Ain’t this a kick in the pants to all integrity-loving screenwriting students who one day want to work in a business where they don’t have to kowtow to commercial instincts. Yes, young scribes, your hero, the sainted Charlie Kaufman, is slumming, doing a polish on “Kung-Fu Panda: The Kaboom Of Doom.”
Now before you get excited, know this was only a “polish,” supposedly consisting of two weeks of work, and in the end, Kaufman will likely not even be credited. When it comes to large-scale studio films, often a few people come on to do last minute tweaks or re-shaping work, and frequently it’s not publicized — in fact, many have to sign non-disclosure waivers so that no one finds out that a studio’s precious blockbuster was gangbanged by eight screenwriters. One of the more interesting reveals in this line of work was by standup comedian Patton Oswalt, who was placed on the Dreamworks payroll to contribute the occasional joke to multiple in-house animated projects for a tidy sum, without ever receiving a credit.
We’ll always have a soft spot for Kaufman as the most original screenwriting voice of his generation, but gigs like this are proof that sometimes it doesn’t pay to JUST be a genius. Hell, need more disillusionment? Kaufman got his start writing for pedestrian sitcoms like “Grace Under Fire.” Mind you, we take all this snobby nose-thumbing talk back if “Charlie Kaufman’s “Kung-Fu Panda: The Kaboom Of Doom” ends up being a Brechtian masterpiece of existentialist angst.