Year 15, Day 117 - 4/27/23 - Movie #4,418
BEFORE: OK, this is a relatively new documentary, it came out in 2021 - but I've been eagerly anticipating this one, so as soon as I found out it was streaming on Hulu, I told myself that I just HAD to work it into this year's Doc Block. Why?
Because, like many other people, I'm a big Vonnegut fan - I discovered his books in high school when I happened upon "Breakfast of Champions" in the library, devoured it in one sitting, and found that the author's views on life really spoke to me. Then I read "Slaughterhouse Five" and watched the movie, and after that I had to read every single book Vonnegut ever wrote.
There's no appearance by Walter Cronkite tonight, but newsman Morley Safer carries over from "Where's My Roy Cohn?". That'll do.
THE PLOT: Recounting the extraordinary life of author Kurt Vonnegut and the 25-year friendship with the filmmaker who set out to document it.
AFTER: This is a film about Kurt Vonnegut, but it's also a film about Robert "Bob" Weide - who discovered Vonnegut's work in high school when he happened upon "Breakfast of Champions" in the library, devoured it in one sitting, and found that the author's views on life really spoke to him. Then he read "Slaughterhouse Five" and watched the movie, and after that he had to read every single book Vonnegut ever wrote. Gee, that sounds kind of familiar...
There are, or were, hopefully still are, millions of Vonnegut fans out there. Really, we should have a convention or something. VonneCon? Con-Negut? I bet there's a fan club you can join, or at least a Facebook or Reddit group. Tumblr? MySpace? Anyway, if you only know the novels, you only know half the story, really - except that Vonnegut put aspects of his life all over the books. Still, you may know the books but not the man. Here I kept thinking that the fictional sci-fi author, Kilgore Trout, who appears in so many Vonnegut books, was a stand-in for the author himself. Well, yes and no, Vonnegut really based Trout on a struggling sci-fi author named Theodore Sturgeon (he just changed the type of fish) but over time Trout perhaps came to represent Vonnegut himself.
But really, if any character was based on Vonnegut's own life, it would be Billy Pilgrim, from "Slaughterhouse Five". Both Pilgrim and Vonnegut served in World War II, got captured after the Battle of the Bulge, and were held as prisoners in Dresden, Germany, before the city got bombed by Allied forces. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs were put to work cleaning up the bodies of German citizens, and one can only imagine the horrors that he witnessed. When Vonnegut got back to the U.S. after the war, he was determined to write a book about the horrors of Dresden, but it took him until 1969 to do so. The book was written over fifteen years and went through almost a hundred drafts - and this was in the days BEFORE word processing, when an author just used a typewriter!
But just after getting back from WWII, Vonnegut married Jane Marie Cox, his high-school girlfriend, and enrolled via the G.I. Bill in the University of Chicago, where he studied anthropology and also worked as a reporter for the City News Bureau at night. Jane had a scholarship to study Russian literature, but dropped out when she became pregnant. (Kurt left the university without completing his master's thesis, but 25 years later, the school accepted his novel "Cat's Cradle" in place of his thesis, and conferred his degree.). Vonnegut worked for General Electric research labs in Schenectady, New York, but after he started getting stories published in Collier's magazine, he quit the G.E. job to become an author full time. His first novel, "Player Piano" drew attention when it was favorably compared to "Brave New World".
More novels came, but they took him time to write. Thankfully he could write short stories much quicker, but by then Kurt and his wife had three children, and had moved to Barnstable, MA where Kurt opened up a Saab dealership. The cars didn't sell well, and the company went bankrupt, but at least being alone in a car dealership around the clock gave him plenty of time to write. In 1958 Kurt's sister, Alice, died of cancer three days after her husband died in a train accident, and Kurt and his wife took in all four of their teenage sons. This made for a large, chaotic family life, raising seven children, which made it more difficult for him to write, but it also gave him more motivation to be successful at it. "The Sirens of Titan" and "Mother Night" were the result, then came "Cat's Cradle" in 1963. After one more book, though, Vonnegut abandoned his writing career and took a teaching job at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa to sustain his family.
Working at the University allowed him not just money, but also time to get back into writing. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967, and used the money to travel back to Dresden and get back on track writing that novel about World War II. If you're not familiar with the story, it's told in non-linear fashion, as the main character, Billy Pilgrim, gets abducted by aliens later in life and is placed in a Tramalfadorian space zoo with a porn star named Montana Wildhack, and at some point the aliens grant him the ability to time-travel within his own lifetime, and he becomes "unstuck in time", and the three timelines of past, present and future play out to the audience in pieces. Yes, I've railed against non-linear storytelling many times in this blog, but I make allowances for authors who really know how to do it - Vonnegut and Tarantino, and very VERY few others.
More successes came for Vonnegut after that, he lectured at Harvard and taught at City College of New York, got several honorary degrees and was elected vice president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He got an apartment in New York and moved there in 1971 to produce a play he wrote, named "Happy Birthday, Wanda June", then fell in love with a photographer in NYC and decided not to go back home to Iowa. It happens, I guess - or as Vonnegut would say, "And so it goes..." His wife had found religion, and Kurt saw himself as more of an agnostic, so after a few rounds of fighting they got divorced but remained friends. On the literary front, Vonnegut released "Breakfast of Champions" but not everybody understood his new simplistic writing (and illustrating) style - to some, it seemed like he had given up on storytelling altogether.
Vonnegut married that photographer, Jill Krementz, in 1979, and they adopted a baby daughter, and he enjoyed another round of successful books in the 1980s, like "Deadeye Dick", "Galapagos", "Bluebeard" and "Hocus Pocus". But he also struggled with depression and attempted suicide. Then came his cameo appearance in the Rodney Dangerfield comedy "Back to School", and a new generation started learning who Vonnegut was.
Oh, right, Bob Weide, I said this film was also about Bob Weide, who started interviewing Vonnegut back in 1982 or so, he started to make a documentary about him but then got busy doing other things, then he re-connected with Vonnegut some years later and started it up again, shelved it again, then found himself hired to adapt Kurt's novel "Mother Night" into a movie and this put him BACK in touch with Vonnegut, who did a cameo in the movie. This inspired Weide to shoot MORE footage for the documentary, but then he got hired to direct episodes of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" and shelved it again. Weide appears here on camera to explain to the audience why it took 40 years, overall, to finish the film. I think maybe just Weide liked hanging out with his favorite author for 25 years, and then finishing a documentary was an added bonus.
Normally I HATE when a director speaks to the audience to explain why a film was made a certain way, but I can see how maybe here he didn't have much choice - much like the director of "The Amazing Johnathan Documentary" which I watched last year - sometimes there's no choice, the viewers need to know WHY the film was made this way, and jumps around so much, or why things seem to be as disjointed as they are, because this was the only way to complete the film. Weide and Vonnegut ended up becoming members of each other's "extended families", so as with other non-linear storytelling techniques, I'll make allowances tonight for it - just don't let it happen again.
Also starring Kurt Vonnegut Jr., (last seen in "Breakfast of Champions") Jim Adams, Steve Adams, Kurt “Tiger” Adams, Peter Adams, Joel Bleifus, John Irving, Jerome Klinkowitz, Sidney Offit, Dan Simon, Valerie Stevenson, Ginger Strand, Gregory Sumner, David Ulin, Dan Wakefield, Bernard Vonnegut, Edie Vonnegut, Mark Vonnegut, Nanny Vonnegut, Sam Waterston (last seen in "Miss Sloane"), Robert B. Weide,
with archive footage of David Bowie (last seen in "Buddy Guy: The Blues Chase the Blues Away"), George W. Bush (last seen in "Running With Beto"), Dick Cheney (last seen in "Shock and Awe"), Bill Clinton (last seen in "Dionne Warwick: Don't Make Me Over"), Bryan Cranston (last seen in "The One and Only Ivan"), Jane Curtin (last seen in "Zappa"), Rodney Dangerfield (last seen in "Robert Klein Still Can't Stop His Leg"), Larry David (last seen in "The Super Bob Einstein Movie"), Jeff Garlin (ditto), Cheryl Hines (ditto), E.L. Doctorow, Peter Fonda (last seen in "Mr. Saturday Night"), Charlie Gibson (last seen in "Wolfgang"), Keith Gordon (last seen in "Christine"), Oliver Hardy (last seen in "Jerry Lewis: The Man Behind the Clown"), Stan Laurel (ditto), Bruce Jenner, Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "What's My Name: Muhammad Ali"), Jane Kaczmarek (last seen in "CHIPS"), Jill Krementz, Ron Leibman (last seen in "The Hot Rock"), Norman Mailer (also carrying over from "Where's My Roy Cohn?"), Richard Nixon (ditto), Chico Marx (last seen in "Hello I Must Be Going"), Groucho Marx (ditto), Harpo Marx (ditto), Zeppo Marx, Nick Nolte (last seen in "George Carlin's American Dream"), George Plimpton (last seen in "When We Were Kings"), Colin Powell (last seen in "The Automat"), Harry Reasoner (last seen in "Attica"), Eugene Roche (last seen in "The Late Show"), Michael Sacks (last seen in "The Sugarland Express"), O.J. Simpson (last seen in "Tina"), Jon Stewart (last seen in "Sheryl"), John Updike, Linda Bates Weide, Burt Young (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in America").
RATING: 7 out of 10 short fiction anthologies
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