The Orchid Thief was a book written by Susan Orlean in 1998, after she published an article on John Laroche in the New Yorker in 1995. The Orchid Thief book inspired movie titled Adaptation, released in 2002, which was about a self loathing screenwriter named Charlie who was hired to write a screenplay of Susan Orlean's Orchid Thief. All of this thrusted the main non-fiction subject of the book, John Laroche, into the public spotlight.