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Breakfast of Champions
First Published: 1973
302 pages
 About the Book
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About The Movie
When Kurt Vonnegut´s Breakfast of Champions finally made it to the screen in 1999 -- directed by Alan Rudolph and starring its producer, Bruce Willis -- it had been in some stage of development as a film for almost 25 years. Rudolph´s film was not a success in its brief and limited theatrical run, though it has resurfaced on home video.
Robert Altman was to have made the film, and he apparently intended to do it at some point after he finished Buffalo Bill and the Indians, with which he followed up his triumphant 1975 film Nashville. Both the Vonnegut novel and E.L. Doctorow´s Ragtime were on Altman´s schedule. In an interview he gave in 1976, the director even mentioned a cast -- Peter Falk as Dwayne Hoover, Sterling Hayden as Kilgore Trout and, improbably, a gender-bending Ruth Gordon as Eliot Rosewater. Vonnegut himself talked in interviews about how Altman would handle the book, and he was pleased with what he had seen of a freely adapted script. Buffalo Bill and the Indians was a failure, and Altman´s plans changed. Ragtime was made in 1981 by Milos Forman, an entirely different film from the one Altman envisioned. But the plan for Breakfast of Champions endured.
The project remained on the back burner until Bruce Willis became interested in the early 1990s. The film finally came together under the direction of Rudolph, who had drafted the screenplay when he was Altman´s protegé in the 1970s and is now a respected independent director himself (Choose Me, Afterglow). Bruce Willis plays Dwayne Hoover, with Albert Finney as Kilgore Trout, and the cast includes Nick Nolte and Barbara Hershey. The film stumbles on a tricky matter that most diminishes other Vonnegut film adaptations. The manic craziness of the book is recreated, but the film fails to find a cinematic equivalent of the galvanic sensibility on the page that knits Vonnegut´s vision.
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