Synopsis
In Midland City, troubled car dealer Dwayne Hoover is spiraling into a personal crisis while preparing to meet Kilgore Trout, an obscure science-fiction writer visiting for an arts festival. As their paths converge, reality, identity, and social convention begin to fracture in a colorful satire of American consumer culture, racism, loneliness, and the stories people use to explain their lives.
Factoids & Trivia
- The film adapts Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s 1973 novel, whose deliberately loose structure and visual interruptions made it an unusually difficult book to translate to the screen.
- The project began in the 1970s, when producer Dino De Laurentiis acquired the rights with Robert Altman in mind. The film remained in development for decades before Alan Rudolph finally made it.
- Bruce Willis helped get the production moving after deciding he wanted to make a comedy and pursue projects that did not place him in the familiar action-hero mode. His company, Rational Packaging, acquired the rights and owned the film's negative.
- Much of the movie was shot in and around Twin Falls, Idaho, which stood in for the fictional Midland City. The production used the region's small-town streets, businesses, and distinctive landscapes to create the film's artificial Midwestern setting.
- Kurt Vonnegut makes a brief cameo as a television commercial director, giving the author a direct appearance in the screen version of his own work.
- The opening-credit illustrations and Celia's handwritten notes echo the drawings and marginal material Vonnegut included in the novel.
- Martin Denny's exotica recordings feature prominently in the soundtrack, reinforcing the film's deliberately bright, artificial, and off-kilter atmosphere.
- The movie received a limited theatrical release on September 17, 1999, and was widely criticized for its eccentric style and fragmented storytelling. Its later reputation has been more favorable among some viewers and filmmakers who value its willingness to preserve the novel's strangeness.