Exclusive: Poster for Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York

My first thought was: this will be more rewarding on the 2nd viewing than the first. My second thought: what will be the fate for the thinking cap required film perhaps too audacious and too sophisticated for common folk. If you’re like me – among the scratch up discs in your DVD collection are the ones that are scripted by Charlie Kaufman.

Ideally, the perfect suitor for the exploratory, highly imaginative cerebral experience that is Kaufman’s directorial debut will be a distribution company that will mount a campaign that points to  the neurotic anxiety filled creator of the picture, but also, the screenplay’s intelligent design of many thematics. Now that the trade reviews are out (mostly positive) and the jury failed to acknowledge the film’s unique screenplay (The Dardenne’s picked up the award), Sidney Kimmel Entertainment will most likely have some serious bids coming in for Synecdoche, New
York in the post-Cannes weeks that follow.

My guess: don’t be surprised to see Focus Features or Miramax films make the serious offers. Both lack the prestige pictures for the Oscar run (they each have at least one pic with clout: Focus has Gus Van Sant’s Milk and Miramax has another Phillip Seymour Hoffman vehicle with Doubt. More importantly, they both shepherded a Kaufmanesque picture in the past: Focus made some coin with Eternal
Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Miramax backed the Clooney directed Confessions of a
Dangerous Mind.

Dealing with bleak subject matters such as death, disease love and loss, theater director Caden Cotard’s (Hoffman) life in Schenectady, New York is looking bleak. His wife Adele (Keener) has left him to pursue her painting in Berlin, taking their young daughter Olive with her. A new relationship with the alluringly candid Hazel (Samantha Morton) has prematurely run aground. And a mysterious condition is systematically shutting down each of his body’s autonomic functions. Worried about the transience of his life, he moves his theater company to a warehouse in New York City. He directs them in a celebration of the mundane, instructing each to live out their constructed lives in a growing mockup of the city outside. The poster below is taken from a scene where Hoffman post-its his directions for the many players in his play.