amount of money through his brother’s agent. The film then concludes rather cynically with the very hackneyed, bang-up ending McKee is ridiculed for recommending, as well as a voice-over epilogue in which—by means of voice-over narration—Cage’s Kaufman character admonishes himself for disobeying a cardinal rule of McKee’s to avoid voice-over narration.
One Comment
I absolutely love this scene. Thanks for posting.