Charlie Kaufman

Ballet -- being a part of the natural world -- evolves according to a Darwinian scheme like everything else. One has worried aplenty, sitting in a dark theater, if what we used to call classical dance hadn't gone right off the rails and belly-flopped into the muck with the creatures that refuse to get up and walk. Trey McIntyre Project restored some faith during its debut performance Saturday at Cal State Los Angeles' Luckman Theater. Kansas native McIntyre, who cut his choreographic teeth with many years at Houston Ballet, approaches choreography with a vacuum cleaner-like equanimity.

United Talent Agency named partners Tracey Jacobs and David Kramer to its board of directors. Jacobs is co-head of the talent department and represents actors including Johnny Depp and Harrison Ford. Kramer is a motion picture literary agent whose clients include screenwriters Charlie Kaufman and John August.

Charlie Kaufman fans can at last talk about: "Synecdoche, New York." The screenwriter's directorial debut, about a playwright (Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose personal life bleeds into his work and vice versa, premiered earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival to positive if cautioning reviews. You either enjoy awesome mind puzzles or you don't. (Friday) You could also talk about -- or to: Kaufman's collaborator, director Michel Gondry.

Charlie Kaufman, a diminutive 50-year-old screenwriter with a thatch of uneven curly hair, is all but swathed in existential terror. He's in the midst of barnstorming the world, promoting his long-awaited directorial debut, "Synecdoche, New York," a rite of passage somewhat akin to a root canal for the famously shy auteur.

It's Charlie Kaufman's world. We just live in it. The day after I first saw Kaufman's movie "Adaptation," my wife and I took our daughter to a birthday party. It was mid-December, an afternoon of flat white sunlight, washed out in that Southern California winter way. At the door, a tangle of balloons announced the festivities in orange and blue and red.

I'm a fan of the intriguing scripts of Charlie Kaufman, but I have to object to his full-blown egomania regarding Susan Orlean's "The Orchid Thief" ("Why Charlie Kaufman Is Us," by David Ulin, May 14). Poor Ms. Orlean, who seemed to have been pressured by the producers of the film to put up with the total transmogrification of her book in order to placate Kaufman and director Spike Jonze following the success of "Being John Malkovich." Putting aside the quality of the film "Adaptation," the idea of Kaufman shredding a fellow writer's work because he was unable to adapt it without turning it into a story about himself reeks of shameless self-absorption.

David L. Ulin sidesteps the importance of the third act in movies ("Why Charlie Kaufman Is Us," May 14). Movies are an accelerated form of narrative, so without a strong closing, the entire clothesline of ideas collapses. Kaufman is masterful at ideas, but an emperor with no "close." He is in good company. In an era of "The Towering Inferno" and "The Poseidon Adventure," Woody Allen's operatic neuroses were hailed as comic genius. At a time of inoffensive Dan Fogelberg ballads, Michael Jackson's overcooked obsessions thrilled music fans worldwide.

\o7Scriptland, launching today, is a new weekly feature on the work and professional lives of screenwriters. \f7* I have the new Charlie Kaufman screenplay on my desk. I've read it -- no, lived it. I've been moved and astounded by it. And I'm tortured by the dilemma of what I should or should not say about it here. I feel a bit like Frodo palming the One Ring.

Filmmakers Joel and Ethan Coen and Charlie Kaufman are collaborating on a theatrical production, "Theater of the New Ear," set for April 28-30 at St. Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn, where it will be taped for broadcast on Sirius Satellite Radio. Among the eight cast members are Meryl Streep, Steve Buscemi, Hope Davis and Philip Seymour Hoffman.

On a chilly night in April, a group of distinguished actors -- Steve Buscemi, Marcia Gay Harden, Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Goodman, Brooke Smith, John Slattery -- took their places onstage without makeup, costuming or props and began speaking in tongues. Since what they were saying was written by Joel and Ethan Coen ("Fargo") as a parody of western serials, they channeled prissy schoolmarms, belligerent gunfighters and crusty country doctors.