My Year of Flops (12 page)

But I would get up early every morning and walk through the back alleys to Paramount. I would see over the buildings, see a big poster for American Airlines, see how many flights to New York, and all I kept thinking is, “I gotta get back to New York. I'm so unhappy here.” And Otto was impatient. He got very particular about everything he wanted, and I thought everything he wanted was wrong. I was thinking the movie was going down the tubes, but I began thinking it was going even more down the tubes than I would have thought. It was like his competence seemed to be eluding him. I thought it would be like a smooth movie that was too old-fashioned. But it wasn't even that. Scenes were just going down the toilet. I kept calling my agent from the sound stage, saying quietly, “You've got to get me out of this.” And she's saying, “Dear, it doesn't work that way. It's not like a play. It's just, ‘No. You're in it.'” But I said it would destroy my whole movie career; I was never going to act again. And I was only 28. I was beside myself.

Then one day we were setting up a shot and Otto was getting increasingly impatient with me. But at the same time, I came in one
day and he said [Adopts Austrian accent:] “I have good news for you: We're going to build you a new, much bigger part so you will be here quite a few more weeks!” And I thought, “Oh, shit! This is like a nightmare. And why can't he see how little this is working?” But still he was getting impatient with me. At first I thought, “Well, it's my first film, I can't hit my marks, can't do anything.” And the first scene was one in which I was naked, by the way, and that freaked me out. It wasn't the way to begin. Then one day we were setting up a fairly simple shot: walking down the corridor outside the cells and coming to a stop, and then I go into a cell. And I didn't hit the marks. And Otto, out of desperation, cried out, “You are amateur!” And before I knew what was coming out of my mouth I said, “I know I am! What are we gonna do about it?” And he just turned on a dime and said, “No, no, I didn't say you're an amateur. I just mean you're inexperienced.” From that point on, he started teaching me what remains about 80 percent of what I know about film acting.

NR:
In
Skidoo,
your character represents the counterculture. Was that something you felt plugged into?

AP:
I was very into all that.

NR:
Why do you think the counterculture appealed to Otto Preminger at that stage of his life?

AP:
Well I think … and he himself said this—he was a strangely open man. He said things like [Adopts Austrian accent:] “I regret that I had not been more like a hippie.” And he also regretted never having had one homosexual experience. He told me that at one point.

NR:
I'm guessing that wasn't a come-on.

AP:
No, no. I didn't get the feeling. Never. If that was that, he didn't do that. He would never do that. He would with women, but I don't think he would ever come on to a guy. If I had said to him, “Well, Otto … ,” then he might have gone along with it. It didn't occur to me. He was just talking about himself and his regrets. What the hippie movement meant to him was that if everybody were more open to all kinds of experiences, the world would be a better place. And that's what that movement was all about. You slept with everybody, you did
every drug, and it did create—which he earnestly tried to re-create in that film, I don't think with much success—kind of a lovely vibe for a couple of years before everybody freaked out. And Otto was very moved by the idea of looking at life that way.

NR:
The defense of
Skidoo
in Hirsch's Preminger biography is that it's a very non-judgmental take on the counterculture.

AP:
That was the trademark of all his filmmaking. There's a real objectivity in the way he puts so much stuff into each shot. He doesn't try to favor one point of view over another. All his best films have that in them. But they all have it in terms of the kind of atmospheres and topics that he understood a little better. But he told me how touched he was by what the hippies were, how hippies saw things, how we saw the possibilities of life—that anything that didn't do somebody harm was worth exploring. He was genuinely moved by that.

Good-bye Blue Monday Case File #88: Breakfast Of Champions

Originally Posted November 27, 2007

Each generation picks its heroes. That's why Robert Altman's death inspired a tidal wave of grief. Altman spoke to my generation like few other filmmakers before or since. Altman had an eternally contemporary sensibility, hip, wry, smartass, and cynical, but with a sneaky streak of empathy and emotional depth. In that respect, he belongs as much to the present and future as the past. The same goes for Kurt Vonnegut.

Vonnegut is one of those rare writers capable of profoundly altering the way readers perceive the world. He possessed a genius for making the mundane and forgettable seem new, ridiculous, perverse, horrible, and cruel. He had an unparalleled gift for exposing the madness and folly of our materialistic world, and a deft ear for the mindless happy talk of commercials, taglines, ad copy, and all the ephemeral nonsense that whispers relentlessly in our collective ear, telling us that eternal happiness is just a few purchases away.

At the core of
Breakfast Of Champions
lies a principled revulsion toward the spiritual emptiness of consumer culture endemic to many of Altman's scathing social satires. So it's fitting that Altman wanted to adapt
Breakfast Of Champions
for the big screen in the mid-'70s with the great Peter Falk as businessperson Dwayne Hoover, the even greater Sterling Hayden as cantankerous science-fiction hack Kilgore Trout, and Ruth Gordon as the wealthy Eliot Rosewater.

Alas, when
Breakfast Of Champions
was made into a movie in the late '90s, Altman wasn't involved, though his good friend and longtime collaborator Alan Rudolph wrote and directed the adaptation. Altman produced many of Rudolph's films from this era, but
Breakfast
boasted an even more venerated producer with an even stronger reputation for valiantly fighting for Rudolph's artistic vision: Bruce Willis' brother.

Not coincidentally, Bruce Willis also stars as Dwayne Hoover, a fabulously well-to-do businessman rapidly coming apart at the seams. While the Midwestern backwater of Midland prepares for an arts festival, Hoover fights a losing battle to maintain his sanity. He is unwittingly on a collision course with Albert Finney's Kilgore Trout, a writer whose stories pad out the pages of dirty magazines and pornographic books. Nonetheless, he's been beckoned to appear at the Midland Arts Festival at the request of a wealthy benefactor. Meanwhile, back at Hoover's car dealership, jittery flunky Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte) worries endlessly that his boss will uncover his secret life as a transvestite, while childlike ex-convict Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps) longs only to work for a man of Hoover's stature.

Breakfast
deals with the conflict between the smiling, together face we show the outside world and the angry, burbling madness roiling just underneath the surface. It accordingly requires a lead actor touched with a spark of divine insanity, but Willis is too self-assured to inhabit the role convincingly. When he sticks a gun in his mouth and ponders the vast cosmic void, he's following the directions of the script, not responding to bad chemicals in his brain or the demented
prerogatives of fate. History has taught us that no matter how many bad guys fire weapons in his direction, or how many Seagram's Golden Wine Coolers he's consumed, Willis will emerge smirking and triumphant. The alpha-male swagger that makes him one of our most bankable action stars also makes him a perverse choice to play a man lurching toward a personal and professional nadir from which he can never fully recover.

In a seedy hotel lounge, Hoover encounters Trout and asks for the meaning of life. Trout hands him a book that takes the form of a letter from the creator of the universe, explaining that everyone in the universe is an automated robot except for the recipient of the letter, who has the glory and the horror of being the only person on Earth capable of free will. This sends Hoover on a crazed spree of unprovoked violence.

As it heads into the home stretch, Vonnegut's novel becomes its author's story as much as his characters'. No longer content to watch from the sidelines, Vonnegut—that kindly, sadistic creator of his literary universe—becomes a character in his own novel, spying on the discord at the hotel lounge from behind mirrored glasses. Vonnegut makes his authorial presence felt in a thousand other little ways as well, from autobiographical asides (or faux-autobiographical asides) to his charmingly simple drawings to the jazz-like use of repetition and recurring themes and motifs.

Rudolph finds a way to integrate Vonnegut's drawings into the film, using them in the opening credits and sneaking them into the background like Easter eggs. The elegantly rumpled and ramshackle Finney proves an inspired choice to play Trout, Mark Isham's score does a much better job of balancing comedy and tragedy than the film, and Epps indelibly embodies his character's poignantly pathetic dreams.

But Rudolph gets just about everything else wrong. His screenplay takes pointless liberties with its source material, eliminating the author's presence and making Hoover's dead wife a spectral but apparently alive basket case stumbling about in a dreamy Thorazine
haze. Most of all, Rudolph botches the book's tricky tone, a highwire combination of misanthropic satire, bleak philosophizing, and deep, aching sadness.

Adapting Vonnegut's
Breakfast
was always going to be a tricky proposition. It's a cartoon tragedy, a slapstick meditation on existence and the meaning of life. Without Vonnegut's indelible voice—an ironic, blackly comic howl of despair at an absent and perverse God—it devolves into a crazed cacophony of clattering cartoon caricatures, a headache-inducing parade of all-American grotesques. Vonnegut's corrosive philosophical satire stumbles nobly toward transcendence and grace, attaining a strange cumulative power in its heartbreaking final pages. Rudolph's adaptation retains only the stumbling.

Failure, Fiasco, Or Secret Success?
Failure

Michael Jai White On Breakfast Of Champions

Michael Jai White is perhaps best known as the title character in the 1997 feature film adaptation of Todd McFarlane's cult comic
Spawn.
He had a memorable supporting role as a gangster whose flunky becomes the victim of the Joker's infamous “pencil trick” in
The Dark Knight
and played a superhero of sorts in the delightful blaxploitation parody/homage
Black Dynamite,
which he also cowrote.

Michael Jai White:
I was confused, man. I didn't know what I was doing there. The day I got there, I knew I was going to do this scene with Buck Henry, but I hadn't met him yet. On the way to the set, I see Nick Nolte running down the street in a dress, and I'm like, “What is this movie about?” Even while I was on the set, I didn't quite understand what I was doing or what was going on. I did the scene with Buck Henry, and Bruce Willis was dancing on top of a car. It was so surreal. He danced on top of the car, which he wasn't supposed to do, destroying the hood of the car. They had to get another car. I didn't get a chance to read the script until I was there, and then I read
the script, and I was like, “I still don't know what's going on.” And I remember sitting in the theater not understanding. It felt like a bad dream. I didn't quite understand anything that happened.

Nathan Rabin:
How did you end up in the movie if you hadn't read the script?

MJW:
I don't remember how I got in the movie, to be honest. I got offered that job, and I remember my manager said, “You should do this. This is a Kurt Vonnegut novel with Bruce Willis in it. It could be big.” My manager says, “This is a good thing.” I always felt Albert Finney was one of the greatest actors who ever lived.