How Kurt Vonnegut Really Felt About The Slaughterhouse-Five Movie Adaptation

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In 1972, director George Roy Hill and screenwriter Stephen Geller adapted Kurt Vonnegut’s celebrated novel “Slaughterhouse-Five” to the big screen, to this writer’s great satisfaction. The book and the movie both told the story of Billy Pilgrim (Michael Sacks), who has suddenly and without explanation become “unstuck” in time. That is, he begins to experience his life out of chronological sequence. He begins to relive his life as a soldier during World War II when he was on the front lines in Belgium. He re-experiences his unsatisfying marriage to a rich woman, Valencia (Sharon Gans), and his ambivalence toward his own children.

Most surprisingly, Billy experiences a span of his life in the company of a species of space aliens called Tralfamadorians. The Tralfamadorians are invisible, pandimensional beings who explain that life is a collection of moments that shift their linearity in our minds. They also are conducting a sex experiment, and put Billy in a bio-enclosure with the comely movie star Montana Wildhack (Valerie Perrine). Billy also sees his eventual death back on Earth.

The film is pretty faithful to Vonnegut’s original novel, which is surprising, given Vonnegut’s arch prose and oblique storytelling. George Roy Hill, however, managed to fit Vonnegut’s narrative into a traditional film structure, using clever editing and jarring transitions to mark Billy’s unsticking through time. As it so happens, Vonnegut actually liked the movie of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” something he stated explicitly in the preface to his 1972 play “Between Time and Timbuktu: Or, Prometheus-5, A Space Fantasy.” Kurt Vonnegut was a largely cynical dude, especially as he aged (he had some positive things to say about “Star Trek,” anyway), so it may be comforting to learn that the “Slaughterhouse-Five” movie left him feeling pleasantly chuffed.

Kurt Vonnegut was very clear on his thoughts in the preface to “Between Time and Timbuktu: Or, Prometheus-5, A Space Fantasy,” writing:

“I love George Roy Hill and Universal Pictures, who made a flawless translation of my novel ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ to the silver screen. I drool and cackle every time I watch that film, because it is so harmonious with what I felt when I wrote the book.”

The movie, it should be admitted, comes across as slightly less tragic and cynical than Vonnegut’s original novel. One might think the happier ending would leave Vonnegut feeling like Hollywood had sold him out. But nothing doing. Vonnegut loved the movie.

It should be noted that the play that the above preface prefaces was also adapted into a TV movie in 1972, and it incorporated several characters from Vonnegut’s other works, including characters from “Cat’s Cradle,” “Player Piano,” “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” “Harrison Bergeron,” and “Welcome to the Monkey House.” There was also, incidentally, a 1971 film of “Happy Birthday, Wanda June,” for which Vonnegut wrote the screenplay. These films of the 1970s seemed to reflect, in their style and collaborations, Vonnegut’s literary spirit.

There were multiple other  Kurt Vonnegut film adaptations, of course, but they seemed to decrease in quality with each passing year. 1984 saw the release of “Slapstick of Another Kind,” adapted from Vonnegut’s book “Slapstick,” a bizarre interpretation of his relationship with his sister Alice, who died in 1958. The movie, starring Jerry Lewis and Madeline Kahn, made everything literal … and nearly unwatchable. The movie didn’t understand the book one iota, and isn’t the least bit funny. It’s not just a bad adaptation; it’s a bad movie.

Kurt Vonnegut passed away in 2007 at the age of 84. So it goes. However, he was alive for some of the worst imaginable film adaptations of his work. In 1995, his short story “Harrison Bergeron” was adapted into a 1995 TV movie starring Sean Astin. The short story takes place in the 2080s when “everyone was finally equal.” That is to say, everyone who is more talented than average has to wear special devices to make them mediocre. Harrison Bergeron is a seven-foot-tall godlike teenager who cannot be burdened by society’s weights.

The 1995 Showtime movie expands on that premise, depicting Harrison’s upbringing and delving further into the futuristic world. It’s nothing like Vonnegut’s story other than the weird Libertarian underpinnings.

1996 saw the release of “Mother Night,” a wartime drama starring Nick Nolte as Howard Campbell, a U.S. spy who smuggled coded messages to the Allies into Nazi propaganda. This required him to live among Nazis and speak their antisemitic propaganda on state radio. He became the voice of Germany. The story is fascinating, but the movie is very, veryboring.

And Alan Rudolph’s 1999 film adaptation of “Breakfast of Champions” is an utter mess. Vonnegut told a surreal sci-fi story with illustrations, and the movie is pure chaos, with new characters and subplots that Vonnegut never intended. Bruce Willis seems out of his element in the lead role as a salesman who is slowly losing his mind, and who gets a new life philosophy from a crazed sci-fi author named Kilgore Trout (Albert Finney). The film flopped amazingly hard.

It’s a good thing “Slaughterhouse-Five” is so good, because many of them are so, so bad. When will that “Sirens of Titan” movie get made?