Video Interview: Kurt Vonnegut
After I completed my Masters degree, I took off a year (I was supposed to go back and get a Ph.D. — that never happened) and traveled around the country. Freed from academics, I could read anything I wanted to. And what I wanted to — and did — read that summer was a lot of Kurt Vonnegut. His combination of science fiction, dark humor and satire led to some great books, many of which became movies including Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Mother Night (1996), and Breakfast of Champions (1999). But there is one story I want to remember: “Who Am I This Time,” a 1982 American Playhouse presentation directed by Jonathan Demme, starring Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken. Here’s the premise:
From a short story by Kurt Vonnegut. Christopher Walken is a shy hardware store employee. But whenever he takes a part in a local amateur theater production, he becomes the part completely — while on screen. Susan Sarandon is new in town, a lonely itenerant telephone company employee. On a whim, she auditions for and gets the part of Stella to Walken’s Stanley when the theater group does A Streetcar Named Desire. Before anyone realizes the problem, she falls deeply in love with the sexy brute, not knowing what the real man is like.
Has anybody else seen this? It’s a wonderful short movie (60 minutes), human and delightful with a nifty twist at the end. So unlike other of Vonnegut’s material and all the more interesting for it.
This interview is from “The Charlie Rose Show.” The first segment is with author Thomas Wolfe. Vonnegut is second.
UPDATE: Vonnegut wrote the story “Who Am I This Time,” which is markedly different than his other books. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “Benjamin Button,” also quite different than his other literary efforts. Are there other examples of writers writing one really distinct story unlike anything else they wrote?