Kurt Vonnegut vs. Hollywood: The Odd Crossroads of Film and Vonnegut
February 26, 2013 · from the Word & Film archive
Kurt Vonnegut graded his own books once, famously and mischievously. Hollywood's attempts at those books grade themselves. The strange truth: the author everyone calls unadaptable produced exactly one great film — and he agreed.
George Roy Hill's Slaughterhouse-Five (1972) remains the outlier. The film trusts the novel's time-slipping structure completely, cutting between Dresden, suburbia and Tralfamadore on match-cuts instead of explanations. It won the Jury Prize at Cannes, and Vonnegut — who watched Hollywood mangle him before and after — called it 'flawless,' writing that he 'drooled and cackled' through it.
The rest of the ledger is grimmer. Happy Birthday, Wanda June (1971) he disowned outright. Slapstick of Another Kind (1984) is best left undescribed. Mother Night (1996) is honorable and underseen — Nick Nolte carrying the book's terrible moral ('we are what we pretend to be') with dignity. Breakfast of Champions (1999), with Bruce Willis, proved some prose voices simply don't survive decompression.
Why the misfires? Vonnegut's plots are trellises; the voice is the vine. Only Hill filmed the trellis and let the voice imply itself. So it goes — the one that worked is cataloged here.
