Strangers in paradise

Alan Rudolph with Anne-Katrin Titze on Robert Altman considering Johnny Carson and Peter Falk to be cast as Dwayne Hoover (played by Bruce Willis) in Breakfast Of Champions: “He would cast his movies before they were written.”

In the first instalment with Alan Rudolph, we discuss Robert Altman’s early connection to Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast Of Champions, the roles played by Bruce Willis, Nick Nolte, Albert Finney, and Owen Wilson, plus working with Willis and Demi Moore on Mortal Thoughts. Now, with the help of Ron Mann, director of What We Like, producer David Blocker, cinematographer Elliot Davis and Shout Factory, there is a 4K Digital Restoration of Breakfast of Champions available to screen in cinemas, on streaming platforms and Blu-ray DVD for the 25th anniversary of this very prescient film. Alan Rudolph was an assistant director on Altman’s Nashville, California Split, The Long Goodbye, and appeared as himself in The Player.

Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover giving Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte) a pep talk

Alan Rudolph will participate in Q&As, moderated by Vikram Murthi, following the 7:15pm screenings on Friday, November 1 and Saturday, November 2 at Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan.

With Dorothy Parker and her Algonquin pals in Mrs. Parker And The Vicious Circle, as well as Ernest Hemingway with his in The Moderns, Alan Rudolph was no stranger bringing writers to the screen. His adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s purportedly un-filmable Breakfast Of Champions features Albert Finney as the outrageous and little-known author, Kilgore Trout, who is on his way to be celebrated at a festival in Midland City, where the factories produce “raspberry air freshener, gourmet cat food, and plastic donuts.” As a byproduct, soil and water are poisoned, as the toxic waste findings pile up. Bruce Willis is Dwayne Hoover, our hero, who has found professional success and fame and feels the urge to do himself in each morning.

Hoover’s face is on countless billboards and his commercials fill every TV screen. This is Hawaiian Week, they scream, and his car dealership is booming more than ever. Dwayne, whose wife Celia (Barbara Hershey, lethargic in her peignoir) pays more attention to the never-ending slogans than her husband, is looking for direction, for a sign. “I need to hear a truth I haven’t heard before,” he tells Francine (Glenne Headly) his assistant, but neither she nor the newly hired, freshly released prisoner Wayne Hoobler (Omar Epps), nor his manager Harry Le Sabre (Nick Nolte in full slapstick mode) can help him out with that.

Albert Finney as Kilgore Trout

In fact, nobody answers any of the questions posed by another. Bunny (Lukas Haas), Dwayne’s son, wants to make music and doesn’t feel the need to “be a man” as his father commands. “Why would I want that?” He asks, when “what men do is so often cruel and ugly. Trout will eventually be the one to tell Dwayne that everyone around him is an automated robot and that one single person can make up his mind. “Exit Now” says the billboard. It will only be Trout who exits like Orphée in Jean Cocteau’s dreamworld through the mirror in order to be young again. Hoover in his capitalist nightmare town has received his truth. “Until you’re dead, it’s all life - so make the most of it.”

From the Pacific Northwest, Alan Rudolph joined me on Zoom for an in-depth conversation on Breakfast Of Champions and his Robert Altman connection.

Alan Rudolph: Hello!

Anne-Katrin Titze: Hi.

AR: I'm a Zoom virgin. I've been accused in my life of zooming too much with my camera, but I think now I think I've zoomed too much, whatever you call this. But it's a pleasure.

AKT: The pleasure is all mine!

AR: Nice apartment. I like your place. That's a window to the street, which street is it?

AKT: To the street. Yes, in Brooklyn.

AR: In Brooklyn with with a British accent! Oh, how wonderful.

AKT: You are on the West Coast?

AR: I'm on in the Pacific Northwest, where I've lived for on and off for 40 some odd years, and I lived in New York. There's no place like New York. We lived there for a dozen years, and I'm coming back in a week or two.

Bruce Willis as Dwayne Hoover Aloha

AKT: Great. Maybe I'll see you here.

AR: Tell me where!

AKT: Okay, let's talk about Breakfast Of Champions. Did it take the world 25 years to catch up with the film?

AR: You'll have to ask the world that! This is my 50th year with Breakfast Of Champions. You know, these are the first interviews I've ever done about Breakfast Of Champions ever. No one would ever talk to me about it. In fact, I got both barrels point blank from every critic and journalist at the time it was released, if you can call it that.

I first wrote the script for Altman in the early Seventies when the book came out, and he knew I wanted to write, but I hadn't written anything and he had writers working on it and he couldn’t, nobody could crack it. We just finished Nashville, and he knew I wanted to figure out a way to get a little movie made. And he told me, I'll get a movie made for you in about three years. But I need you to write something first. But this wasn't it.

He had a team of writers working, and somebody must have brought him the book, because Bob never optioned anything. He wasn't going to spend his own money and he said, I need a script for this. Have you read this book? Breakfast Of Champions? This would have been maybe ’74, something like that ’73. And it would make sense that they would send it to Altman first. I said, no, I haven't, and he said, read it, I need a script in a hurry now. Maybe he figured going to someone who hadn't professionally written was the perfect thing, because that was his style but also I wouldn't argue with it. I would just figure it out. So he said, nobody can figure this out.

Nick Nolte as Harry Le Sabre

And his marching orders were as always, I can just hear him say it: Don't follow the book. That was all he told me. So I read it and I came to him, and I said, well, if you really, truly did this, it would have to be a biography of Vonnegut. I mean he's in it. He's the author of it. He's in it by name. He's in it by surrogate name. He's in it by alias. It's him, it's his life, it's his attitude. And he said, well, I'm not doing that. So I said, well, then, I'll try and make sense out of the characters, I said, that's all I can do is follow the characters and see what we come up with.

AKT: You added a second perspective? You made Dwayne Hoover what he is in the story?

AR: Well, yeah, I guess I mean, when it came out in ’72, or something, for me, a young guy 30, something 31 with long hair and working with Altman. It was sort of like actually working with Altman or Rock and Roll, or LSD, there's life before Breakfast Of Champions, and then your life after and it overlapped and articulated, and it was hilarious all the kind of caustic outlook I had about America at the time. I just thought, well, if we made this about these characters, you know Dwayne Hoover a car dealership, and this crazy writer, and all these characters.

And Bob said, go! I don't think it took me too long to write that script. I brought it to him. He read it, he liked it. As he always asked, he said: Who do we put in it? Who's that? He would cast his movies before they were written. That's the only thing that was really important. He would get meticulous about the script, and then when he started, he'd throw it away.

But casting was always the first conversation. So he said, who do you see in Dwayne Hoover? I said, Johnny Carson and he said, oh, that's a good idea! And Carson was famous for not wanting to be in movies. But because of Nashville or Altman's presence, he flirted with it for a little bit, but wouldn't commit, and then backed out, and then we got Peter Falk to play Dwayne Hoover.

Alan Rudolph as himself pitching a film to studio head Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) in Robert Altman’s The Player

AKT: That's quite a jump from Johnny Carson to Peter Falk!

AR: Yeah, maybe physically. But nothing happened. The movie didn't get made. Bob moved on to Buffalo Bill [And The Indians, or Sitting Bull's History Lesson] and he had me write that script. Bob let it go, moved on. I got to start making my own films, the first two with him and then I did a couple of studio movies, which I wish I had the time back. But I got paid enough to option the book every now and then.

It was an expensive option, and I found out over the years that, I never got the names, but it was kind of infamous, the book Breakfast Of Champions for being optioned by big name directors. And no one cracked it. But I think it was kind of a prestigious trinket. They had, you know, like Confederacy Of The Dunces or Catcher In The Rye, you know movies that no one would ever make. But yeah, I'm going to make Breakfast Of Champions!

AKT: The way people have Finnegan's Wake in their bookshelf, and never read it!

AR: Oh, boy, that's true, isn't it? It's only like eight hundred pages long or something [656]! But I wanted to make it because I had no success, and I didn't care. I never had a lot of projects. I only had one thing, and I'd always chase it, and I couldn't get it made. And in 1991 or ’92, somewhere in there I did a little film and was hired to do a very low budget movie with big stars, a 6 million dollar movie with Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, called Mortal Thoughts.

Lukas Haas as Bunny Hoover, Dwayne’s son

If it wasn't for Robert Altman, I don't mean for me personally, he changed the way audiences saw films, whether they knew it or not. He changed the way Hollywood made movies, whether they knew it or not. We invented ways to do it when I was working with him. Sound, everything. It's all become now absorbed. Now it's different. It's all different, but not really in spirit. The film is a living thing and it's your job to capture it and evolve with it.

And I brought that to the set of Mortal Thoughts and the way we made the movie. And you could see these two Hollywood superstars had never gone through anything like that. They'd never been free. They'd never had, as Kilgore Trout would say, free will on a movie set. And you know, just because something was written one way doesn't mean you do it. If you have a better idea, let's chase it. And Bruce was very public after that movie that it was his favourite experience, and his favourite acting.

AKT: Maybe he felt like a Stranger In Paradise?

AR: Maybe we all are! You never know. We're all starry eyed. I didn't have much contact with Bruce after that, but I really enjoyed him and Demi and she was wonderful, and maybe ’97 I was in my little cabin at the time in the rainforest, and I got a phone call from Bruce out of the blue, out of the gray, and he said, I want to make a comedy right now. I need a comedy in my life. I didn't know what his life was like at the time but he said, I want to make a comedy. I read Breakfast Of Champions. I've optioned the book. I've read your screenplay, I laughed, let's go now!

Glenne Headly, Demi Moore and Bruce Willis in Alan Rudolph’s Mortal Thoughts

AKT: Oh, wow!

AR: I said, Bruce, you don't get these calls ever. I said, yeah, we want to make it. And maybe in ten years somebody will put up the money. He said, No, you let me worry about that? But he says, I got a big schedule, and I need to go as soon as possible. I may have revisited the whole concept of what we were doing if I had time, but I didn't. I just took the script which I touched up over the years, but didn't really fundamentally change.

And we were shooting a few months after that with our first choice of cast. He'd say, well, who do we get to play these things? And I said, well, let's go after the best actor in the world for Kilgore Trout! Who, he said, who's that? I said, Albert Finney for me. And he said, you think we could get Albert Finney to be in this movie? I said, I don't know. Let's try. And Albert was famous at the time for turning everything down. And we didn't have the money he was, you know, used to, but he read it. I flew to London, met him, three bottles later he said, yes.

AKT: Three bottles of what?

AR: Wine! We, well, we wound up with wine. I couldn't tell you how we started. So we make the movie with no interference. Finish the film. And then it was like a radioactive three-headed dog sitting in the center of Hollywood that no one would talk about, no one would touch. The film came out for a day or two, or a week or two, and then it got buried in some landfill. It's never been streamed. I had to buy a DVD. At warehouse records the day they were closing for 99 cents, just to have a copy to prove I've made the film!

Breakfast Of Champions poster

And then Ron Mann, a Canadian documentary filmmaker of great repute, apparently has a little company called Films We Like and he contacted David Blocker, who produced the film for Bruce and me, and asked if he could get the rights. He’d like to release it in what used to be called art houses. Now you get drunk, you eat food, and you have reclining seats. So you see a movie like this, all they have to do is wheel you out.

And Bruce has gone into a new phase of existence and Blocker got his people to agree to sell the rights to Shout Factory, which is a company that will stream it and DVD release it in Blu-ray 4K. So Elliot Davis, the cinematographer, and I retimed the movie. It's going to open at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan on November 1st. I'll be there and a whopping 40 seats. And this is true. I haven't lied to you yet. Okay, so this is my 50th year, act three of this film.

AKT: The Nick Nolte/Bruce Willis choreography is great. The two of them, especially with the physicality in their scenes of total mayhem, are wonderful.

AR: I tell you, you're the most perceptive person I've talked to yet about this film! The choreography of Nick entering in the showroom when Wayne Hoobler, Omar Epps, comes in first and Omar comes up like to the altar, and he said, fairyland and Nick is just coming into, and he stops, and he does this kind of dance. Should I leave? Should I stay? It’s a work of genius for me, Nolte, whom I've worked with four times. He probably regrets it. I think he's even been vocal about saying, I don't know why I did all those movies with that guy. He does that. He doesn't have any success, but he loved them. He loved doing them.

You're a very smart woman. You can do research, and you will see when we did Afterglow, I think we shot it in ’96, ’95, Nick was a superstar, a franchise superstar, a male superstar, because female superstars, except for, I guess, Streisand maybe, didn't exist. You will not find a Hollywood franchise male superstar who ever jumped into the pond of what is now known as independent filmmaking. He was the first one. I mean, there were actors who did low budget, maybe -ish movies, but not like this.That movie was under five million. He didn't get much and he got bitten by the bug, and right after that was the year I owned the option for Breakfast.

Sun Ra and His Arkestra at SummerStage in Central Park performing Stranger In Paradise, opening for Kim Gordon

I sent it to him. He never responded, so I figured he didn't read it. He didn't like it. He put it in a pile. Fair, and then Bruce calls, and says, let's make it. I own it. I bought it. I want to make it. I'm going to play Duane Hoover, and I said, oh, boy, and I sent it to Nick again to play Harry Le Sabre, the cross-dressing sales manager. I get a call. I think it was in Florida. Why the hell didn't you offer me Dwayne Hoover? And I said I did, but you never called back and he said, well, you're supposed to chase me. And I said, Nick, it doesn't matter what part you play. You're going to steal the movie anyway, as this guy. And he almost does.

AKT: Owen Wilson, I have to mention him. He came as a total surprise.

AR: Bruce was friends with him. We were shooting in Idaho. He said Owen wants to be in the movie. I didn’t know him. So we invented a part. He came in did it half an hour and left.

AKT: Lovely to see him there unexpectedly. The song Stranger In Paradise is prominent in the movie, you use three different versions.

AR: Only three?

AKT: Three at least. It’s the perfect song for this story. Obviously, as you can tell, I have not read the book. I could never get through any Vonnegut, to tell you the truth. I started several of his novels, and I just couldn't continue. Tell me a bit about Stranger In Paradise! Is it part of the book?

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast Of Champions novel

AR: It just seemed appropriate. It's one of those melodies, you know, it's from a Broadway musical, I guess.

AKT: Kismet, yes.

AR: Kismet. I used to hear it when I was a kid around the house somehow, and I don't know how you come across it. I just got the idea. Well, what about Stranger in Paradise? And I looked, you know, there was no Internet then, and I looked up to see how many versions of it! And there were like 100 versions of these things.

AKT: There is one by Sun Ra Arkestra, which is great. They performed it this summer in Central Park.

AR: Oh, really? That's probably interesting. Yeah. Do you know, Klaus Schulze, that name? A musician guitarist. That's another, that's another thing. Martin Denny, I picked that out, that Hawaiian lounge music that when I was a kid was, you know. popular. He had done a version of Stranger in Paradise, and I thought, okay, that now I have to go after him, too, to do the score.

AKT: Thank you for this!

AR: I’m so glad you appreciated the film. I hope we pass again. I'll be at the Alamo Drafthouse, drunk at those screenings.

Coming up - Alan Rudolph on the perfect release date for his movie, advertising, more on Bruce Willis, whom he calls “a true artist,” the nature of politicians Kilgore Trout’s longing, the big 'It', and Barbara Hershey as the dead wife.

Breakfast Of Champions opens in New York at the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Lower Manhattan on Friday, November 1.