Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers

Since the late 1990s, a subtle, subversive element has been at work within the staid confines of the Hollywood dream factory. Young filmmakers like Spike Jonze, Wes Anderson, Michel Gondry, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater, and Sofia Coppola rode in on the coattails of the independent film movement that blossomed in the early 1990s and have managed to wage an aesthetic campaign against cowardice of the imagination, much like their artistic forebears, the so-called Movie Brats?Coppola, Scorsese, De Palma, Altman, and Ashby among others?did in the 1970s. But their true pedigree can