Charlie Kaufman is making his directorial debut, and it’ll be interesting to see what the writer has learned from his partnerships with Spike Jonze and Michel Gondry. The movie is one that he’s written (of course) called Synecdoche, and it’s about “an anguished playwright and the several women in his life.” I guess after you’ve written a movie starring yourself you have to make your onscreen doppelganger a little more removed from your real profession – so it goes from screenwriter to playwright!
By the way, why is it playwright? Why not playwrite? Is it related to shipwright?
Anyway, the film will star Phillip Seymour Hoffman, presumably as the playwright. Michelle Williams, most recently seen in Brokeback Mountain and helping to continue Heath Ledger’s near-perfect DNA line into the future, also stars.
By the way number two, synecdoche isn’t a sci-fi technobabble word, which I kind of thought it was. It’s a noun, and here’s what it means: “A figure of speech in which a part is used for the whole (as hand for sailor), the whole for a part (as the law for police officer), the specific for the general (as cutthroat for assassin), the general for the specific (as thief for pickpocket), or the material for the thing made from it (as steel for sword).”