Back in the mid-1970s, the great Robert Altman was reportedly planning a film of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 best-seller “Breakfast of Champions,” his wild, satirical novel aiming at the increasingly brutal nature of American society. It would follow two characters crossing paths: Dwayne Hoover, a big-shot car dealer in Midland City who seems to have it all on the surface but is teetering on the brink of a nervous breakdown, and Kilgore Trout (a recurring character in Vonnegut’s works), a prolific but largely unknown sci-fi author of inexplicably summoned to be honored at a local arts festival.
The task of wrestling Vonnegut’s complex prose into a workable screenplay was given to Alan Rudolph, a protege of Altman’s who had worked alongside him on “The Long Goodbye” and “Nashville,” and who would collaborate with him on the screenplay of “Buffalo Bill & the Indians.” Although some wild casting suggestions were announced—including Peter Falk as Hoover, Sterling Hayden as Trout, Alice Cooper as Hoover’s lounge singer son Bunny, and Ruth Gordon as Eliot Rosewater, one of the richest men in the world—the film, like so many other projects that Altman would announce over the years, did not get made. It became one of those legendary “what if” projects, whose loss cineastes would mourn.
A couple of years later, Rudolph (who already had a couple of obscure low-budget horror programmers under his belt) would begin making his own series of odd and idiosyncratic films, including “Welcome to L.A.” (1976), “Remember My Name” (1978), “Choose Me” (1984), “Trouble in Mind” (1985), “The Moderns” (1988), “Love at Large” (1990), “Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle” (1994) and “Afterglow” (1997). Although a cult following would develop for Parker and his films, his quirky and laid-back approach to familiar genre tropes would sharply divide critics and did not exactly bring in large audiences. The only genuine hit that he would have was “Mortal Thoughts” (1991), an atypical thriller co-starring Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, then at their apex as a Hollywood power couple, that he took over after the original director was fired at the last second.
A few years later, Willis would revive “Breakfast of Champions,” with Rudolph now directing as well and with a cast that would include Willis as Hoover, Albert Finney as Trout, Nick Nolte as car salesman-with-a-secret Harry LeSabre, Barbara Hershey as Hoover’s ethereal wife, Glenne Headly as his mistress, Lukas Haas as son Bunny and familiar faces like Omar Epps, Buck Henry, Owen Wilson, Michael Clarke Duncan, Will Patton and Vonnegut himself turning up in small roles.
When the film was finally released, so to speak, in 1999, it was an all-around disaster. Critics hated Rudolph’s deliberately in-your-face tone, and audiences revolted at the sight of Willis–the hero who’d just saved humanity the year prior in “Armageddon”—in a weird social satire in which his first scene showed him sticking a gun in his mouth and trying to will himself to commit suicide. To make matters worse, it was distributed in America by a division of Walt Disney Studios, who decided to wash their hands of the whole thing and gave it a release so minuscule that to describe it as “token” would be overselling it. (The final box gross was estimated at under $200,000 total.) Outside of a long out-of-print DVD release, the film more or less disappeared from view.
This is a shame because, while it was clearly never going to be a mass audience hit, it still has a lot of things going for it. Vonnegut is not the easiest author to adapt, and while Rudolph’s film may not heed the text completely, it does a good job of taking his voice and putting it into cinematic turns. A lot of the performances are quite good as well—Willis takes a lot of chances in his turn as Hoover, and most of them pay off; Nolte (in the second of four collaborations with Rudolph) is very funny, and Finney is such a good choice as Trout even those who otherwise hated the film concede that he worked. Additionally, the wild and chaotic tone that proved so abrasive in 1999 now seems right at home in the chaos of our current times. If you liked Richard Kelly’s equally divisive cult favorite “Southland Tales” (2006), “Breakfast of Champions” is clearly on the same wavelength.
The film is marking its 25th anniversary with a 4K restoration that will be turning up in theaters via Films We Like and Shout! Studios on November 1–just in time to coincide with the upcoming election—and which will presumably then go to streaming and Blu-ray afterward. Will audiences today respond to its weird and decidedly off-beat sensibilities any better than in 1999? Honestly, I don’t know. But as a longtime fan of Rudolph’s oeuvre, the chance to experience one of the most idiosyncratic films from one of America’s most idiosyncratic filmmakers—is an unexpected thrill. It’s a work that is so defiantly odd that I can imagine some viewers becoming inspired to seek out some of Rudolph’s other works.
To promote the reissue of “Breakfast with Champions,” I had the privilege of speaking with Rudolph via Zoom. He talked about the film’s convoluted history, how he thinks it will play with contemporary audiences, and the frustrations of trying to find some of his earlier films on video. He also shared some news about his imminent entrance into the Criterion Collection.
I have to admit that of all the films I might have expected to get a 25th anniversary remaster and rerelease, “Breakfast of Champions” was not one of them. How did all of this come about?
You would have to stand in line behind me because I never expected it. Then, we would both have to stand in line behind countless others who were probably trying to prevent it for all these years. I did no press when it was released because they wanted no press, and it never played anywhere after that. “Breakfast,” in my creative life, is in its Act III. I wrote the screenplay because Altman pointed to me in a room and said, “I can’t get anybody to come up with a screenplay for this book—crack it!” His only marching orders were, “Don’t follow the book.” Then I read the book, and I think it was like acid or rock and roll, where life becomes divided between before “Breakfast of Champions” and after “Breakfast of Champions,” especially at the time.
I embraced its corrosive look at our country’s society and power structure and racism and all that, done through the most hilarious lens. Then, as a young guy—I was 30-31 at the time—Bob couldn’t get anybody to write it. We had just finished “Nashville,” and he asked me to try it, and I was too dumb to say, “I can’t crack this,” so I did. Then, I went to New York to meet Vonnegut, which was a double whammy. He said the same thing—the book and a movie of the book have to be separate and just use it as a starting point. I told Altman and Kurt that if you did the book and tried to adapt it faithfully, it would almost have to be a biography of Vonnegut. I know Altman didn’t want that, and I don’t think Kurt did, and it would take me years to write that. I told both of them that I was just going to focus on the characters, but I was so naive and green at the time that I was probably just reaching for something because I got stuck. Then it didn’t get made.
Twenty-five years later, I got a phone call from Bruce Willis, who I had worked with several years earlier—we had a good time and made a nice little movie, and he was so happy with his performance because somebody let him act. He says, “I need to make a comedy right now for my soul. I want to make “Breakfast of Champions,” and I found that you wrote a screenplay. I read it-let’s go!” I said, “‘Let’s go’ as in a year from now?” and he said, “As soon as you can get it together. I’ll get the money—it won’t be a lot—but let’s go and keep it a comedy.” Now, I was confronted with a screenplay I had polished a little over the years and bought the rights to a few times when I could afford it with David Blocker, my producer, but we never got it made. It became an honor to be associated with something you knew would never be made, but that looked good. I knew it would never get made, and I wasn’t even trying, but when Bruce Willis calls you and says he has the money, that gets real in a hurry.
So we did it, and if I had a career, it was a career killer, but I didn’t have a standard career, so it was just another brutal awakening. At the time, I considered it pretty much my proudest achievement, and no one else agreed with me. My dear friend Tom Robbins, the novelist, said, “You don’t have a career—you have a careen.” Then, the documentary filmmaker Ron Mann contacted David Blocker, and somehow, Shout! Factory, which I had been involved with on “Trouble in Mind” and “The Moderns” earlier, got together with them and figured something out. Ron loved the movie and thought we should re-release it at places I didn’t even know existed, like Alamo Drafthouse, where you can get loaded, recline, and watch a movie with waiters. I’m thrilled.
The one thing that people have said to me exponentially over the years is, “Where can I find your movies?” I can’t help them because I can’t find them either. The fact that “Breakfast of Champions” is coming out in a beautiful 4K remastering that Elliot Davis, the cinematographer, and I worked on—I haven’t seen it yet except for a reel at a time on the computer because I don’t know how to hook my computer up to my television, so I will see it for the first time in 4K stranding in the back of an Alamo Drafthouse with a bunch of drunks. Success was never part of my formula, I guess. Still, if I could pick a day to release this movie at any point in its life, with social awareness being what it is now, I would pick it a few days before the 2024 election because it looks like a mild documentary.
At the time, it was so outrageous that everybody was furious with the film except for the people who made it—we were proud of it. I thought people were more aware of how they had to peel the happy face off of society in the late 90s to see what was going on, but people did not want that. They didn’t want to look under the tent. Now, the roof has been blown off the tent, madness is afoot, and everybody knows it. Chaos is the way of the day; free will is the only thing that will save us, and suddenly, Vonnegut is a genius yet again. I am just happy to be on the interpretive train ride. Yeah, it is not the book, but for me, that doesn’t disqualify it, especially when the people who say it wasn’t the book also say it is impossible to adapt.
Although you have worked on a couple of other adaptations over the years that did not get made, such as the proposed screen version of Gary Larson’s “The Far Side,” “Breakfast of Champions” is the only one that you have made from a script that you adapted from another work. How did you go about the process of adaptation so that you could combine Vonnegut’s voice as a writer with your voice as a filmmaker?
I would say that the Vonnegut voice, I didn’t try to capture his voice, per se, because that is his. I might have gone for that if I was writing a novel adaptation. But in a film adaptation, I dove into the characters and my reflection, through his mordant lens, of America at the time. It became more original than an adaptation after I kept sifting through it. It made it more instinctive for me but less acceptable for the purists. I was always interested in detail and emotions—I am not a traditional storyteller.
I thought “Remember My Name” was the best film I had made for years, but nobody had seen it—it never came out, basically, and there is no streaming or DVDs. I became immune to what anybody thought of anything I ever did because it usually would not be a wild commercial success. That is why the budgets were so low—that way, nobody got hurt in the end. I did five or six movies for under a million bucks, which is still a lot of money for regular humans, but nobody makes money on those.
This one was a little more—I think this was the most I ever had, maybe nine million. We could afford shooting time, and the actors got paid, but it was not close to what they wanted. They all wanted to do it and we got our first choices on everybody. Bruce asked me who we would get, and I said I would get the best actors around. We had both worked with Glenne Headly, so she was a lock. I mentioned Albert Finney for Kilgore Trout, which may be the most acceptable extension of the book for most people as even people who hate the movie think that we at least got Kilgore right—I don’t know how you can hate the movie if you got Kilgore right, but that is somebody else’s business.
Nolte, who I had worked with before, proved that there was more than one layer to the onion with him. He steals the movie, basically, and he is hilarious. We worked together a few more times after that. On paper and in the stew of filmmaking, I thought we accomplished what we set out to do. I don’t know how it will be received now and don’t think it matters much. I think audiences will like it, maybe, because they will get to laugh. Even if it is too hard to follow, it still works.
Stylistically, “Breakfast of Champions” is quite different from your other films—it has a brash, in-your-face style and tone. The film that it reminded me of—and I mean this as a compliment—is Altman’s “O.C. & Stiggs,” which was also a corrosive satire of what was going on in America at the time.
I found an inroad to interpreting the film through advertising. To me, the whole thrust of advertising is to take the most fragile element of every individual, their identity, and replace it with a version of their identity that they want to buy to look young or sexy or whatever advertising tells you. People buy into it and become, as Kurt called them, robots. The only thing you can use to fight against it is your own free will and identity. Advertising became the focus of the message, so to speak, and because of that, I think I wanted to do what advertising does—it shouts at you.
There are a few quiet and introspective moments—very few and mostly through Kilgore and the Barbara Hershey is-she-alive-or-not? wife—but they get overwhelmed by the noise and the chaos of the real world. Maybe the experience of viewing this film is more important than the actual film today. Today, you will compare it through a lens that you didn’t have when it first came out, which is the orange guy and the madness that has taken over the lies that are spewed and the falsehoods that are taking root as truth. Maybe now, that will resonate, especially close to the election. Maybe it won’t, but then I guess you just order another beer at the theater.
Perhaps the oddest aspect of the entire “Breakfast of Champions” saga is that it was distributed by Disney. How much involvement, if any, did they have in the production of the film?
I had no idea that they were going to be involved. Bruce just said that nobody would interfere, and no one did. His company produced it, and he may have had some deal with them. I can tell you that they suppressed it. They were the ones who didn’t want anyone to see it. They released it through Hollywood Pictures, and when I bought the film on DVD at the warehouse on the day it closed for 99 cents and put it in my player to see it, there was a whole bunch of trailers that you couldn’t fast-forward through that all featured big-name actors in movies you had never heard of before. This was probably the junk pile of all the movies they had that they had no interest in and didn’t work to their tastes, so they just dumped them. When I finally got to the movie, the color was bad, and the format was wrong, but I just laughed my ass off through it. It was like seeing someone else’s movie. I hadn’t seen it in years, and there was maybe one screening.
I’m going to tell you a story. I finished editing the film, and we got it ready. No one has seen the film. I finished it in Los Angeles, and Altman was in some kind of complex where he was renting space while preparing a movie. I said that I would be looking at the movie that night in a little 12-15-seat screening room and invite anyone who worked on the film to see it. He said, “Oh, I want to see it,” but he said he had to run out right afterward because he had somewhere else to be. Nolte came, the cameraman came, and a director came. We all knew who was hot and who had worked with the director—there were maybe 15 people in those 15 seats.
We played the movie, and then it was over, and everybody had a stunned look on their faces. Altman immediately got out of his seat, grabbed me, and pulled me aside on his way to the car to wherever he was headed. He never did this before in the 40-some years I knew him—he stopped, looked me straight in the eye with those mighty blues of his, and said, “You’ve done something great—and they are going to kill you for it.” Turned out he was at least half-right.
You spoke earlier about how many of your films, including some important ones, are currently difficult to find in any format. I find it baffling, for example, that I cannot get even a DVD of something like “Remember My Name” or “Equinox,” but I can get a Blu-ray of “Roadie.” I mean, I like “Roadie,” but still. . .
“Roadie” and “Endangered Species” were two movies I did with Carolyn Pfeiffer because I couldn’t get arrested, as they say, after “Remember My Name” was a total disaster. She started a little company and worked with a rock ‘n roll promoter named Shep Gordon, and she had these two studio projects. We did them, and after the second one, which was a terrible experience, especially since I had been able to start in the best way working with Altman, I told her that if we were going to work together again, we would have to find a little money of our own and never do this again. We did that by starting Island Alive.
You can get a Blu-ray of “Roadie,” but you can’t find “Remember My Name,” although Turner Classic Movies has shown it. Criterion picked up “Choose Me”—40 years later, but I’ll take it. That is my first film with them, and they do really good work. We have retimed that, and man is that good. They told me they wanted “Remember My Name” but that there is some kind of legal thing involving the music. Now, everyone involved with the music is dead, and the music wasn’t pop music—it was Alberta Hunter and her blues tunes. It is probably just some lawyer who got lazy and didn’t do something, but that has stopped it from anybody who has tried to pursue it. Nobody will tell me what the issue is—they just say it is a legal thing.
I must say that I haven’t exactly stayed current. I was shocked this morning to discover that Amazon owns MGM. You make these movies for little companies, and they dissolve and just throw the rights to anyone who wants to pay thirty cents to buy them. With “Equinox,” the guy who put that money up—I don’t know where he is or even who he is other than his name. Blocker has been trying to get him to hand over the elements, but nobody cares. It’s unrewarding but not unsatisfying because the movies themselves are what counts.
Because nobody has seen these things, and most have not even heard of these things or me, because I kind of faded away before the internet, when they see them, they kind of say, “Well, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be.” Films live forever, and that is the beauty of them. Kristofferson left the room the other day, and he was such a deep and important soul and artist. I hadn’t seen him for a long time and realized that my first reaction was, “Well, he is still that other guy. He’s not a corpse—he’s that guy. We just can’t see him in the flesh anymore.” You don’t know where to put these things anymore, but the spirit of these things transcends almost anything. I think movies are an essential human need, and they kind of live forever if you can find them.