[projector clicking]
Downloaded from YTS.MX
♪
Official YIFY movies site: YTS.MX
[quacking]
[clicking, whirring]
[cat meowing]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Listen.
♪
[explosions, rapid gunfire]
[water splashing]
[wind blowing]
[chirping]
♪
[man] Kurt Vonnegut told me once...
we don't understand the first thing about time.
Before Dresden happened,
he said he was walking in the forest,
put his head against the trunk of a tree,
and he saw everything that happened.
[whooshing]
♪
[heart beating]
[chirping]
[man] He really saw it all before it happened.
And he wasn't kidding, and he wasn't speaking metaphorically.
This is how he experienced... his life.
♪
[Charlie Gibson] Kurt Vonnegut,
the author who became an oracle for the baby boomer generation,
has died.
In the end, it was a head injury that killed Kurt Vonnegut.
He was 84.
[clicking]
[static]
And now, back in 1970 with electronic television,
our last item tonight...
[clicking]
♪
[man] ...is an interview with a very funny
and a very remarkable writer.
Kurt Vonnegut.
[man] I can't think of a single other American author
even of half Vonnegut's age,
who has all of his books in print.
[Morley Safer] Young people snap up his books
as fast as they are re-issued.
He is suddenly a star, a luminary,
a guru to youth.
♪ Time has come today
[man] One of the pre-imminent novelists,
and I would say, philosophers of our time,
Kurt Vonnegut.
Do you really know the answers to everything?
I haven't been stumped very often.
What would you like to know?
-Well, I-- I-- -[audience laughs]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Now, what are my book about?
I have written again and again about ordinary people
who have tried to behave decently
in an indecent society.
Vonnegut has been the most profound influence in my life.
I think he's the funniest person alive.
You know, that's why George Bush hates the Arabs
-is they invented Algebra. -[laughter]
[laughing]
[Morley Safer] What do you think it is that does make you
so highly respected by young people?
I'm screamingly funny.
You know, I really am in the books.
I think so.
He is both incredibly funny
and also dark and brooding at the same time.
My books are jokes, mosaics of jokes,
about serious matters, about death, about disease,
about war and that sort of thing.
He made literature fun. that was huge.
♪ Now the time has come
♪ Time
♪ There's no place to run
He'll be read to understand the 20th century
the way you have to read Mark Twain
to understand the 19th century.
[man] Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Germany
and he's been getting ready to write a book about it.
Now he's done it.
[woman] Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
was an instant hit;
an anti war novel that was searing, satirical,
strange and darkly funny.
[man] The protagonist of Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim, bounces around
from time to time in his life.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Listen...
"Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
"Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower
"and awakened on his wedding day.
"He's walked through a door in 1955
"and come out another one in 1941.
"He's gone back through that door
"to find himself in 1963.
"He's seen his birth and his death may times, he says,
"and pays random visits to all the events in between,
and the trips aren't necessarily fun."
[man] Unstuck in time is Billy Pilgrim's status
in the novel Slaughterhouse-Five.
But it's also Kurt Vonnegut's status
as the writer.
I'd say you and I are about equally unstuck in time.
♪ Time
♪
♪ Time
♪
[indistinct dialog]
[sighs]
Can you believe we're really gonna do this again?
What is this, the fourth, fifth time?
[man] I think the fifth.
I know the first interview was in 2014.
Then, about a year later, was the stripey-shirt interview.
That's the one where I cry.
[chuckles]
Then there was, what, the editing room interview?
Then the light blue shirt, I think, was 2017.
Every time, I thought it was gonna be the last time.
I didn't even want to be in this film in the first place.
This was gonna be a conventional author documentary
with interviews with Kurt,
his family,
you know, biographers and scholars,
but not me.
I don't even like documentaries where the filmmaker
has to put himself in the film.
I mean, who cares?
But when you take almost 40 years to make a film,
you owe some kind of an explanation.
Full disclosure.
I was 23 when I first approached him
about making this film.
And I remember he was just about to turn 60,
and I would refer to him as the old man.
And a couple months ago,
I turned 60.
How fucked up is that?
It all started for me at the same time as it started for
almost every Vonnegut reader I've met,
which is in high school.
In my case, Sunny Hills High School,
Fullerton, California.
[Kurt Vonnegut] How many of you have had the teacher
at any level of your education
who made you more excited to be alive,
prouder to be alive,
than you had previously believed possible?
Hold up your hands, please.
There's a door behind which my life would sort of change
when I was 16 years old.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] Please say the name of that teacher
to someone sitting next to you, please.
[Bob Weide] Valerie Stevenson was the name of the teacher
who first led me to Vonnegut.
I assigned a book to the students to read, um,
Breakfast Of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut.
This is the actual copy that I, uh, read.
Looking back now as an educator of many years,
I'm just sort of horrified that I did it.
It's a pretty edgy book,
and iconoclastic.
"To give an idea of the maturity
"of my illustrations for this book,
here is my picture of an asshole:"
Questioning authority--
"...teachers of children in the United States of America
"wrote this date on blackboards again and again,
"and asked the children to...
[Kurt Vonnegut] "...memorize it with pride and joy:
"1492!
"The teachers told the children that this was when
"their continent was discovered by human beings.
"Actually, millions of human beings were already living
"full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492.
"That was simply the year in which sea pirates
began to cheat and rob and kill them."
What high school kid isn't gonna gobble this up and say,
"I've found my author"?
Nothing was the same after that.
♪
I jut became somewhat obsessed.
I just so connected to his philosophies,
and these serious issues being handled in this comedic way.
He was the guy who made me think
he thinks what I think about the world.
He came in at the beginning of his senior year
and proposed that he teach a course in Vonnegut,
and didn't seem to think that that was an unusual thing.
[chuckles] It was but he set up his course
very seriously, Professor Weide,
[Bob Weide] I had probably a dozen students in the class,
and I graded them all and gave assignments,
and we all read his books.
It was like having a very cool Vonnegut reading club.
But, um, that was the beginning of it.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] "If you find your life
"tangled up with somebody else's life
"for no very logical reasons, writes Bokonon,
"that person may be a member of your karass."
Okay, here's the first one.
This is the one that got me into all this trouble.
"June 29, 1982.
"Dear Mr. Vonnegut,
"Earlier this year, I produced
the above-named documentary for PBS.
"The Marx Brothers now have their definitive documentary.
"How about allowing Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to have his?
"If the documentary had your authorization,
I'm confident that I could arrange for financing immediately."
I remind you, I wrote that letter in 1982.
So, I wrote him this letter, and days turned into weeks,
and I didn't hear back and I thought,
well, all right, that's that, I gave it a shot.
And then the day came and there was a letter
with that familiar handwriting on it that you see in
Breakfast Of Champions.
I thought, "Holy crap!"
[stammers] "It's him!"
Ready?
"Dear Robert Weide,
"I've been out of town for most of this summer,
"and so read your friendly letter of a month ago
"only this morning.
"It turns out I that
"I already know something of your work.
"I saw the Marx Brothers tribute and liked it a lot.
"Who wouldn't?
"I am honored by your interest in my work,
"and I will talk to you some, if you like,
"about making some sort of film based on it.
"But there is sure no great footage to start with.
"Anything that is any good of mine
"is on a printed page, not film.
"Maybe you have some ideas as to what to do about that.
"I don't.
"Anyway, give me a ring if you like.
Cheers-- Kurt Vonnegut."
[Bob Weide] Oh, I'm guessing this--
[man] Doesn't have a label on it.
[Bob Weide] Doesn't have a label?
Where's the-- Oh. So this is '94.
-Ninety-four. Right. -This is the later stuff.
That's the more recent stuff, '94.
We want the old stuff.
-Eighty-eight. That's it. -Okay. We'll go with this one.
That's should be it. Yeah, that's it.
[whirring]
[keyboard clacking]
[man] Here we go.
[man] Drop it.
So, we're okay from there, Bob.
[Bob Weide] This is the very first stuff we shot
on the first day in, uh, 1988.
There's Kurt.
[indistinct dialog]
There he is, laughing and smiling and chatting away.
Like he's still here.
-[laughing] -We'd gotten together
quite a few times, uh, since that initial letter.
[Bob Weide] But that day sitting on the train across from him
with the camera next to me,
finally hit me that...
my God, this film is really gonna happen.
-Are we going? -[Bob Weide] Yeah.
Yeah. My books are about loneliness,
and about people being driven out of the Garden of Eden
one way or another.
The world's full of lonesome old people
and when trouble comes,
they call either the police or fire department.
[laughs]
Lonesome? Have no friends? Dial 911.
Uh, and that's not much of a solution.
And I say get an extended family.
[Bob Weide] We were going to Buffalo, New York.
Kurt had a speaking engagement there
at a Unitarian church.
Kurt was an agnostic, certainly,
and a humanist,
but to the extent that he affiliated with any religion,
it was Unitarianism,
which is really more community based than God based.
[shouting] Perfectly capable of projecting in a room this size.
[laughing]
This was the first of many public appearances I would film,
but the audiences were always out the door, in the aisle,
and they always ate out of the palm of his hand.
We are taught to be enthusiastic,
to pretend we know what the good news is.
Just think, here you are two years old,
and mommy and daddy come up to you,
they're all excited.
Guess what's goin' on?
-[gibberish] -[laughter]
It's your birthday!
-[gibberish] -[laughter]
[Kurt Vonnegut] But-- [laughs]
What the hell's a birthday?
[laughter]
Why should it be such good news?
And so we pretend all these enthusiasms.
Uh... you know,
the Buffalo Bills made it to the Super Bowl.
-[gibberish] -[laughter]
[applause]
We are so grateful any time
anybody tells the truth about life
and the basic truth about life is,
we don't know what the good news is
and what the bad news is,
and one reason we would like to go to Heaven
is to ask somebody, "Hey, what was the good news,
and what was the bad news?" [laughs]
[applause]
-[man] Like this. -[laughter]
[indistinct chatter]
[tape fast forwarding]
[snapping]
[Bob Weide] I was always filming on and off with him over the years,
just thinking, you know, I'll figure this out later.
[Bob Weide] Now we're havin' fun.
[chuckling]
[snapping]
[Bob Weide] In 1994, we went to Indianapolis.
It would be terrible if
I don't even recognize the house anymore.
That's here Mr. Herman lived, he was very mean.
Oh, this is-- this is it.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "I took him to the Indianapolis of my childhood.
"I got out of my rented car, I did it noisily.
I slammed the door firmly.
[snapping]
Oh, yeah, that's Kurt Vonnegut and that's Edith Vonnegut.
And, of course, the house was built in 1923
when I was one year old.
♪
Yeah. This is my room all right.
[Bob Weide] Kurt, in your writing,
there's much talk of extended family.
Where does this notion come from?
Well, I used to have one.
♪
There must have been 30 Vonneguts,
all prosperous. in the phone book here.
[man] Kurt always said he trusted his writing best
when he sounded like a person from Indianapolis, Indiana,
which is what he was.
His father and grandfather were architects.
Other relatives were, uh, symphony conductors,
and, uh, heads of libraries
who had basically created Indianapolis.
And it's got Vonnegut written all over it.
[Kurt Vonnegut] The family was built around
the Vonnegut Hardware Company,
which was a very successful hardware store chain.
One of my ancestors invented the panic bar on doors.
But if there is a fire,
and you are jammed up against the door,
by a crowd-- Ahhh.
[grunts]
Flies open.
And it must have saved a hell of a lot of lives.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Vonnegut was growing up
in this beautiful house
designed by his architect father.
People have very kindly left this here all this time,
and that's me, my hand was pressed here,
including a little bit of my sweater.
My sister, Alice,
who's no longer among the living.
And this is my brother, Bernard, who is nearly 80;
atmospheric physicist who knows more about tornadoes
than anybody on Earth.
And this is my mother.
And this is my father.
Doesn't make me sad at all,
'cause it was such a happy time
in the lives of all these people.
[Bob Weide] After spending so much time with Kurt,
I got fairly close with his brother, Bernie.
-[beep] -Hi, uh, Bob,
uh, this is Bernie Vonnegut calling.
In a closet,
he had some old 16mm home movies
of the Vonnegut family.
[Bernie] I found the film,
or at least, uh, some of it.
and I, uh, hope, uh, you received it.
[Bob Weide] I took it down to a post production facility
had the stuff cleaned,
and put it up to transfer it to video tape.
I couldn't believe what I was seeing.
[projector whirring]
♪
[Bob Weide] It was amazing, crystal clear,
black and white home movies.
The family dynamic is on full display.
Kurt's the baby brother, of course,
always demanding attention.
He's either laughing or crying or running around.
And, uh... a lot of dancing.
[Kurt Vonnegut] The youngest member of each family
is the family comedian,
'cause it's the only way the youngest one
can get attention.
And so I would make a joke, and everybody would look,
"Did he say that?" you know,
and did he mean it and all that,
and so I became specialized that way.
[Bob Weide] Bernard is nine years older.
It's funny, when I knew Bernie,
he was this rather serious, retired academic,
who was a world renowned atmospheric scientist,
uh, and rather stiff on camera.
This is an instant of which I have no memory,
but, uh, I was, uh, very young.
But here he is, hamming it up,
and, uh, quite the snappy dresser.
To Vonnegut readers, his sister, Alice-- Allie--
is almost a mythical figure,
very important in Kurt's life.
He always writes about how funny she is,
and you see it.
[Kurt Vonnegut] Same jokes amused us both.
So maybe she taught me what was funny.
♪
This is my sister, Allie's, room.
The sleeping porch there where, with her permission,
we could sleep out on hot nights in the summer time.
She grew up to be six feet tall, was a very beautiful blonde...
uh, with terrible posture,
because she was so embarrassed about being tall.
Yeah, and I really miss her as we were extremely close.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Allie Vonnegut was
a constant presence in his life.
She substituted for Kurt's mother.
I think she gave him the love and the nurturing
that he was not given.
Kurt's mother was society bred,
as his mother was distant,
and really had her own mental problems to deal with.
His father was not the warmest, fuzziest guy in the world.
He was a good father,
but he was, uh, a serious architect.
[Kurt Vonnegut] I wish my parents had been happier than they were.
And I think it was largely my mother's unhappiness
that, uh, made the depression harder for all of us.
♪
[Jerome Klinkowitz] He grows up in
a very traditional, supportive family.
He has a happy childhood.
Uh, but then,
all the money for it disappears
during the Great Depression.
♪
Now, of course, everybody in Indianapolis
was quite depressed.
Uh, nothing was being built,
and so father finally had to come home.
But there was virtually no work.
Oh, I think he was deeply embarrassed,
and mother always felt that there must be some way
he could go out there and get some money.
Yeah. "Get out of her and get me some money too.
Why don't you do right like some other men do?"
[Jerome Klinkowitz] They lost their family home,
and had to go into a rental property.
[Kurt Vonnegut] We moved out of here when I was ten years old,
and I really didn't give a damn.
[chuckles]
You know, I thought life was pretty interesting wherever--
wherever we were gonna live next.
Young Kurt was taken out of, uh,
private school, put into public schools,
and it took him out of the bubble.
He read comic books,
he was immersed in popular culture,
and what it was like to be a person
not living in a world of privilege.
[Kurt Vonnegut] When I was a child,
and there were many serious things going on,
such as the Great Depression and all that,
it was Laurel and Hardy who gave me permission
not to take life seriously.
And it turned out that it as okay to, uh,
laugh your head off.
[laughing]
Life was a very serious business,
and it inspired me to try and write funny books,
that this was a good thing to do with a life is to be funny.
♪
[Gregory Sumner] One of the luckiest breaks for Kurt Vonnegut
is that he went to Shortridge High School,
one of the finest high schools in the country.
[Kurt Vonnegut] It was an extraordinary high school,
it was better than any university I ever went to.
This is where I got my foundation in chemistry,
in ancient history,
and this place had a daily paper,
The Shortridge Echo.
My parents worked on it,
so that's how long Shortridge had had a daily newspaper.
I learned to write for peers,
as I would write something in the paper,
and the next day, my fellow students would
tell me what the hell they thought about it.
It was a swell experience for me,
because I learned to write journalistic style;
which was to be clear and don't bluff,
and also to say as much as possible
as quickly as possible.
And my books are essentially that way.
I give away the big secrets in the first page
and tell people what's going to happen.
[snapping]
Yeah, I suppose I knew about one person in ten
on this list of people who died--
classmates who died in, uh, Second World War.
Particularly, close friend of mine was
Hal Plummer,
and he was just on a training mission,
he cracked up a plane in San Francisco.
Art Gipe.
Yeah, he died of spinal meningitis
during basic training. [laughs]
Had one fraternity brother at Cornell...
uh, who was so excited upon hearing that
Pearl Harbor had been bombed,
he was taking a bath and he somehow
banged his head on a faucet and died.
[laughing]
♪ [jazz]
[indistinct chatter]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Marge Murray was my prom date,
senior prom date.
Wonderful dancer.
Had blond, curly hair, too.
[Bob Weide] It was really interesting
seeing Kurt interact with his high school classmates.
Many of them, I assume, hadn't seen each other
since they were 18,
which I'm sure, for them, didn't seem that long ago.
[man] Yeah, well, my girlfriend had me doin' this.
You're too old to have a girlfriend,
don't bullshit me.
[laughing]
[Bob Weide] This was the class of 1940.
They had no idea what was waiting just around the corner.
I didn't know what the hell they were talking about.
You went through the ringer, for cryin' out loud.
Yeah. What happened to you?
I was in North Africa and they sent me to China, Burma, India,
and that's where it happened.
-They really used you, didn't they? -They used me. Yeah.
No, I couldn't
-They have-- -I know.
-They have no right to do that. -I know.
You're a real good guy, I really like you.
-Mustard gas? Where? -Yeah. Well, we were...
[Kurt Vonnegut] Second World War was fought by children.
The movies give the impression that
war is fought by middle-aged men.
No, it's startling how young soldiers are.
[school bell rings]
[explosions]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Anybody who's been in the ground forces
and been on the front lines...
hates war.
[explosions, rockets firing]
[Kurt Vonnegut] And I was involved in
the biggest defeat of American arms,
which was the Battle of the Bulge
'Cause the Germans caught us totally by surprise.
They were all dressed in white,
we were dressed in uniforms the color of dog shit,
and there was snow all over the place.
[laughter]
And my whole division got captured or wiped out.
And after it was over,
as far as you could see going down the road,
were American kids with their hands up like this,
'cause if you took your hands down, you'd get shot.
♪
[heartbeat]
[Kurt Vonnegut] What there is to see is so nauseating
so horrifying...
you don't want to hear about it anymore,
you don't want to talk about it.
[train clacking]
[bell clanging]
[train whistle blows]
[Kurt Vonnegut] So all the captured Americans, prisoners of war,
were loaded on those trains
and taken to the interior of Germany.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] "The skyline was intricate
"and voluptuous and enchanted and absurd.
"It looked like a Sunday school picture of Heaven
"to Billy Pilgrim.
"Somebody behind him in the box car said Oz.
"That was I. That was me.
The only other city I'd seen was Indianapolis, Indiana."
♪
"The slaughterhouse wasn't a busy place anymore.
"The prisoners were taken to the fifth building
"inside the gate.
"It had been built as a shelter for pigs
"about to be butchered.
"Now it was going to serve as a home away from home
"for 100 American prisoners of war.
"The address was this:
schlachthaus funf."
[Bob Weide] Uh, how was your division put to work in Dresden
when you first got there?
[Kurt Vonnegut] Privates, my division,
uh, were put to work in small factories.
The Germans all explained to us this is an old city,
'cause it had a very long art history,
and many people all over the world
were sentimental about Dresden,
and so they never expected to get hit.
[engines roaring]
[siren blaring]
[engines roaring]
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Billy Pilgrim was down in a meat locker
"on the night that Dresden was destroyed.
[explosions]
"There were sounds like giant footsteps above.
"Those were sticks of high explosive bombs.
The giants walked and walked."
[heartbeat]
[wind blowing]
[metal clanking]
[Kurt Vonnegut] We all came out
and we all looked around at the same time.
And the city was gone.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Dresden was like the moon now,
"nothing but minerals.
"The stones were hot.
"Everybody else in the neighborhood was dead.
"So it goes.
[Kurt Vonnegut] What really destroyed the city
were the thousands of very small fire bombs,
and started so many fires
they couldn't begin to deal with them all.
It created one big column of flame,
uh, roughly the same diameter as the city.
It generated tornadoes,
and consumed everything organic.
Only prisoners of war were allowed in there
to, uh, start digging out bodies,
and that's what we did.
♪
I know what it's like to carry the bodies of civilians
while the Germans watched silently.
I didn't feel, uh, particularly badly
when I did it.
I didn't feel much of anything.
[train clacking]
[Bob Weide] I think in the past you've sort of downplayed
that being like a major, pivotal moment of your life.
What-- What is the truth as to
living through something like that?
It was a great adventure of my life
and certainly something to talk about.
Indeed, I was there.
The neighborhood dogs, when I grew up,
uh, had far greater-- [laughs]
influence on what I am today than-- than, uh,
the mere firebombing of Dresden.
[Edie Vonnegut] I think Kurt-- Yeah, he's full of it.
He's seen too much, you know, and he's--
just living through Dresden,
and his sister dying and all his friends,
and seen too much anyway.
No, I don't-- Did he really say that?
You should see when he laughs at the most inappropriate times,
but it-- it seems right somehow.
Definitely his way of sublimating.
What, "so it goes?"
[Bob Weide] Yeah, let's talk about that.
[typewriter clacking]
[Kurt Vonnegut] "On an average,
"324,000 new babies are born into the world
"every day.
"10,000 persons, on an average,
will have starved to death
or died from malnutrition."
-[bell dings] -"So it goes.
"They were all being killed with their families.
"So it goes. He tore himself to pieces...
"...throwing up and throwing up.
"So it goes. ...and every day,
"my government gives me a count of corpses...
"So it goes. ...tried and shot...
"So it goes. ...the champagne was dead,
"So it goes. So it goes.
"So it goes.
So it goes."
[Jerome Klinkowitz] It's intoned 100 times in the novel.
Vonnegut did it to make it iconic.
Death is so common, so inevitable,
we can't go to pieces every time there's a death
or we ourselves will just be incapable of living.
So you have to just sort of shrug your shoulders
-and say-- -"So it goes."
I think it's a mantra in his head.
I think that's how he-- he copes.
Through that book.
He didn't talk about it.
Yeah, that-- I found out about it...
from Slaughterhouse-Five.
Horrible descriptions of what was happening
or going on around him.
And it was very light, you know, the way he wrote it.
[Kurt Vonnegut] Laughter was a-- was a great relief
day after day,
and it would have been embarrassing to cry--
cry day after day.
I've said that it-- it-- I prefer laughter to crying
because there's less cleaning up to do afterward.
Also, you can shut it down faster.
This business of the stuff that happened to me in Dresden
really had no impact
is the same person who is completely traumatized by it.
It all went very fast, you know,
marvelous once I was able to see
in such a short time,
and I wouldn't have missed it for anything.
[Nanny Vonnegut] It is painful for him to remember things.
Memory is painful.
I think he's doing lots of artwork now, that helps.
Drawing.
[slide projector clicking]
Bob, this is Kurt Vonnegut.
I just wanted to tell you I sent via Federal Express
a whole bunch of pictures I made
for an art show of mine back in 1980.
I thought you might be able to use them
some way in the film.
If not, send them right back to me. Bye.
[Bob Weide] How would you describe
the artwork of Kurt Vonnegut?
[Kurt Vonnegut] God, I don't know.
I think-- I think, uh,
what's such-- such a relief about it
is that I don't have to say what it's about.
[chuckles]
A friend of mine said, "You're the only author
who's paintings, uh, look just like what you write."
My books...
are aggressively unreal.
They make the reader accept a premise,
and unreasonable premise, and then keep going.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Billy Pilgrim could not sleep
"on his daughter's wedding night,
"though he knew there was a flying saucer
"from Tralfamadore up there.
He would see it soon enough inside and out.
and he would see, too,
where it came from soon enough."
♪
[Bob Weide] In '94, we made a trip to
Lake Maxinkuckee in northern Indiana
where the whole extended Vonnegut family
all had cottages.
Just seeing these places
brought it home in a way that, uh...
that really humanized him for me.
He was opening up about his experience in Dresden,
his childhood,
seeing the place where he actually came up with
the idea of Tralfamadore.
I had never read about it in any book,
he'd never written about it, but... he, um...
he showed me where it happened.
This platform here is--
my father designed it and had it built,
and the family would gather out here,
particularly at night.
And one night, cousin Richard
was naming the different stars and constellations,
and nobody knew whether he was telling the truth or not.
[chuckles] And he would say,
"Oh, there is Arcturus and there is Andromeda and so forth.
And so there was a lull in the conversation,
and I must have been about ten years old, I think,
and so I all of a sudden pointed up to the sky
and said, "There is Tralfamadore.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] "It was a flying saucer from Tralfamadore.
"The saucer was 100 feet in diameter
"with portholes around its rim.
"It came down to hover over Billy,
"and to enclose him in a cylinder
of pulsing purple life."
[applause]
Where am I?
[man] Welcome to the planet Tralfamadore, Mr. Pilgrim.
Oh, Finland.
-Tralfama-- -[man] Tralfamadore.
How did I get here?
There is no "how," Mr. Pilgrim.
There is no "why."
The moment simply is.
[Kurt Vonnegut] I experimented with the science fiction idea
using it for relief...
is to get some distance from an atrocity of this sort
to see how much it really matters in the long view,
and, uh, the science fiction thing seemed to work.
And it seemed to be amusing,
and it seemed to lighten the whole enterprise,
so I kept it in.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Later in life,
"the Tralfamadoreans would advise Billy
"to concentrate on the happy moments of his life,
"and to ignore the unhappy ones;
"to stare only at pretty things
as eternity failed to go by."
♪
[Bob Weide] Most authors impart life lessons to
the readers in their books.
Kurt gave me life lessons in his living room.
We would talk about almost anything.
Kurt was very interested in my dating life.
He'd ask me about what kind of girls I was meeting,
and he loved living vicariously through a younger person
who was still in the open market.
I met Linda in '94, which was the same year
that Kurt and I were in Indianapolis,
it was later that year.
Vonnegut adored Linda.
[narrator] "Dear Romeo: and believe me that is some Juliet!
Go for it! That redhead is a keeper."
'Cause he'd say to me, "When are you gonna get married?
When are you gonna marry that girl?"
I said, uh, "Well, I don't know.
"I kind of feel I'm ready but, you know,
I think if we get married, I'm probably ruling out kids."
I was in my late 30s.
Now, Linda's age is a state secret.
I can't say, but she's got a few years on me.
If we wanted kids, we would have had to get on that right away.
And Kurt said, "Uh-huh."
But I could see him working on it,
you know, like-- like a math problem.
Thought about if for a while and then he looked at me and he said,
"You don't need kids."
I said, "Oh, okay. Well, that's sorted."
[man] This ceremony calls you a lot of different names,
man and woman...
husband and wife, bride and groom,
but the most beautiful words are the ones I recited in Hebrew
which refer to both of you as lovers and friends.
[no audible dialog]
♪
[narrator] "Dear Linda and Bob,
"I've just FedExed your wedding present.
"It is a pair of Victorian candlesticks
"They are identical with a pair I inherited from my father.
"I have since given their like to each of my children.
"They have become our family totem.
Be happy. Kurt."
♪
[door creaking]
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Our cottage was sold to a stranger
"at the end of World War II.
"The buyer put off taking possession for a week
"in order that I,
"just married after being discharged from the army,
might take my bride there for a honeymoon."
♪
"My bride, who's name was Jane Cox,
"had me read The Brothers Karamazov
"during our honeymoon.
"She considered it the greatest of all novels.
"Jane was a writer too, by the way.
[Edie Vonnegut] Kurt and Jane were big book lovers.
He would give her a book and she would give him a book
it would be inscribed on the day,
and that was the anchor in their relationship,
it's a love of literature.
I mean, I know it was, I've read their love letters.
[narrator] "To Jane, whom I love and shall love all my life.
[continues reading]
"Presented when we were too young to even be engaged.
Kurt."
[Nanny Vonnegut] My image of them is very sweet
'cause she's very round and small,
and he's very tall and-- and they loved each other.
He was very, very romantic. She loved that.
I remember her, when I was little,
saying there's no other voice,
nobody who can talk like this man.
Really encouraged him to write, and said, you have to do this.
[narrator] "Beloved,
"from your loving me,
"I've drawn a measure of courage
"that never would have come to me otherwise.
"You've given me the courage to be a writer.
"That much of my life has been decided.
"Regardless of my epitaph,
to be a writer will have been my personal, ultimate goal."
Kurt and Jane's first son was born.
He was named for Mark Twain,
and things became quite different for Kurt.
He needed a job.
And here's where his older brother, Bernard,
came to the rescue.
♪
[snapping]
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Bernard was already a world famous physicist
working in the research laboratory at General Electric.
[Ginger Strand] At GE labs,
Bernard and his colleagues discovered
a new way of seeding clouds
with the chemical, silver iodide,
in order to make rain or snow.
He was as big a celebrity in his own field
as his little brother would become later.
Bernard heard that the GE News Bureau was looking for
men to write, uh, publicity, and Kurt took it.
Kurt and Jane moved to Alplaus, New York.
Most of the people who lived in Alplaus
worked for General Electric.
GE was a world unto itself.
It had not only a huge factory,
but the extensive research lab that Bernard worked in.
[Kurt Vonnegut] It was one hell of a good company.
It was the United States at its best.
[Ginger Strand] Kurt's job was to
go around the company
and learn about all these fantastic scientific advances
that the company was making.
So he really was seeing the future.
Although he kept it a secret,
he had a desk at home and was working very hard
to compose stories on evenings and weekends.
He and Jane studied magazines together
to try to figure out what editors might want to buy.
[man] He was writing, writing, writing,
and finally he had something to write about.
You'll get a kick out of this.
It shows step-by-step automation.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] My father and my brother were both technocrats,
and thought that engineers could straighten out the world,
and I believed that for a long time.
General Electric showed me a milling machine
which was being run by punch cards
that could do it better than a man could.
But they were ashamed.
They were worried about what they'd done
and they felt guilt about it,
and the whole emphasis now is throwing people out of work.
I was so optimistic about science
during the Great Depression
that I almost believed that, uh, by 1945,
we would have cornered God,
taken a color photograph of him,
and printed it on the cover of Popular Mechanics.
-[laughter] -And, uh, instead, of course,
we-- we dropped a bomb on Hiroshima.
After seeing what scientific truth could do,
I lost interest in truths,
and I've been trying to think up neat lies ever since.
[tyepewriter clacking]
[Ginger Strand] Kurt had had the idea for a novel
about a GE like company.
He began working on what would become Player Piano,
which he saw as the novel
that would make his literary reputation.
It's about a future in which machines
have entirely replaced human beings.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] People, by not having meaningful work to do,
begin to think their lives themselves
are not meaningful.
But he realized he could never hope to publish this novel
and continue working at GE.
♪
The work he had to do was, you know,
sitting in a cubicle typing up public relations.
[Ginger Strand] GE very much wanted to tell you how to think,
so as he worked there,
he grew more and more uncomfortable,
with the job of company man.
And it was, in fact, Jane who convinced him
to take himself seriously as a writer.
Kurt's advance for Player Piano
was $2500.
It as a good pay out,
but a novel takes a year to write.
It was a much better living to write short stories,
which he could crank out in a couple of weeks.
He set himself this goal of selling five
before he would allow himself to quit his job.
[Kurt Vonnegut] Writing for the magazines
they told me an awful lot about how to tell a story.
[typewriter clacking]
I would mail off a story,
and then wait for the money to come
and the money wouldn't come.
The story would come back instead,
and they would tell me what was wrong with it.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] And it was slow going.
You wouldn't believe the piles of rejection letters,
piles, I mean, this thick.
[Ginger Strand] His father never thought
he would have it in him to make a living as a writer.
He probably needed to prove it to himself
that he would, in fact, be able to support his family.
In spite of the rejection letters that piled up,
Jane was incredibly encouraging.
[Edie Vonnegut] She's writing to editors,
please read this, it's my husband,
and no one knows it now, but he's very gifted.
[Nanny Vonnegut] They were very passionate, long letters,
like, you don't even know what you gave up.
She was fierce, just saying this man is a genius.
[Mark Vonnegut] I mean, she believed in him
in a way I don't think he did.
He would have given up without her.
[Ginger Strand] One day, while he was still working at GE,
he came home and there sitting on the piano
where Jane had put it was a check for
the first short story that he ever sold
Report on the Barnhouse Effect for Collier's.
♪
[Bob Weide] Why don't you explain what that is.
Yeah. Well, this is a letter dated October 28, 1949.
And I wrote it to my father.
[reading]
"I think I'm on my way.
[continues reading]
"I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job,
"and never take another one so long as I live,
"so help me God.
[continues reading]
"Love, K," which is my family nickname.
And father glued this to a piece of Masonite
and varnished it,
and on the back of this plaque, uh,
he has this Shakespearean quotation.
"An oath, an oath, I have an oath in Heaven:
Shall I lay perjury on my soul?"
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] There was an enormous magazine industry,
which paid very high prices for stories,
and they needed lots of them.
They paid tons of money for them.
[Ginger Strand] Short stories were popular entertainment.
They really were the television of the era.
[Kurt Vonnegut] I had money piled up.
[laughing]
I'd never been this rich.
In a period of a few months, I had made more money than
General Electric was prepared to pay me all year.
[Ginger Strand] It quickly became apparent
that they really had no reason to stay in Schenectady.
At the end of 1950, he handed in his notice to GE
and decided that he was going to be a writer full time.
[birds chirping]
♪
[narrator] "Dear Bob,
[reading]
"Have Edie show you the underpass on route 6-A
"where she has painted angels.
"and the stone garage in West Barnstable
"where I sold sops and wrote Rosewater.
"And the Barnstable Comedy Club
of which I was once president
"and which inspired Who Am I This Time?
"And the Madonna in St. Mary's Church
"which I gave to the church in memory of my sister
after our father died."
[Bob Weide] Why don't we start by getting us oriented
and just telling us what is--
what is the significance of where we are?
[Nanny Vonnegut] This is Barnstable.
Sweet little town of Barnstable.
This is where they started their life.
[Edie Vonnegut] Barnstable was a great place to write
and he could get to New York easily,
and meet editors.
But he didn't have a job, really.
He cut all his safety nets by quitting General Electric
and coming here.
He was probably the only writer in town.
♪
[Bob Weide] Edie still lives in Cape Cod
in the house that the Vonnegut family grew up in
in West Barnstable.
To me, it was thrilling just to go and-- and film these sites,
to be able to look at the house where Kurt Vonnegut lived.
♪
If someone had told the high school me
that someday I'd spend several nights in the room where
Kurt Vonnegut wrote all those books,
I think my head would have exploded.
There'd be hair everywhere.
♪
Okay. This is Kurt's studio.
And when he couldn't write, he would paint doors.
I remember it being just a mess, papers everywhere,
and toxic with smoke.
He would play the worst music on the radio.
Muzak. Elevator music.
-Do you remember that? -[chuckles] Yeah.
-Horrible, annoying music. -[Edie Vonnegut] It was hideous.
♪[Muzak]
[Edie Vonnegut] He carved these words, which are Thoreau's,
and it says, "Beware of all enterprises
that require new clothes,"
which led all of us children to think
we never had to get a job,
-don't you think? -[chuckling]
Kurt would write, like, all stooped over
on this low table.
Your posture's too good, you know,
-it's gotta be really bent there. -Okay, and--
-And his knees were up here. -His knees were up here,
and it was beautiful.
Also, he'd have his ankles crossed,
he had really long legs,
and so he would be all hunched over.
[clacking]
It had a-- a music to it,
it would stop and... go fast and then stop
and... like that.
[typewriter clacking]
[Nanny Vonnegut] He was funny
and we was always trying to teach us stuff, too.
He was very smart.
He took a break once and wanted to sit me down
and give me a little lesson about life.
And he said, "As soon as you think life is turning up roses,
it gonna turn to shit.
We're being racked up by technology.
The magazines got knocked out,
not by any spiritual change
but by the invention of practical television.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] TV is now controlling the entertainment industry,
and that's how Vonnegut starts losing
his short story markets.
As he put it, television came
and my cash cows all died.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Vonnegut realizes
he's gonna have to write novels to make money.
The problem was, he could get an advance for a novel,
2500 bucks, 3,000 tops,
that would take him two years to write.
[Ginger Strand] Player Piano was published in 1952.
It pretty quickly disappeared from the literary scene.
And then he spends 17 years writing every day
and striving for a literary reputation.
It wasn't practical at all to be a writer.
Everyone else's fathers had jobs.
I think Kurt and Jane felt like bumpkins.
There weren't that many people that Dad could talk to.
So he was a little lonesome here.
Ultimately, I think it was good for him.
I think he wrote his best books here
because he didn't have any distractions.
[Nanny Vonnegut] He just always had a story in his head.
You could tell. He was always talking about it, an idea.
Just seeing what my-- the chapters in his life,
what he'd already been through,
what he had survived at 20-- prisoner of war--
and then his-- his losing his sister.
[clicking]
[indistinct dialog]
[Kurt Vonnegut] The way to achieve artistic wholeness...
is to create for one person... in mind.
And I thought about it and realized
that I write with my sister in mind.
♪
[Edie Vonnegut] The situation was
that Kurt's sister, Allie, had cancer.
So a tragedy was coming, it was inevitable,
she had terminal cancer, she had it everywhere.
And she was going to die.
She had four sons,
and her husband, Jim, was gonna take care of the boys.
And the horrible thing that happened
was he would commute on a train to Manhattan,
and his train went over an open drawbridge.
And he drowned.
♪
But Allie was in the hospital. She wasn't supposed to die
for another month or maybe two months.
And the nurse gave her the newspaper.
And she knew that Jim was on that train.
She died two days later.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] I don't think he can, even now,
get his arms around it.
I think Allie's death was the biggest loss of his life.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] Sadness is an interesting emotion.
You really don't know how anything's gonna hit you.
And I can't bear to look at photo albums,
'cause they just make me terribly sad.
I-- I think of all that's gone and will never come back.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] If you look at the films,
she's very protective of him,
and is hovering over him and just adored him.
I mean, that was just the purest type of love there is.
♪
[Edie Vonnegut] Kurt had to drive up there
and see Allie before she died.
And she was able to say,
"Keep my boys together."
♪
The gesture that Kurt made to take all four of us,
was really extraordinary.
I can't imagine anybody else doing it.
He really did it.
[Mark Vonnegut] He came back with the kids,
two dogs and a pet rabbit.
And, uh, changed everybody's life.
[Edie Vonnegut] And it seems like destiny now.
Over night, our house went from being
a quiet place with three well behaved kids,
to seven kids out of control.
♪
There was a lot of running around,
playfulness and activity
and horrible practical joking.
[Jim Adams] It wasn't long after we moved over there
when I started raising hell.
We'd break into houses, we'd break windows,
we'd make bombs and blow up doors in mailboxes.
I thought it was terrific fun.
We were one-stop shopping for
the Barnstable police department.
They would just pull into the driveway
and try to figure out which kid had done it.
All the other kids loved it over there
because it was just like free-for-all.
[Nanny Vonnegut] It was just total chaos
from my point of view,
and it was just great chaos.
[chuckles] We were running wild.
And he was writing through all this.
[Edie Vonnegut] Kurt's studio was off the end of the house.
And he would come out and just, "Shut up!"
"Shut up. Shut up."
"All you kids, shut up!"
[Kurt Adams] He was moody.
-[Steve Adams] He was scary. -[Kurt Adams] Scary moody.
He'd come storming out of his study and, ooh.
You never knew what you were gonna get.
You had to be sort of on guard
so as not to get his wrath.
[Bob Weide] Is there any way that you would describe him as
-cuddly or... -[laughs]
No.
I don't think he wanted too much cuddling. [chuckles]
He cuddled with the dog.
[Edie Vonnegut] Kurt would roll around with Sandy on the kitchen floor,
and I remember always being a little jealous.
Why doesn't he wrestle with me like that? [chuckles]
[Mark Vonnegut] He said to us sometimes,
"Please let me off the father hook,"
which is not a good thing to say to your children,
but... [laughs]
nobody's perfect.
[Nanny Vonnegut] It was so intense what he was doing.
As family, you learn how to stay clear.
My mother was a huge force.
She was his gatekeeper and guarded that door.
She sort of trapped him in there
and said, "You have to do this."
Really encouraged him to write.
[Jim Adams] Jane was always washing clothes,
vacuuming, sweeping.
Kurt was not a sharer of domestic duties.
Kurt didn't do anything.
He'd come out, he'd make a sandwich,
or he'd go on walks, chew on paper,
and be scary, really scary,
and-- and Jane was scared of him, too.
Everybody was scared of him.
[Edie Vonnegut] I could tell when he was having a good day and a bad day.
Definitely. 'Cause he just wouldn't talk to you.
And he would be smoking and, you know,
his head coming through that door.
You just didn't mess with him 'cause it wouldn't be fun.
I mean, there were times when he would be just incredibly fun.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] Oh, when he had a good writing day,
he'd be really happy, it was kind of a manic lifestyle.
And we'd have these wonderful music times
where we'd all be pounding on music and singing.
-He'd be doing poetry and-- -He'd be right there,
right there.
[Jim Adams] The next day, it'd just all turn to shit,
and he's back in his study and he doesn't want to have
anything to do with anybody and...
[typewriter clacking]
[Steve Adams] Kurt may not have been an attentive father
or father figure, but I do understand it.
He was-- He was a writer, and that's what he was.
And he had all this crap going on in his head.
And therefore, when he's going from the study to the kitchen,
what's going on in his mind
are the books that everybody's loving.
[typewriter clacking]
[Edie Vonnegut] I had no sense of who he was at all,
I don't think, until I read something.
And it just amazed me that this man lived downstairs.
I just loved it.
It's pretty remarkable that by the mid 1960s,
he'd written Sirens of Titan,
a mind-blowing space opera,
that made a lot of people wonder what drugs he was on.
Mother Night, great morality tale.
Cat's Cradle, which made him
a cult figure on college campuses.
This is all pre Slaughterhouse-Five.
You know, Slaughterhouse-Five is okay for me.
But Cat's Cradle and Sirens of Titan
today remain my favorite books.
[man] He really emerged as a writer
and I have to think it was because there were no prospects.
Who cares? None of this stuff is--
is being published as paperback originals.
It's disappearing before it even hits the stands,
you know, so why not just go for it?
It had never occurred to me that
someone could write a comedy about the end of the world.
[Kurt Vonnegut reading]
I loved him for being fantastic and creating religions
and talking about God's travel plans.
[Nanny Vonnegut] My mother was so excited about those.
I mean, she could not believe how great these were,
and it was slow going.
[Mark Vonnegut] Jane would do anything to help Kurt along,
to the point of going to bookstores
and under a fake name ordering his books.
You could tell that these were not big financial boons
because he had to accept, like, a sexy cover
for Sirens of Titan when there's no sex in the book,
so here you would write a novel
and you would get less than $1,000.
When I was 12, he sincerely and utterly came to me
and asked if he could borrow $100
that I had saved up from my paper route.
I had money and he didn't.
The normal answer, uh, for most people
would have been to get a good paying job.
My favorite one is where he got a job for Sports Illustrated.
He wouldn't do the job.
He would be given a chore to talk about a horse race.
[Mark Vonnegut] And he was given the assignment of writing about
this horse that broke away,
and Kurt sat there all morning, and then he typed out...
[Edie reading]
And then leave. Did you hear that story?
His attempts to work regular jobs
didn't go well.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] When I went broke as a writer,
I got an automobile dealership, you know.
It was one of the first Saab dealers in the United States.
[Edie Vonnegut] We had a red one and he used to
put my mother on the hood and take pictures of her.
People wouldn't pay for their cars
and he'd have to go and repossess them.
I don't think he was a really good car salesman.
[man] How'd you hold the line?
-We screwed them on the radio. -[laughing]
We, uh-- [laughing]
[Mark Vonnegut] I don't think
he could have stayed employed if he had wanted to
at Sports Illustrated, GE or any other job.
He was meant to be a writer and, I think,
for his own mental health, he had to write.
[typewriter clacking]
Well, he was not selling Saabs at all
'cause no one came in.
He took his typewriter down there and he wrote
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in that building.
♪
[Jerome Klinkowitz] God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was written when Kurt
was at the low point of his career.
And the book is just money obsessed.
[narrator reading]
It's like if a book were written by a starving man,
what would the subject be? Food. [chuckles]
[Gregory Sumner] One thing that's interesting and important about
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater,
is the introduction of the character Kilgore Trout.
[narrator] "Trout, the author of 87 paperback books.
"was a very poor man,
and unknown outside the science fiction field."
[man] Who is Kilgore Trout?
That's a-- That's a big one.
He does appear and reappear
in many of Vonnegut's books.
Kilgore Trout is different in every book.
So he's not a very consistent character
but he is consistently a science fiction writer.
[Gregory Sumner] Trout was based on
an actual science fiction writer named Theodore Sturgeon.
You can get the pun there.
Vonnegut met him when he was down on his luck
up at the Cape writing for a penny a word.
So he admired Sturgeon but he also saw--
look at the life he's living.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Trout's employer and co-workers
"had no idea that he was a writer.
[continues reading]
I think, psychologically, Kilgore Trout
is what I thought I might become.
One woman said that Kilgore in the different books
represents my psychological state.
I think it's pretty clear that he's an alter ego of Kurt's.
He's a doppelganger, a dark twin.
[Kurt Vonnegut] I don't mind people calling me Kilgore.
Most authors will say that, you know,
laymen are so stupid to think that
I'm talking about my own life.
My position is it's all I have to talk about,
and, uh-- uh--
I'll take full responsibility for having experienced
every event in any book.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] In 1965,
when even the novels weren't selling,
he had to submit to the worst humiliation
any human being can suffer.
He had to come to Iowa to teach college.
-[cow bells clanking] -[mooing]
♪
[man] If you're not making enough money
to support yourself as a writer,
and you need to have a teaching job,
a job in Iowa is a really good one.
Most of the other MFA students, they hadn't read him.
They had written him off on the basis of his reputation
or lack thereof,
and I thought he was fascinating.
It was very compelling to me to be in the presence of
someone who said,
"It's not just all right to be an entertainer
and a serious writer,
but if you're going to be serious,
you better also be entertaining.
[Nanny Vonnegut] And we had a crummy little house we rented,
and Andre Debus was one house next to us.
For the first time, he met other writers,
uh, of his stature.
Nelson Algren, Richard Gates,
Vance Bourjaily.
He suddenly felt like, oh,
he was part of the writing community.
[Gregory Sumner] It became two of the happiest years of his life.
It led to the breakthrough of him discovering
how to use his own voice in fiction.
Hanging around these other creative people,
they gave him some ideas about
how you can tell a rather untellable story.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "I taught in the afternoon.
"In the mornings, I wrote.
"I was not to be disturbed.
I was working on my famous book about Dresden."
[typewriter clacking]
"Listen:
"Billy Pilgrim has come...
[typewriter clacking]
[Bob Weide] When it came time to sit down
and write your book on Dresden,
didn't you find some difficulty in recalling?
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] "When I got home from the Second World War,
"23 years ago,
"I thought it would be easy for me to write about
"the destruction of Dresden,
"since all I would have to do would be to
"report what I had seen.
"And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece
"or at least make me a lot of money.
"But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then.
"And not many words come now, either,
"when I've become an old fart with his memories
and his Pall Malls."
[Bob Weide] He was always working his way up to
Slaughterhouse-Five,
and he just couldn't find the key.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "When I was somewhat younger
"working on my famous Dresden book,
"I asked an old war buddy named Bernard V. O'Hare
if I could come to see him."
[David Ulin] O'Hare's wife, Mary, she says,
"You're gonna write a book that is going to glorify war,
"and people are going to read it and think
it's fine to send all these kids off to war."
And it's an eye-opening moment for Vonnegut.
The war in Vietnam is not like these other wars.
[Lyndon Johnson] Yet war is always the same.
It is young men dying in the fullness of their promise.
[David Ulin] Mary O'Hare, she shamed him and said,
"Write about what really happened.
You were babies."
[Kurt Vonnegut] I would hate to tell you
what this lousy little book cost me,
in money and anxiety and time.
When you go through all the various drafts
and iterations of Slaughterhouse-Five through the years,
you become very aware of Vonnegut's struggle
and his perseverance.
He's trying everything to get it right.
Some drafts are written first person,
sometimes it's Vonnegut's point of view,
sometimes it's a made up name.
Sometimes the narrator is already dead,
and narrating from the grave.
Billy Pilgrim's name keeps changing.
The title of the book keeps changing.
He's constantly auditioning different openings for the book,
different prefaces and forwards.
He's often doodling and drawing on the pages
as if to clear his head.
At one point, he gives up trying to write it
as a novel altogether,
and he tries to write it as a play.
In-- In one version, uh, middle-age Billy Pilgrim
receives a crank phone call from a drunken Vonnegut
who taunts Billy by telling him
he's a fictional character in a book Vonnegut is writing.
And remember, this is, you know, in the days before computers,
so he's not cutting and pasting.
Every new attempt is a page one rewrite.
Sometimes he's halfway through the novel
before he starts all over again.
Sometimes he changes course after an opening paragraph.
But he just won't give up.
You just see him persevering and rewriting again and again,
and he just can't crack the code.
It's like he's not just trying to get a bead on the book;
it's almost like he's trying to purge
the whole Dresden experience from his soul
once and for all.
And just when you think Dresden
is about to claim yet one more victim...
he nails it.
♪
[Edie Vonnegut] In 1969 when Slaughterhouse-Five came out,
that was the big kaboom.
The current idol of the country's
sensitive and intelligent young people,
is 47 years old.
Slaughterhouse-Five was the breakthrough
because it was the right place at the right time.
It was in the ugliest phase of the Vietnam War
in the ugliest phase of our domestic crises at home.
[Morley Safer] His gentle fantasies of peace
and his dark humor are as current among the young
as was J.D. Salinger's work in the 1950s.
[Edie Vonnegut] Fans would come to the door,
and wanting to know if he lived here,
and they would end up coming in,
and sometimes they'd stay for three or four days.
[Nanny Vonnegut] The sudden money coming in
was a total shock.
And he just couldn't believe it.
I remember at the dinner table, he said,
I have money coming out of my ears. [laughs]
It was, like, fun and new, like he had arrived.
♪
[Edie Vonnegut] All of our friends wanting to come over and visit,
'cause Lifemagazine was here.
♪
This is the biggest thing that came to this town.
And then when that article came out
there was these big pictures of our kitchen,
and our father getting a haircut and...
me standing there with a paintbrush.
It was just extraordinary.
[Nanny Vonnegut] And I was getting attention, Edie was getting attention,
everybody loved us because we were with this doofus,
our father. [laughs]
[Jim Adams] Norman Mailer came to the house
and Jane was excited about that.
I'll never forget, she came into the kitchen and,
"Jimmy, you got any pot?"
[laughing]
[Nanny Vonnegut] Peter Fonda,
he wanted to buy the rights to Cat's Cradle,
so he made a pilgrimage. [laughs]
We couldn't believe it.
It was just after Easy Rider,
and I had a girlfriend that didn't really think I was that great.
But I told her, "Hey, listen,
Peter Fonda's gonna be over at our house.
She says, "Really? Okay." And we-- we all came back,
and we all sat around and we're talking with Peter Fonda,
and it-- it did the trick.
[laughig]
Thanks, Kurt.
[man] Do you mind being middle-aged?
[Kurt Vonnegut] Yes, I mind. I think a terrible mistake
has been made somehow.
I suspect that I'm 21 years old,
that I've been misclassified,
somehow, or time has slipped.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] When he paperback of Slaughterhouse-Five came out,
all the previous novels were reissued in a uniform edition.
It was just making it clear that Slaughterhouse-Five
did not exist in a vacuum.
This spoke for 20 years of a writing career,
and a coherent, very interesting human being behind them.
[Morley Safer] Vonnegut spends most of his time
in he tranquility of Cape Cod where he lives.
But now he can be found in New York
in a theater in Greenwich Village
agonizing over his new play,
Happy Birthday, Wanda June.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] That was a big family excitement going to that opening,
to be in New York City and getting all dressed up.
Oh, my mother was so proud.
It was just very exciting.
I knew he would be great, but I never envisioned,
like, that kind of movie star type of thing,
people wanting to take your pictures.
That was fun.
That was a lot of fun.
But it wasn't a lot of fun when--
when he didn't want to come home.
♪
[Edie Vonnegut] There was a woman photographing him
and they started a relationship.
And she was a lot younger than my mother.
[camera shutter clicking]
And he stayed with her.
And eventually married her.
And left my mother here on the Cape.
[man on P.A.] ...for Toronto now boarding flight one.
[snapping]
[indistinct dialog]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Big problem has probably been noticed in this church.
A lot of people are getting divorced.
What's the trouble?
Well, the people who are getting divorced don't know why.
I don't know, I really-- I love you a lot.
'Cause I love you more than when we were married.
But something's wrong.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] I like the house, I like the kids,
and it's gonna be a terrible strain on the kids,
but I'm sorry.
I just can't go on this way.
I can't describe what's wrong,
all I know is something's wrong.
[Nanny Vonnegut] He always keeps repeating to me,
watch out for the empty nest syndrome.
It's devastating when all the kids are gone.
And I think he couldn't handle the quiet around here.
[Kurt Adams] It was pretty clear that Kurt's famous now,
and he's left his drab life behind on Cape Cod.
and now he's living the celebrity life
in the fast lane of Manhattan.
[Edie Vonnegut] It must have been a very heady time for him.
His books selling, movies being made,
It must have just been incredibly seductive.
[Mark Vonnegut] I wish it didn't hurt him in the way it hurt him,
but, um, I think fame is
a horrible destructive thing to do to people.
[Jim Adams] It wasn't until he died that I stopped doing this,
but I thought that I hated him.
I hated the way he treated Jane.
Jane supported him and loved him,
and did everything in her power to back him up,
and, uh...
he threw it all away.
[Nanny Vonnegut] My parents were partners in this for 20 years,
and I don't think my mother ever expected that
she wouldn't always be part of it.
She was the kind of woman who wanted to meet everybody.
You know, she wanted to meet John Updike,
and Doctorow and George Plimpton,
she would have been perfect at all those cocktail parties.
Here they had finally worked to this point,
and she was waiting to, you know,
enjoy the benefits, too.
The beauty of Jane is she was not devastated.
She thought this would all end fine,
and, uh, to a certain extent, she was right.
[Edie Vonnegut] In the end,
she found a wonderful man to live with.
[Nanny Vonnegut] She was not bitter at all,
and always, uh, believed in him as a writer,
was so proud of him
every time he came out with a new book
when they weren't married.
She'd be laughing, you know, sitting in the backyard
and just shaking her head, like, guy's still got it.
[chuckles] He's so funny.
They were in touch to the end.
♪
But this chapter
being on the Cape as a whole family...
was over just like that.
[woman] I want you to tell me that you loved me once.
Oh, for Christ's sake.
I mean it. I must have that and so must Paul.
Tell him that he was conceived in love
even if you hate me now.
Tell us both that somewhere in our lives
was love.
[Bob Weide] In 2001,
my wife, Linda, and I were on the phone with Kurt.
I remember Linda saying to Kurt,
"What do we gotta do to get you out here?"
Kurt said, "Well, I'll come out if
"Bob directs Happy Birthday, Wanda June,
and if you play Penelope."
Stay or go, talk or sulk,
laugh or cry as you wish,
do whatever seems called for.
My mind is gone.
-[laughter] -Bye!
[applause]
[Bob Weide] Linda was sensational in it, of course.
But we hit a bit of a snag because...
a few weeks before we opened, in the middle of rehearsal,
came September 11, 2001.
And so he apologetically said that he wasn't gonna make it up.
Yeah, after 9/11, he wasn't a big fan of flying,
so usually when we got together
it was in New York, which was fine with me.
♪
There were a lot of lunches, a lot of walks on the east side.
And fans would always recognize him,
and come up to him and say, "Oh, Mr. Vonnegut,
I've read all your books,"
or "Your work has saved my life."
And I'd be with him thinking,
"Why am I with him?"
I should be that guy.
And he would always engage them,
he would always ask their name and where they're from.
He was sort of the anti Salinger writer.
But by this time, he was something of a New York landmark.
He had lived in the city longer than he had in
Indianapolis or Cape Cod.
Ever since he moved there in 1970
when his first marriage went bust.
♪
♪ Yeah, this is a mean old world ♪
♪ Baby, to live in by yourself ♪
[Gregory Sumner] The '70s were a tough time for him.
Divorce, sudden celebrity,
sudden fame and wealth.
He's sort of almost having a nervous breakdown
in a culture that is having a nervous breakdown.
♪ Someday, someday, baby ♪
♪ I'll be six feet in my bed ♪
[man on TV] Bruce Jenner.
Wheaties is the breakfast of champions.
He didn't quite know where he was going
after Slaughterhouse-Five.
It has been proved
that if a writer is blocked, is unable to write,
the psychological consequences are terrible.
Frequently, nervous breakdowns.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Everybody was hanging on
every word he was writing.
No matter what he wrote, it was gonna go to number one
on The New York Times best seller list.
And all of a sudden,
having this responsibility locked him up.
He thought he could have
Breakfast of Championswritten in a year and a half.
It took him four years.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "This is a tale of...
[continues reading]
[Gregory Sumner] It's such a relentless interrogation of our
junk history and our junk culture in the early '70s.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "We Americans require
"symbols which are richly colored
"and three dimensional and juicy,
"which have not been poisoned by great sins
"our nation has committed,
"such as slavery and genocide, and criminal neglect,
or by tin-horned commercial greed and cunning."
[Gregory Sumner] He tells you right at the beginning
I'm trying to get the junk out of my mind
the debased language and the lies and the racism.
All the poisons that I've taken in,
I want to get rid of them.
[Kurt Vonnegut singing ditty]
For me, the real effect of Breakfast Of Championswas
the use of the art, the use of the drawings.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Kilgore Trout's nation was by far the richest
"and the most powerful country on the planet,
"and it disciplined other countries
"by threatening to shoot big rockets at them
"or to drop things on them from airplanes,
"and still the people went on fucking all the time.
Fucking was how babies were made."
He was blurring lines,
but he was doing it in ways that were funny,
that were accessible.
thinking beyond what one would assume
could be done on the page.
[Kurt Vonnegut] In my new book,
I confront Kilgore Trout.
I finally acknowledge that I did invent him,
and he had imagination enough to know that
maybe he was somebody in somebody else's book.
[Kurt Vonnegut reading]
Since anything I say in writing happens to him,
because he is my creation,
and I give him his freedom, and this is, uh--
I will never use him in a book again.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "I'm approaching my 50th birthday,
Mr. Trout," I said.
"I'm cleansing and renewing myself
"for the very different sorts of years to come.
"I'm going to set at liberty all the literary characters
"who have served me so loyally during my writing career.
"You are the only one I am telling.
"Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free.
You're free."
[David Ulin] I mean, it's a remarkable moment
He as the, kind of, creator of those stories
was as important to the stories
as the characters he was writing about.
[Kurt Vonnegut reading]
"You're afraid you'll kill yourself
the way your mother did, I said."
[typewriter clacking]
"I know, I said."
[snapping]
[birds chirping]
Would have been 1943, I guess.
She died in this house.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] It was Mother's Day.
My sister and I, uh, found her.
It was upstairs.
Indeed, she was dead.
It was a Marilyn Monroe thing,
it was a combination of pills and alcohol.
A lot of pills.
Suicide is supposedly a disgrace,
and whenever I've said that my mother killed herself,
other relatives would say, no, no, it didn't happen.
It was a family secret.
She never recovered from profound unhappiness.
And it was too damn bad.
[Bob Weide] What then became of your father
after your mother's death?
[Kurt Vonnegut] He didn't like life very much after that.
Certainly, the starch went out of him pretty much.
As it should have, I mean, you know,
people can stand so much and no more.
To have you wife dislike life that much,
you know, he-- he was principle maker of her life.
♪
He wound up all alone here.
It's too bad that one of us couldn't have stayed with him.
That's about it.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free.
"You're free.
"His voice was my fathers' voice.
"I heard my father and I saw my mother.
"My mother stayed far, far away,
"because she had left me a legacy of suicide.
"Here was what Kilgore Trout cried out to me
"in my father's voice:
"'Make me young.'
'Make me young.'"
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] A writer is very fortunate
in that he can cure himself every day.
Uh, if he is able to write every day,
he has done himself some sort of great psychological favor.
[narrator] "Dear Robert,
I'll be going to England for two weeks,
to hustle Deadeye Dick.
[bell dings]
"Dear Bob,
I hack away at a new novel calledGalapagos.
-[bell dings] -"Dear Whyaduck,
"Yes, I've finished another book,
" Hocus Pocus.
"I don't know if I like it or not.
"At least it isn't about World War Two.
"That's an improvement.
[bell dings]
-Huh? [man] You gonna read--
I don't think anybody else is, I might as well,
-because-- [laughter]
God, it's so boring, there's so much--
[laughter]
A lot of people got off the Kurt Vonnegut band wagon,
I don't think they read him as much after
Breakfast Of Champions.
I can see his latter novels as a reflection of
what's happening in Kurt Vonnegut's life.
The books become more personal.
He has this dream of extended family
as the thing we'd most lost.
and the thing we most need to re-create.
Some of it worked, some of it didn't.
When he sort of stumbled a bit in some of his '70s work,
they were so happy to crush him.
He as so hurt by it.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Kurt Vonnegut said,
"Enduring the critical reception to Slapstick
"he felt like he was sleeping on his feet
in a boxcar in Germany again."
They took that book as the occasion to attack
all of his work, to say,
"See? We were right all along.
He's a bad writer from start to finish."
I read a number of reviews,
and have watched the critics turn.
We live decade by decade now,
and, uh, people write books about this decade
and then the next decade,
and I belong to the '60s, I guess, and not the '70s.
People dismissed him,
or wrote about him as an easy writer.
As anyone who's tried to write knows,
it's not easy to be easy to read.
[Gregory Sumner] The accessibility of his style,
which I think is a strength,
it's become a badge of shame.
Just because a junior in high school
can read Cat's Cradle and enjoy it
and get something out of it
that doesn't make it not profound.
Vonnegut was championed by the people,
not by the critics.
[woman] Ladies and gentlemen,
Mr. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
[cheering, applause]
[David Ulin] As the novels maybe became less fulfilling
in a certain sense,
he was able to move into writing those speeches,
and addressing the material that way.
The most sensible and constructive thought
we can hold on this day,
is that we are not members of different generations.
We are also close together in time
that we should think of ourselves
as brothers and sisters.
Whenever my children complain about the planet to me,
I say, "Shut up, I just got here myself."
[laughter, applause]
[Jerome Klinkowitz] He wanted to keep himself current
to let people know he was still there
standing behind his ideas.
The two experiences that will try you most
are loneliness and boredom.
We are all so lonesome so much of the time
because we were meant to live in extended families,
to have dozens or even hundreds of relatives near by.
Do what you can to get yourselves extended families
no matter how arbitrary they may be.
We all need more people in our lives,
and they do not have to be high grade people, either.
They can be imbeciles 'cause what matters--
-[laughter] -Is numbers.
Good lord, I certainly wish you well.
[applause]
As my generation of critics sort of came up,
I think Vonnegut began to be taken much more seriously,
and I think that's probably true in academia as well,
that, you know, he began to be taught,
he began to be sort of regarded as
a kind of touchstone in a certain way
because we all grew up with him.
[Kurt Vonnegut] As I told you, I studied anthropology,
and I had to give it up.
I just couldn't stand primitive people,
they were so stupid.
[laughing]
[Nanny Vonnegut] If go l-- see him speak,
and I see the-- the auditorium is packed,
and out the doors, it-- it staggers me,
but I really do have to share him with the whole world.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] He invited me on a trip to Indianapolis
to have a family outing.
You know, I thought it was gonna be the two of us.
And then at the last minute, he said,
"Oh, by the way, they're shooting a documentary.
I was so angry.
I actually wouldn't have gone on that trip if I had known that.
But turned out, it was... all right.
[snapping]
-Oop! -[laughter]
[Nanny Vonnegut] I had never seen him so at ease.
They had found each other as the subject and the filmmaker.
It felt like a friendship.
[laughter]
I was happy to see my father enjoying himself.
-[man 1] Mark. -[man 2] Marker.
...and said, "There is Tralfamadore."
[Bob Weide] Can you just do that line one more time.
-Up your ass. What the-- -[laughing]
[steady tone]
[Kurt Vonnegut] "She had me read The Brothers Karamazov
during our honeymoon."
[Bob Weide] Would you go back to, "She had me read"?
-[Kurt Vonnegut] Oh, shut up. -[laughter]
[Bob Weide] You know, when you're a Vonnegut fan,
you run into so many other people who love Vonnegut,
who've read all of his works,
but I find that for the masses who haven't read his books,
that Kurt eventually became
so much a part of our culture
uh, pop culture,
that there are these people who know him for these odd things,
like there were a series of commercials done for coffee
It's called The Coffee Achievers.
[man] You are the new American society.
The movers and the shakers.
♪ Hold on tight to your dreams ♪
And then there's what, in some ways,
the most memorable thing that Vonnegut's ever done.
You've got a major paper comin' up on Kurt Vonnegut.
You haven't even read any of the books.
[sighs] I tried.
[knocking]
I don't understand a word of it.
So how you gonna write the paper then, huh?
Hi. I'm Kurt Vonnegut.
I'm looking for Thornton Melon.
Uh, wanna come in?
When I was in high school and making my way through
Vonnegut's canon,
eventually, I read Mother Night,
and I remember closing that book,
and decided right then and there in high school
that I wanted to make a movie out of this book.
And I did, 20 years later.
Kurt gave me the rights to the book on a handshake,
and I wrote the screenplay to Mother Nighton spec.
Took five years 'til we got it made.
The director of the film was my best friend,
Keith Gordon.
Coincidentally, Keith had his own connection with Vonnegut
because Keith used to be an actor.
And Keith played Rodney Dangerfield's son
in Back To School.
Hey, Keith. Sorry we're late.
Welcome. Thank you for doing this.
-Thank you. -I appreciate it.
[Bob Weide] Kurt came up to Montreal to visit the set one day.
We were trying to figure out a way to use him.
♪
[man] It wasn't the fear of death that froze me.
I had taught myself to think of death as a friend.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] Congratulations,
we're honored to have had anything to do with it.
Bye.
[Bob Weide] Of course, it didn't make a dime.
[chuckles] Nobody went to see it.
I remember Kurt said to me,
"Well, maybe you just wrote a lousy script."
And I said, "Well, you know what they say:
Garbage in, garbage out."
Throughout all of this, I always had other jobs.
I mean, I had bills to pay.
♪
After the Marx Brothers film,
I did several more documentaries.
mainly on comedians that I loved.
Every time I took another gig,
there's always a tinge of guilt
that I wasn't finishing my Vonnegut film.
One day in 1998,
I got a call from my friend, Larry David.
♪[ Curb Your Enthusiasmtheme]
Get in the car.
-Are you my Caucasian? -I'm your fuckin' Caucasian.
-All right! -Yeah!
-Here, watch this. -Ow! [groans]
-[clattering] -Shit!
Bob, this is Kurt. I thought you were a failure.
How wrong I was. Hooray.
[Bob Weide] I had no idea at the time
that that would then lead to a series
called Curb Your Enthusiasm.
After ever season, I kept saying, that's it,
I'm leaving, I'm leaving, I'm leaving.
Okay, now the Vonnegut documentary.
♪
[narrator] "Dearest Whyaduck,
"Where indeed is your Slaughterhouse-Five?
"Have you considered cutting off an ear
and sending it to a prostitute?
These things take time.
[Bob Weide] This is all stuff that he sent me over the years.
Whenever he would do, like, a speech at a college,
or anything on TV,
he would always have them make a VHS tape and send it to me.
He started to think of me as his archivist.
Hi, Bob, this is Kurt.
I just want to make sure the address is still right.
There's videotape I'd like to send you.
We are here on Earth to fart around.
And don't let anybody tell you any different.
[laughter, applause]
It's like Harpo Marx's coat, it's just bottomless.
Uh, How To Get A Job Like Mine,
Distinguished Speakers Series, 2003.
If you really want to hurt your parents,
and you don't have nerve enough to become a homosexual...
[laughter]
...the least you can do is go into the arts.
[laughter, applause]
[Bob Weide] I didn't want to do a bait and switch.
I didn't want him to think that I had said,
"Hey, I'm a big a fan of yours,
I'd like to make a film on you,"
and then we'd become friends,
and then that I would just ditch the film.
But no matter how much time I'd put in,
I never seem to get any closer to the finish line.
I should say I'm not the only one
who was stuck in the mud on a long term project.
Well, this-- this very morning,
I mailed off the last 30 pages of a book.
[woman] Is there a title for your new book yet?
Yeah, it's called, uh, Timequake.
And, uh...
But that's pretty good, I'm-- I'm 73 years old
and, uh...
I didn't think I'd last this long, you know?
[chuckling]
[David Ulin] Timequake was a struggle for him to write
because he had said it was gonna be his last book
that he was gonna retire,
so I think he didn't want to end his career on a kind of
half-assed resign note.
Basically, the Timequake is at--
in 2001 there is a timequake
which is a kind of earthquake in the time continuum.
where the universe resets ten years,
and everything goes back to 1991,
and everyone has to go through the ten years again.
I remember him telling me back in the, uh, early '90s
that he was working on this book,
and then I'd say, "How's the book coming?"
and he says, "Oh, I don't think it's ever gonna get finished.
I'm not really blocked.
I'm, uh, writing stuff I don't like.
I had a book scheduled to be published,
I just didn't like it.
[David Ulin] He had finished
a conventional version of the novel,
he had fulfilled the contract,
and then he said
he didn't want to go out like Mick Jagger--
[laughs] playing Satisfaction,
you know, for the eight millionth time.
So he went in and, you know, he had a better idea
and he went in and changed the whole book.
[Bob Weide] And when he finally sat down and wrote
the final version of Timequake,
it was a book about him trying to write this novel.
So you'd have a passage from the body of the story
and then you'd have a passage of Kurt telling you
the difficulty he was having in writing this book.
[Gregory Sumner] Vonnegut finished Timequake,
turned it in sheepishly to the publisher,
and said it's a disaster, it didn't work.
Nobody's gonna want to read it.
[applause]
They had an opening at the Borders flagship store.
The line was around the block.
Very interesting to me how he continually kind of thought
they're not gonna like what I'm doing,
and then they have, like, a record crowd turned out,
and people still love Vonnegut.
I actually have an idea for one more book.
[laughter]
-But I-- -[applause]
It's about my homosexual relationship
-with O.J. Simpson. -[laughter]
[woman] Mr. Vonnegut,
I drove from Cincinnati to meet you--
[Kurt Vonnegut] Oh, I heard about you people.
I was wondering if I could get a picture with you?
-[Kurt Vonnegut] Of course. -[camera shutter clicks]
Oh, thank you so much.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] Vonnegut shows that
it's not the final book that's the point,
it's the struggle to write the book,
and that's the text.
The point is not the end, it's the journey.
♪
[Bob Weide] I think most critics and scholars agree that
the best thing about Timequake
is that I'm in it.
[narrator reading]
[Bob Weide] Vonnegut write about
a farewell clambake for Kilgore Trout,
and he mentions all the people in attendance.
And they're all his friends.
[narrator reading]
[Bob Weide] And there I am.
[narrator] "They were Robert Weide,
"who in the summer of 1996
is making a movie of Mother Night."
I remember sending Kurt a fax the next day
thanking him for including me in the book.
I-- I think I took it all in stride.
Yeah, finding myself in a Vonnegut book
was a pretty happy thing.
The sad thing about Timequake
is that Kurt suffered another loss
right before he finished the book.
[answering machine beeps]
[Kurt Vonnegut] Hi, Bob, it's, uh, Friday morning.
Uh, Bernie died at 10:00 Eastern Standard Time here,
it's utterly peaceful.
I thought you'd like to know.
[laughing]
Uh, his ashes are going to be scattered over Mount Greylock
where the first cloud seeding experiment
with dry ice was performed.
He loved that idea.
Bye.
[narrator] "I was the baby of the family.
[narrator reading]
[Bob Weide] After Timequake,
I found myself with a question which sounds rhetorical,
but I was wondering about a literal answer.
What happens when a writer stops writing?
[waves crashing]
[seagulls squawking]
When I was a neighbor to Kurt
in Sagaponack in Long island,
he frequently came to visit.
And often when I would get up in the morning,
and I get up early,
Kurt would be there.
He'd be on the porch.
Um... waiting for somebody to get up.
Waiting to come in and have a cup of coffee.
Uh, and another Pall Mall.
When I asked, "How long have you been here?"
"Oh, I've just had a butt or two," he would say,
or I just-- I just got here.
There were enough butts out there,
so you had to believe...
he'd arrived when it was still dark.
♪
[man] Mr. Vonnegut, thanks for coming by.
Oh, my pleasure.
How's life?
Well, it's practically over, thank God, I'm--
-[laughing] -Heaven's sakes.
I'm practically 83.
There won't be that much more of--
for me to put up with, I don't t think.
[Morley Safer] When Kurt got older and more cranky
and falling apart,
which I'm going through myself right now,
he used to say we live too long.
We really live too long.
Some of you may know about my class action suit.
against Brown Williamson.
It's uh-- They're manufacturers of Pall Mall cigarettes
in Louisville.
And-- [clears throat] I have been chain smoking these
since I was 14 years old.
And on their package, they promised to kill me.
[laughter]
And I'm about to turn 83.
[laughter, applause]
[man] He had a totally fulfilled career.
Totally fulfilled life. That's why it's haunting.
You know, you've done what you're gonna do,
and now you're just hangin' around
to find out what specialist you see next week.
[man] So there he is,
he's not working on a major book,
he was quite lonely.
and he would reach out.
It was almost like somebody, um,
in a prison cell in a funny way.
You know, he would send these faxes.
Anything he wanted to write he could have gotten published,
but these were just little things for his friends.
Oh, here's a favorite one of mine.
[reading]
That's from a Martian Visitor. Look at this.
[reading]
Look at this one. Here's a simple one.
[reading]
♪
[Bob Weide] The things that were depressing him
were no secret.
There was his domestic situation,
as he referred to it.
We had a lot of conversations,
and there were a lot of faxes about his second marriage,
which was not exactly playing out happily ever after.
He was also outraged about how we were
poisoning the environment,
and the inevitable consequences of that.
But there was one other thing.
The last thing I ever wanted...
was to be alive...
when the three most important,
most powerful people on the face of the Earth...
were named Bush, Dick and Colin.
[laughter]
[Bob Weide] He was not a big fan of the Bush administration.
Either one, actually.
Um, and especially the war with Iraq.
Either one.
[explosions]
[Mark Vonnegut] He truly believed in the American dream.
He believed, uh, that this could be wonderful
and I do think it was the invasion of Iraq
that he said... it's over.
I don't' think there's any question
but that experiencing war had a profound effect.
And there's a certain resolution in saying I've said it all.
You're testing yourself to say it.
There wasn't any way he would ever stop writing.
[man] What he did,
which is very unusual for a world famous writer to do,
he started writing occasional essays
for a little magazine called In These Times.
♪
[keyboard clacking]
My relationship with Kurt began,
I, uh, asked him to do an interview
for In These Times.
It was about Bush and the war in Iraq.
In that, uh, first interview, he used the phrase
"psychopathic personality."
[narrator reading]
"They cannot care because they are nuts."
He was angry as an American.
He was angry as a vet.
His own good name as an American was being trashed.
When I saw a photograph of the Iraqi kids,
with their hands up like this having been shelled and bombed
until they were half-witted,
I said, those are my brothers there.
And I didn't think it was amusing or wonderful at all
to see kids in that situation.
[applause]
[Joe Bleifuss] He wanted to speak out,
and so within a month of his first interview,
he was sending me things to publish.
He wrote about things that were important to him,
but with every essay,
it would always bring in a variety of things,
So sometimes Kilgore Trout would just appear.
[Jerome Klinkowitz] I doubt if he was paid for it,
and he just wrote what was on his mind.
Turned out,
they were so good that a small press,
Seven Stories Press in New York collected them.
We canceled, at his request, that book twice,
because he was afraid that what if he did this little
kind of off-hand book at the end of his life
that included criticizing his government,
criticizing his country.
I mean, he really thought about that,
and he was very concerned about that.
♪
The book hit the best seller list immediately,
and we sold a quarter of a million copies very, very quickly,
we could barely keep up with it.
This was Kurt's first best seller
in about 10, 15 years.
All of a sudden, he's all over the back page of
the New York Times Book Review,
which had never been his biggest fan,
saying this is just amazing.
As an adolescent, he made my life bearable.
His latest is A Man Without A Country
Please welcome to the show Kurt Vonnegut.
[cheering, applause]
You know, I-- I always felt in your writing
that you were admiring of man,
but disappointed in him.
Yes, well, I-- I think we are terrible animals.
-and I think-- -[person laughs]
I think our planet's immune system
is trying to get rid of us and should.
-Uh-- -[applause]
You know, Mr. Vonnegut, if I may,
it's sad for me to see you lose your edge.
[laughter]
It was an opportunity for people far and wide
to let him know how much they loved him.
I don't think anybody realized
he was our greatest living writer.
-Kurt Vonnegut. -[cheering, applause]
[clicking]
♪
[projector clicking]
♪
Kurt was gonna be spending the summer
at his summer place in Sagaponack in Long Island, New York,
he'd get out of the city every year,
and asked me if I wanted to come and hang out.
I said, "Yeah, you bet."
And I remember my initial instinct was,
hey, this is great, I'll get a small camera crew
and it'd be great to see Kurt
sort of walking around Sagaponack
and going to the post office to get his mail every day,
and this'll be great for the documentary.
And then soon after, I realized
I-- I don't want to do that.
This is time for us to hang out.
I don't know if he's gonna feel it's intrusive
to have a cameraman there to be filming for the documentary
but suddenly I felt it was intrusive.
It was kind of a turning point for me
in the making of this film,
because prior to that,
I'd always been concerned that
the friendship might, um, infringe on the film.
This was the first time I realized that
things had flipped so entirely now
that I was worried about
the film infringing on the friendship.
And, um, that was a realization for me
that I was maybe in trouble.
Because part of me had...
almost given up on the film at that time.
[woman] And the Emmy goes to...
uh, Robert Weide, uh, Curb Your Enthusiasm.
[applause]
[Bob Weide] Hey, Ma, this is for you and for Dad.
and for, uh, my wife, Linda,
to whom I just lost a $100 bet.
-[laughter] -Um--
[answering machine beeps]
Hi, Linda, this is Kurt,
just thinking about how happy you guys must be.
My goodness, and how deservedly happy.
Wow, when somebody's happy, I-- [chuckles]
Makes me happy too.
So crazy about you two, I hope you love each other
as much as I love both of you.
Bye.
♪
[Bob Weide] In 2018,
Linda was diagnosed with progressive supranuclear palsy,
or PSP.
Touch your nose, go back and forth.
The other side.
Neither of us had heard of it
but that's because it's very rare.
It's sort of a cousin to Parkinson's,
but very aggressive and very fast moving.
Her speech, her balance,
her walking have all taken a hit.
Um, there's no known cure.
But she's participating in some clinical trials
which hopefully will provide some relief.
We never saw this coming.
But, you know...
what'd you ever see coming?
Fate happens.
[Kurt Vonnegut] "Why me?
"That is a very earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim.
"Why you? Why us, for that matter?
"Why anything?
"Because this moment simply is.
"Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber?
"Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim,
"trapped in the amber of this moment.
There is no why."
[answering machine beeps]
Hi, Bob, this is Kurt and, uh,
so exciting to know that
you are probably in this town right now.
I look forward to seeing you on Thursday if not before.
Anyway, do not play Three-card Monte.
The people who conduct these games are criminals,
and, uh, there's no way you can win.
♪
[Bob Weide] We had a dinner just like any other dinner.
I had a little digital camera with me,
and jut for fun, I took a little-- [clicks tongue]
picture of him sitting at the table.
And then we walked back to his place on 48th Street.
So we said goodbye and I said, "Oh, wait a minute.
Hold on. Let me take a picture."
And I took a picture of him at the bottom of the steps
looking at me.
And I don't know what compelled me to do this,
because it wasn't anything did on a regular basis.
To this day, it's not something I do that often,
to say to another guy, I love you,
but that's what came out of my mouth.
I said, I love you, and I probably added man.
I love you, man,
which takes the edge off of the corniness.
Hey, love you, man. Something like that.
Anyway, I said, I love you.
And he said, "Love you, too."
Oh, isn't that nice.
That was the last time I saw him alive.
♪
[Nanny Vonnegut] My brother called to tell me that Dad had fallen.
He hit his head and it-- it's really bad.
That day that he fell,
he called me, we had a conversation.
And, um...
Oh, my God.
He called because there was always among us
the worry about, you know, cancer, breast cancer, whatever.
He said, "Darling-- [clears throat]
Um... sorry if I can remember this right.
"Are your boobs okay?" [laughs]
"Are your boobs okay?"
"Yes, Dad, my boobs are fine."
"Okay, I love you."
Yeah.
[reporter] Author Kurt Vonnegut has died.
He was one of the most influential writers
of the 20th century.
He wrote classics such as Slaughterhouse-Five,
and Cat's Cradle.
He was know for his satirical commentary,
and he took aim at culture, society and institutions.
Kurt Vonnegut was 84 years old.
[Kurt Vonnegut] This is what I would like to be read at my funeral
and I think maybe some of you
would like this to be read at yours.
"I have finished my course.
"I have ceased to enjoy and suffer.
"Please transfer your love and your benevolence
"to your living fellow men.
"The memory of the one as well as of the other
is appreciated and honored."
♪
[Bob Weide] I keep above my desk
the Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary.
And Kurt's name is included in it.
And I love the fact that it said,
"Kurt Vonnegut, 1922 to blank."
Here was empirical evidence,
here was verification that he was still with us.
'Cause that second year wasn't filled in yet.
Maybe by finishing this film,
it acknowledges that...
he's gone.
But I feel like I owe him this.
Hi, Bob, this is Kurt.
So grateful for the documentary.
I wanted to thank you for your friendship.
Love you.
Bye.
[laughing]
♪
[Bob Weide] Are you gonna buy Pall Malls?
-You gotta by Pall Malls. -[Nanny Vonnegut] Yeah.
Do you have Pall Mall? Cigarettes?
[laughs]
I'm doing this just to amuse you.
I know-- I haven't smoked since...
third grade.
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] When things are going sweetly and peacefully,
please pause a moment and then say out loud,
"If this isn't nice, what is?"
Candlesticks.
That feeling that you get when she's around,
when she's in the room, when she's with you,
I'm the lucky guy who now gets to feel that
for the rest of my life.
[applause, cheering]
[Kurt Vonnegut] It's the impermanence...
of life.
I mean, this day is as real as any day
we're going to live,
and yet we have an idea that we're headed for other days,
even better days.
[cheering applause]
[Kurt Vonnegut] And this is it.
This is all there is.
♪
[Bob Weide] Vonnegut writes,
"The British mathematician, Stephen Hawking,
"found it tantalizing
"that we could not remember the future.
"But remembering the future...
[narrator] "...is child's play for me now.
"I know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies
"because they are grown ups now.
"I know how my closest friends will end up
"because so many of them are retired or dead now.
"I say, be patient.
"Your future will soon come to you
"and lie down at your feet,
"like a dog who knows and loves you
"no matter what you are.
"And the dog of my future lying at my feet
is snoring now."
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] Should I myself die,
God forbid--
[laughter]
I hope you'll say...
he's up in Heaven now.
That's my favorite joke.
[bird chirping]
♪
[Kurt Vonnegut] I do believe time repeats itself.
Our lives are somewhat like pendulums
that we, uh, start at birth and swing to death.
and back and forth throughout all eternity.
and that would suit me if I got the cycles of my life
through all eternity.
I don't want to die and go away entirely,
I'd like to come back and come back and come back
on almost any terms.
♪
Oh, Jesus!
Oh, what a thing to say in church.
[laughter]
[laughing]
♪
[laughter]
♪
[snapping]
Hooray!
Do it again.
[chirping]