When 2004 Nieman fellow Susan Orlean began researching the arcane world of rare-flower piracy in the mid-1990s, she was less than immediately successful, as she explained to a capacity audience of Summer School students in Boylston Hall’s Fong Auditorium on Monday.

“I’m fucked. There’s no story,” she said, recounting her thoughts as she struggled to organize an “overwhelming” amount of research.

By the time she had managed to pull that research into a New Yorker article and a book, Orlean had a critically acclaimed bestseller on her hands: 1998’s The Orchid Thief.

A few years later, Orlean’s nonfiction work was chosen as the basis of a film scripted by offbeat indie writer Charlie Kaufman and his twin brother Donald Kaufman, who may or may not exist. But when she saw the script to the film, titled Adaptation, her reaction was not surprise but something closer to horror, Orlean said.

“I’m a professional journalist,” she remembered thinking. “This is going to ruin my career.”

In the movie, a character named Susan Orlean (played by Meryl Streep) intrepidly investigates the work of eccentric orchid thief John Laroche (Chris Cooper) for a New Yorker article and a book. She also snorts psychotropic orchid extracts, brandishes—and fires—a gun and poses nude for a website while engaged in an affair with Laroche.

“It’s not my book,” Orlean said bluntly on Monday after the audience viewed Adaptation. “In an oblique way, it’s about a particular journey I took as a writer and a journalist.”

The film, mainly concerned with the trials faced by an onscreen Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage) after he agrees to adapt Orlean’s book into a screenplay, is no kinder to its script’s author—which Orlean said led her agent to employ an unusual argument as he convinced her to approve the script.

“‘I mean, c’mon,’” Orlean said her agent told her. “Look at Charlie. He’s masturbating through the entire movie. What’s your complaint?”

When she finally conceded to have her name attached to the film, Orlean said that signing a waiver form that read “I understand I’ll be portrayed as a murderer, a drug addict and a porn star” was particularly odd.

In the end, though, Orlean said she liked the film—which netted an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Cooper, as well as nominations for Cage and Streep.

“On the eighth viewing, I still enjoyed it, which is saying something,” she said, after the closing credits had rolled.

In the hour-long question and answer session which followed the screening, Orlean expressed her admiration for the shadowy Donald Kaufman, instantly naming him as the one person, dead or alive, with whom she would choose to dine given the chance.

Orlean was cagier about whether the gleeful twin—also played by Cage as a foil to the gloomy Charlie character, and credited as a writer of the film—actually exists.

“The one request [director] Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman made was to sort of pass on the question [of Donald’s reality],” she said. “I can say that I’ve never met Donald Kaufman, but he would have been dead anyway.”