it's been awhile since i read the book.
i know kilgore trout's work has a big impact
on billy pilgrim's life in the book,
but does he actually make an appearance?
whether or not he was in the book, he would
have been a welcome addition to the film.
in fact, he's probably the only the character
who could have presented the time elements
of the plot to the uninitiated, either
as a narrator or through dialogue.
I too took notice to the lack of his character. Trout was a major part of Pilgrim's later years according to the novel. I thought that maybe Trout was just a character that they didnt want to bring in... leave him a mystery. Let him be a figment of the imagination rather than having a Hollywood actor pop up in our heads everytime we think of Kilgore.
But they he appeared in Breakfast Of Champions... I dont know. There was about twenty years between the two films and different directors so maybe that was the idea and it was lost. I dont know for sure. But that's just my two cents.
One of my great disappointments in the movie is the absence of Vonnegut's most famous creation, Kilgore Trout. I particularly liked the scene in the novel where Trout finds a job managing paperboys and spends his time cursing at them, that would have been great.
It was also unfortunate that Eliot Rosewater (another character that makes frequent appearances in Vonnegut's writing) only appears in a single scene in the hospital without anything to say.
Speaking of Rosewater and Trout, did you know that there was an unfinished project to film "Breakfast of Champions" in the late 70's, with Peter Falk as Dwayne Hoover, Sterling Hayden cast as Trout? It's a shame we never got to see that, it probably would have been an improvement over the Alan Rudolf version of 1999.
Robert Altman was originally scheduled to film BOC in the late 70s. He was also originally to direct Ragtime. Both books would probably have been much better served.
shareI listened to an interview with Kurt Vonnegut who said that he acted himself in scenes that were cut from the film, but he didn't say what role he played. It's possible that he played Trout since Trout was loosely based on his own persona.
"You waited 40 days to cry."
http://www.scottgingold.com/lost.html
I've also heard that Trout was supposed to represent Philip K Dick. While Dick has an illustrious place in scifi lit today, back in the 60s his books were not well received by critics or readers, great as they were.
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