Johnny Showtime: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

 by JB

It’s here! It’s back! Ladies and gentlemen after a hiatus of twenty-five years... one of the worst movies ever made!

I was lucky enough to see Alan Rudolph’s film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions in 1999. I was visiting Illinois State University in Normal, Illinois for an AP Conference, and it was actually playing at a local theater there. This obscure little film did not get much of a theatrical release. (Thanks, Disney!) I have always assumed the distributor thought, “Well, dese college kids like dis Vonnegut guy; why not play dis in college campuseses?” (The film’s eventual gross was estimated to be under $200,000.)

I hated the film. It was a miserable experience. Then the film disappeared. After a perfunctory VHS and DVD release, it was not released digitally until 25 years later.

THE PLOT IN BRIEF: “This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.” The first is car dealer Dwayne Hoover (Bruce Willis), who is in the middle of a nervous breakdown after the death of his wife Celia (Barbara Hershey). The second is obscure science-fiction author Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney) wo has just been invited to a special celebration of the arts in Hoover’s hometown. The film traces Trout’s journey to the Midland City gala and Hoover’s increasingly delusional behavior regarding his mistress Francine Pefko (Glenn Headly), his sales manager Harry LeSabre (Nick Nolte), a former prison inmate Wayne Hoobler who has become obsessed with him (Omar Epps), and a local millionaire bankrolling the arts festival, Eliot Rosewater (Ken Campbell).

FULL DISCLOSURE: Kurt Vonnegut is my favorite author. He was my favorite author is high school, when my parents actually tried to stop me from reading any more of Vonnegut because 1) They were rabidly anti-intellectual and 2) They were afraid he was making me cynical. This just made me want to read him more. Later, I became a high-school teacher and taught Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five for the better part of three decades.

When I retired, my colleagues bought me a first edition of Breakfast of Champions, signed by the author. It is one of my treasured possessions. For many years, former students would contact me on the Facebook machine when they got themselves a Vonnegut tattoo. The three favorites are 1) “And So It Goes,” from Slaughterhouse-Five, 2) The tombstone inscribed “Everything was Beautiful and Nothing Hurt” from Breakfast of Champions, and 3) Vonnegut’s cow drawing and inscription “Goodbye Blue Monday,” also from Breakfast. If I seem a little picky and possessive about Vonnegut, I come by it honestly.

The other night I noticed the 1999 Breakfast was actually available on Amazon Prime! I watched it, hoping that time had been kind to this misbegotten piece of shit. It had not. Hipsters crow that Plan 9 from Outer Space and The Room are two of the worst movies ever made. Those films are wildly entertaining and competently made, compared to Alan Rudolph’s Breakfast of Champions.

The film’s shit-shit-shittiness is largely due to the following: 1) Everyone overacts. Apparently, Bruce Willis bankrolled this vanity production because he felt he needed to make a comedy. As opposed to leaning into the book’s subtle air of dark humor and satire, adaptor/director Rudolph tells his cast to GO FOR IT. It’s hard to determine who is worse. I will admit though... takes a deep breath... Albert Finney alone acquits himself nicely and was an inspired choice to play Vonnegut alter-ego Kilgore Trout. But Willis? Nick Nolte? Omar Epps? Owen Wilson? Forget it.

2) Everyone is miscast. Because the film contains no actual entertainment value, it’s easy to let one’s mind wander while watching it... and come up with a better cast. First, Willis and Nolte should have switched roles—inspired. Barbara Hershey plays Willis’s wife and Glenne Headly plays his mistress—again, switch! The only performance I’m completely satisfied with is Ken Campbell as Elliot Rosewater. You might remember Ken Campbell; he plays the helpful boarder at the Bed & Breakfast that Bill Murray keeps running into in the hallway in Groundhog Day.

3) Because the protagonist here is a car dealer who is well known from his advertising presence, Rudolph takes his visual and pacing cues from the world of television advertising. What we are left with is a brightly colored, annoying, and incoherent mess. The film was edited without purpose or intent; it’s shit show. If we were to ask Rudolph why this is, I think he would reply, “Well, life is a shit show.” Problem is... I don’t believe that... and I do not think Vonnegut believed that.

4) Vonnegut is missing. Although he appears in a small cameo, it’s Vonnegut’s voice is missing here. This reminds me of the film adaptation of Angela’s Ashes, which fails because it is missing Frank McCourt’s distinctive narration from the book. A key scene in Breakfast of Champions involves Kurt Vonnegut setting all of his characters free. Where IS he? The film DOES contain a weird and incoherent ending involving Kilgore Trout and a magic mirror, but the key scene between Trout and his creator is missing. This is a tragedy because it is one of the most memorable scenes in the book. Vonnegut introduces himself to Trout and explains that he is Trout’s creator. Trout’s response? He lets out a loud mournful sigh and shouts, “Make me young. Make me young.”

ANOTHER BEEF: Like the Malcolm McDowell character Alex accidentally getting conditioned to hate Beethoven music in A Clockwork Orange, the inexplicable score to Breakfast of Champions was slowly making me hate the work of Martin Denny. Martin Denny is one of my favorite composers/arrangers, having almost single-handedly invented the genre of “exotica.” You can check out Martin Denny’s famous work here:



Alan Rudolph, you are a cruel, cruel bastard.