Responding to our podcast [Zen and the Angst of Kaufman](http://johnaugust.com/2012/zen-and-the-angst-of-kaufman), reader Scott argues that Charlie Kaufman is in fact thinking of the audience:
> He’s just like you. He’s trying to write movies that HE would want to sit in a theater and watch. But what he likes to watch is something true, not something he’s seen before in a slightly different form. We may not be entertained by this, either because our culture has trained us that a movie should be a certain way, or because we simply like different things than Charlie Kaufman likes (because everyone’s different).
> He’s putting himself in the theater seats as he writes, as we writers should, but he’s asking us to be a more critical audience of ourselves than real audiences actually are.
We’re conflating two points here. I think both are valid, but they shouldn’t be confused:
1. Screenwriters should write movies they themselves want to see.
2. Screenwriters should consider the point-of-view of the audience.
Violate the first rule, and you have hacky trash.
Violate the second rule, and you have solipsistic indulgence.
Kaufman is clearly writing movies he wants to see. That’s good. But if another screenwriter loves horror movies and wants to see more movies like Halloween, his intentions should be considered just as pure despite being more commercial.
Scott feels Kaufman knows what “real audiences” are like, but holds himself to a higher standard. Okay. But if this higher standard makes the screenwriter’s work inaccessible or uninteresting to an audience — or at least, a large chunk of the audience — I don’t think it’s fair to put all the blame at the feet of “the system.”
In his BAFTA speech, Kaufman isn’t complaining as much as explaining (or exploring) why he feels compelled to write the movies he writes, and the resulting frustration.
Scott continues:
> The Hollywood model panders to the universal truths that we already know are universal, because that will translate to the largest demographic and therefore the largest box office. What’s funny to me is that one fairly common “truth” sold by many of these films is that “money isn’t everything” (or some variation thereof). Yet the person (or committee) who wrote the script, the people who greenlit it, the people they hired to make it, and the people marketing it are solely concerned with it making the most amount of money possible.
Agreed. It’s likely because the credit-slash-blame for movies is shared among so many people that this thematic hypocrisy goes unnoticed.
