Last week, I spoke with legendary cult director Alan Rudolph about his infamous, unfairly maligned flop Breakfast of Champions. We talked about the crazy ensemble cast, adaptation advice from Robert Altman and Kurt Vonnegut, and his hopes for the film’s reputation in the future.
BOSTON HASSLE: I was going over your filmography and I’m blown away by just how many people you’ve worked with. I could just start listing people and that would be the whole interview. Sissy Spacek, Geraldine Chaplin, Anthony Perkins, just like gigantic ensemble casts. Breakfast of Champions is the same way. How do you approach that? Everyone in Breakfast of Champions is someone I know. I thought, “Albert Finney is in this, I want to watch it!”
ALAN RUDOLPH: Well, that wasn’t the feeling when we made it. I learned this from Altman. It’s still true, maybe more true than ever. Actors make your film. And my experience as a young guy with no credits at the time was that actors in Hollywood, certainly in the ’70s, were never given true opportunities to act. They’re basically paid a lot of money to react. And none of these films I’ve made have been for money. And some of them we got paid, some we didn’t. But compared to these actors’ salaries, they’re nothing. And yet they all, for whatever reason, agreed to be in them, I think for the opportunity to do things differently. The results are fairly obscure. For normal film fans, you probably haven’t seen a handful of them, if that. And they’re hard to find because the little companies that made most of my films are scattered to the wind and they just… The rights, who knows where the rights go.
BH: I always wonder about that. I’ve recorded Remember My Name on TCM. I’ve not watched it yet, but I recognized that a while ago. I was like, oh, that one I need to grab.
AR: You know, I was shocked when I saw it on TCM, my favorite channel, because it’s never been on DVD or VHS. It’s never streamed. It barely came out. I thought it was my best film. It was my second film, but it was more of me. And I thought– no, I didn’t think, I knew Geraldine’s performance was as good as anybody ever at the time was doing. Tony Perkins, Jeff Goldblum’s in it, Alfre Woodard, so many nice actors in it. I think it’s Alfre’s first film. And only a few prints were ever made and I’ve tried over the years. “Why can’t we get this out somehow just to have a record of it?” And it always goes back to some obscure music rights thing. It really means it’s not worth the money to pursue it by the lawyers who control these things. And it just sits there. And then a couple of years ago, I think it was for Tony Perkins month or Gerry Chaplain, I noticed that it was going to be on TCM. I wondered how they got that. I actually watched it because there’s no way to watch that movie, and it’s beautiful. I don’t quite know the technology or how they do things, but I checked that one off the list. Okay, there’s a record of it somewhere.
But I have quite a few films. Breakfast was one of them. I got my only copy of it– until now, I guess I’ll get a new one– I found the DVD at Warehouse Records the day they were going out of business, in the 99 cent bin. I found about three or four of my movies and I bought the DVDs, they’re my copies. I’ve always been an army of one. I’ve had people try and find some, you know, I’ve actually spent some time and certain people’s efforts to try and unravel the Remember My Name issue and no one can. And Breakfast has never been streamed, I don’t believe. After the first of the year, Shout Factory is going to do it. We like them as a company, and they’re releasing it in what used to be known as “art house.” Now I guess they serve booze and food and reclining seats. So at the end of a movie like this, all they have to do is wheel you out.
BH: How did this restoration really come together? Were you involved in the process of that or were you overseeing it?
AR: The producer, David Blocker, who’s produced or co-produced several of my films, I kept noodling him and saying, how can we get Breakfast, even if, just to get a decent copy of it, and get it out there somehow. When it was released – to use the word lightly – it was like this radioactive thing that no one would talk about. It was like it didn’t exist. It was just sitting there in the center of Hollywood and they walked around it until it went away. Blocker started working with Bruce’s people to figure that out. And then sort of out of the blue, Ron Mann, a great documentary filmmaker, Canadian filmmaker, who has his company, who releases films, I guess it lives up to its company name. This is his first in America. It’s a night here, a week there, around the country. The amount of people who see it this time won’t make it a profit but at least it might start a conversation and then at least it’s available. We did a 4K retiming with Elliot Davis, the cinematographer. I’m just thrilled I can check that off the list. There’ll be a document of it. The film hasn’t changed one frame. I think the attitudes have greatly changed in America and the world, but also in film viewing. And what was just too outrageous or too much for people then might seem rather fuzzy and friendly now.
BH: Yeah, I was thinking about that with just, it seems like such an impossible task to adapt Vonnegut in general. I think there’s only been a few different attempts and I haven’t seen any of them. The only one I’ve seen now is Breakfast of Champions. I think there’s even like a Slapstick movie from the ’80s or ’90s?
AR: There was the George Roy Hill film of Slaughterhouse Five which was a really good film. It’s kind of straightforward. And then I think Mother Night, Nick [Nolte] was in that. But this one’s outrageous. I wrote the script 50 years ago for Altman. He was going to do it. But then I started making my own films. When I get paid, I try to buy the option of book rights, which I did for two or three years, but probably not consecutively because I wasn’t paid that much. And then in, I think it was ‘97 in the winter, I got a call from Bruce Willis, who I’d worked with several years earlier, previously, on Mortal Thoughts, with Demi Moore. And Bruce said, “I’m going to make a comedy. I’ve optioned Breakfast of Champions. I’ve read your screenplay. Can you do it for a low budget? If you can, we can start as soon as possible because I have a busy schedule.” You don’t get those calls. He knew what it was.
The most important thing always is start casting. We went after our first choices. I’d worked with Nolte, the film before Breakfast, on Afterglow with Julie Christie, that Bob Altman produced. And Nick and I really got on and wanted to keep going. And Albert Finney, who plays Kilgore Trout, who is in several of Vonnegut’s novels, and probably is his fictional ego. He was notorious for turning down or not even reading scripts at that point in his life, unless he could meet his salary, which was established. I didn’t know him at all. Pam Dixon, our casting director, said he could probably try and get it to him and see if he might read it. And he did. I met him in London, a couple bottles in, he agreed. And boy, he’s right up there in the great experiences of my life. What a wonderful actor, man, human. I told him once, if I owned the world, he would teach life because he just had it as a person. All the cast was wonderful. And they were our first choices. We never had sent it out to more than one person.
BH: I love Albert Finney and everyone else in it. I mean, part of it when I got this email from Shout that was coming back, it was twofold. I read so much Vonnegut in school and I haven’t really come back to it in a while. And then I saw the cast for this and I was like, oh right, I remember hearing about this. Let me see how this goes. And I don’t know, I just found it so interesting.
AR: Well, at the time, it was both barrels point blank from all the critics. I mean, they just, they couldn’t kill it enough.
BH: That’s just so bizarre to me, where I really feel like it captured the tone of this book. I mean, Breakfast of Champions is the one with the illustrations and like the butthole drawing and everything, where I’m just like, no, this is what’s going on.
AR: Well, the illustrations were key. When I was dealing with Altman, somebody brought him the book, this would have been right after Nashville was finished. So it was about ‘73 when I think the book came out. So obviously Bob was hot after Nashville. People were hearing about it. And I don’t know the details, but I think some producer probably optioned the book and brought it to him because Bob never spent his own money. And he had some writers working on it. I was writing something else for him. He had some writers and nobody could crack it. I don’t know how many writers he had working. And he needed a script if he was going to pursue it and he didn’t want to get a producer to find a writer. So he just turned to me and said, have you read the book? I said no. He said read it. I need a screenplay. Well, reading that book at the time in the early ’70s, during the war, during everything else, cultural change, I mean, it was like rock and roll and acid. There’s life before Breakfast of Champions and after Breakfast of Champions. And it just solidified, underlined, coalesced my whole attitude towards things. And it was hilarious.
But Vonnegut plays a big role in it, not only as the author, but as himself and his, you know, his fictional alter ego is there and his alias is there and there. I said to Bob, or it came up, because we didn’t have much time to discuss it, I said, to do this justice, you’d have to almost write a biography of Kurt. Because it’s really about his life as much as the characters he’s creating. And nobody wanted to do that. I wasn’t capable of it and I didn’t want to. And Altman’s instructions to me, and I can hear him saying it today, just don’t follow the book.
BH: That sounds about right for Altman.
AR: I did my first film with him. He said, “I’ll get a film made for you to direct,” because he knew I wanted to make a film on that show. And I’ve been trying, and he said, “All I ask you to do, I don’t care what you make, just don’t make it a car chase movie.” That’s the only thing he ever told me up front. And I said, I’m just gonna write a story of the characters and see where it goes. Then I flew to New York to meet Vonnegut, and I think it was after I wrote the script and he said, “A book and a film should be completely independent from each other. They could come from the same source so this book may inspire you or you may reference it and all that, but don’t try and make it the book. That’s not what a film is.” So I have these two cultural icons telling me the same thing basically.
So now the film is made. And the critics, I didn’t have the guts to read but one review, and that was enough. But basically, the tenor was, this book is impossible to film, and you didn’t follow it. And I’m going to go ahead and say that they may both be true, but they can’t both be true together. It’s been a fascinating thing for me from the moment I started making films. The films have not changed one frame. The attitudes change and society changes and filmmaking changes and critics change, but the films never change. And yet, I don’t know if this film will get rediscovered. It’s got a nice head start and the fact that it’ll be seen. One of the many messages of the book and the film was, it’s chaos out there. Yeah. Our film, our society is absurd. And the lies we follow and accept as the truth make us hollow and remove all the support for a healthy society. And I thought at the time people would be as questioning and maybe cynical as I was, and wanted to peek under the tent, because when we made the movie, the attitude of the country was, “Let them take care of it, we just look out for ourselves and climb the American success ladder,” and that’s really what life is about. I thought everybody kind of didn’t really believe that. They might want to see what’s beneath the tent, but they didn’t. Now I don’t know if one person will show up for screenings, I don’t know this, but if they do, and if they’ve come from their home and they just watched the local, what passes for news, they’ll think this is a warm and fuzzy friendly documentary.
BH: Honestly, that’s how I felt watching it. This is kind of just what being alive feels like. I’m just like, I don’t really have a problem with this.
AR: Welcome to your world. I’ve never seen life as “normal.” There was no internet, no social media at the time. Certainly, when the book was written, there was a war going on. There’s always a war going on. And when the movie came out, computers were just starting to be recognized, but the spread wasn’t there. So it was all from the traditional sources that you got your information. And to me, the poison tip of the spear that challenges everyone’s identity, which is what the film’s about, is advertising. Let’s take the most precious, fragile piece of every human being’s existence, their own identity. What advertising does is say, “Let’s remove that, because it’s so troubled anyway, and replace it with this version of your identity, which feels so much better. And if you buy this, you’ll get laid, and wear these pants and you’ll look young and that’s it. And when you’re of no use to us, we’ll move on to someone else.” And people believe that. Barbara Hershey’s character, who may or may not be present in the film, she’s the victim of complete belief in advertising because her husband is on television all day long telling the people, you can trust me.
BH: Yeah, it’s Hawaiian week.
AR: It’s Hawaiian week and he, Bruce, and Dwayne Hoover… Before we started shooting, we had a conversation. I said, to me, he’s every politician that’s ever run for any office. He basically skirts around the truth. He is going to be elected because of his looks, his fame, his words, his act, his schtick, his charm, his money. But it’s not because he tells the truth. And this character, finally, there’s a little bubble of a question inside of him. He doesn’t know where it’s coming from. He doesn’t know how to deal with it because he’d never spent any time on self-enlightenment or self-reflection. He only believes what’s there that he’s striving so hard to achieve, which is success and fame. And so he does what Americans do now – looks for someone else to tell him the truth. So he finds a guy that only spouts nonsense and he even misinterprets that. Yeah. And he has bad hair, if you want it to match the mood.
BH: What’s something you’re most proud of from the production of the film, just something that’s really stuck with you while you were making it?
AR: Except for this last week, I haven’t done any interviews, even when the film came out, about Breakfast of Champions. No one wants to talk to me. It was a career killer I thought, but it didn’t matter to me because I didn’t have much of a career. I just kept making movies. And my dear friend Tom Robbins, the author, used to say, you don’t have a career, you have a careen. And when it’s come up in interviews, I said, hey, you mean the most reviled film in modern American cinema? My proudest achievement. I love this movie. I love what it is. Yeah. I can’t say there’s anything that I would have done differently. It’s exactly what I wanted to do. I think the cast is the best thing about it. And because of them, If you don’t get into these characters, and I understand they’re not easy to get into, but at least you see their struggles. Yeah. And you see them questioning it. And you see the plot like Harry LeSaber, Nick Nolte. You see a guy who’s trying to deal with his issues. He doesn’t know how, in the same way Dwayne doesn’t know how to deal with his. Everyone in the film has issues and some come close to dealing with it as a truthful thing and others don’t know how to.The only one who is right there at the pulse is Kilgore Trout and he doesn’t really believe in anything other than it’s chaos and there’s a great mystery involved. And it’s your job to be the eyes and ears and conscience of the greater mystery. And that’s a pretty good message. There’s a line in the movie that’s original to the script. It wasn’t in the book that Albert says to Bruce, the big message, which is, I’m paraphrasing because I don’t remember exactly, the line is, -paraphrasing my own thing, what does that mean?- The line is, “Until you die, it’s all life.” And parenthetically, it means, so live it. Live it truly. Live it as yourself. Live it honestly. That’s what’s not said, but implied. And Dwayne Hoover misinterprets that too. Well, he turns into himself, which is kind of violent, accusatory, egotistical.
But the film itself, I know the actors and everyone involved felt we were doing something. But it hurts so much when you can’t find one person to agree with you. The action went beyond bad reviews. It got personal. The critics thought it was awful. I know the film is not awful. But it was almost as if they didn’t want people to see it because it was a threat somehow.
BH: I’ve noticed that sometimes with critical reactions. Like, I’ve reviewed some bad movies, but it’s things like Black Adam or other Marvel and DC things. There’s a very big difference between Breakfast of Champions and The Avengers when there’s a failure on that level. I’ve never understood the vindictiveness there. And this feels like, when I was looking at things, I was like, what is wrong with people? Like, leave this thing alone.
AR: Well, I wish you could clone yourself.
BH: No, if I was there, I mean, it was 1999, so I was a little younger, but I was into movies then. Maybe if I had seen it then.
AR: I think that’s the essence of filmmaking. Somebody asked me, how did I “get through it?” I said, I don’t think that’s the question. I think the real question is “why?” And the answer is, of course, that you can’t let it go. There’s some films, my films, I can always speak for me. My experience, some were better than others, some I did to survive, to pay people that had been working for me. But the ones that I made on my own– and that was the majority of them– they are living things. I mean, I used to tell the editors, oh, we’ve got to make this work. The next splice, the next cut we make, Western civilization is depending on it. They are living things, films. They’re a most amazing experience, their creative thrill is beyond definition. And it seems to me the filmmaker’s job to capture that, not to hold a prisoner, but to let it go free. And to let other people become experienced. And I feel that the greatest thing about Breakfast for me, I don’t know, the purists of the novel may hate it. I don’t know, people who like Marvel may hate it.
BH: Well, I don’t care what they care about.
AR: It was what we intended to make. I’ll stand by that. Absolutely. It hurt when the thing we came up with was exactly what I tried to make and nobody gave a flying rat’s ass about it. Maybe take two is better. Let’s hope that it’s available for everyone to see in a theater. That’s the first step.
The brand new 4K restoration of Breakfast of Champions opens this weekend across the country, and hopefully Boston eventually. Shout Factory will release the 4K disc soon!
