| “Generally speaking, orchids seem to drive people crazy,” The New Yorker’s Susan Orlean once observed. It was a pathology with a history. The Victorians, she reported, even coined a term for the condition: “orchidelirium.” Symptoms, at times, have included obsessively cataloguing and collecting different species; paying thousands of dollars for a single plant; and forming a criminal ring to steal the flowers, roots included, from a state preserve in Florida. In 1995, Orlean chronicled the legal proceedings that followed the Florida theft, an operation organized by a thirtysomething named John Laroche, also known as Troublemaker and Crazy White Man. After losing his own orchid collection in a series of unfortunate twists, Laroche had taken a job with the local Seminole tribe, which planned to build a nursery on its reservation. Laroche believed he had discovered a loophole in state law that would allow the removal of protected orchids from the preserve—an interpretation not shared by the ranger who arrested him. Orlean later expanded her New Yorker article into “The Orchid Thief,” a book whose swampy settings and colorful characters proved irresistible, but also nearly impossible, to the Hollywood screenwriter Charlie Kaufman. Kaufman’s tortured efforts to craft a movie from the story ultimately resulted in “Adaptation,” the 2002 film starring Meryl Streep as Orlean, Chris Cooper as Laroche, and Nicolas Cage as Kaufman. (All were nominated for Oscars, and Cooper won.) This week, as part of The New Yorker’s annual Interviews Issue, the real-life Orlean reunited with Cage, whom she had met on the film set in 2001. Among other topics, the pair considered the prospect of “Adaptation 2.” Their conversation, Cage said, “could lead to planting the seeds.” | 
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