Breakfast of Champions (film)

Breakfast of Champions is a 1999 American satirical black comedy film adapted and directed by Alan Rudolph, from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s 1973 novel. The film starred Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte, Barbara Hershey, Glenne Headly, Lukas Haas and Omar Epps. Though the producers entered it into the 49th Berlin International Film Festival,^[5] critics negatively received the film and was a box-office bomb that was withdrawn from theatres before going into wide release. While it was released on VHS and DVD in 2000, it was not given a digital release until February 4, 2025.^[6]

Filmmaker Ron Mann, under his company Films We Like, subsequently acquired rights to the film from Willis, partnering with Shout! Studios in the United States to theatrically release a 4K restoration on November 1, 2024.^[7][8][4]

Dwayne Hoover, a car salesman who is the most respected businessman in Midland City, Indiana, is on the verge of a nervous breakdown, even attempting suicide daily. His wife, Celia, is addicted to pills, and his sales manager and best friend, Harry Le Sabre, is preoccupied with his own secret fondness for wearing lingerie, worried he will be discovered.

Meanwhile, a little-known science fiction author, Kilgore Trout, is hitchhiking across the United States to speak at Midland City's arts festival. In search of answers for his identity quest, Hoover decides to attend the festival.

In the 1970s Robert Altman was going to make a film of the novel after Nashville and get got Alan Rudolph wrote a script.^[9] Rudolph recalled the book "was like acid or rock and roll" and "I embraced its corrosive look at our country’s society and power structure and racism and all that, done through the most hilarious lens."^[4]

Altman proved unable to raise finance. Film rights went to different producers. In 1988 Bruce Campbell was going to make a version for HandMade Films from a script by Peter Bergman but it did not eventuate.^[10]

Rudolph went on to direct a number of films including Mortal Thoughts with Bruce Willis. Willis enjoyed the experience of working with Rudolph, discovered the script for Breakfast of Champions and decided to make it, telling the director "I need to make a comedy right now for my soul."^[4] In 1993 Willis declared he was interested. ^[11] It took a number of years to eventuate. Willis said he was particularly motivated after having made Mercury Rising after which "a bell rang in my heads and I said, 'I've got to do some movies without a gun in my hand.'"^[12]

Willis' company, Rational Packaging, bought the rights to the book and his agency, WMA, was responsible for raising the money. Foreign distribution rights were sold to Summit Entertainment and a loan was obtained from the Imperiald Bank. Willis owned the negative.^[12] "This film is kind of outside the Hollywood box," admitted Willis. "But every once in a while I've got to satisfy myself."^[3]

Lukas Haas makes a cameo as Bunny, Dwayne's son, who, in the novel, plays piano in the lounge at the Holiday Inn. For legal reasons, in the film Bunny instead plays at the Best Western Inn.

The film's soundtrack predominantly features the exotica recordings of Martin Denny to tie in with Hoover's Hawaiian-based sales promotion.

Much of the film was shot in and around Twin Falls, Idaho.^[13] Vonnegut makes a one-line cameo as a TV commercial director.^[14]

Rudolph said "I didn’t try to capture his [Vonnegut]'s voice, per se, because that is his" but "I dove into the characters and my reflection, through his mordant lens, of America at the time. It became more original than an adaptation after I kept sifting through it. It made it more instinctive for me but less acceptable for the purists. I was always interested in detail and emotions—I am not a traditional storyteller."^[4]

Willis said "I had a great time making this film."^[12]

Distribution rights were bought by Walt Disney studios which had made Armageddon and The Sixth Sense with Willis.

The film made $178,278 against a budget of $12 million.^[2]

Breakfast of Champions was not well received, scoring a rating of 28% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 50 reviews, with an average score of 4.6/10. The consensus states: "The movie is overwhelmed by its chaotic visual effects and disjointed storyline."^[15] Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned the film a score of 42 out of 100, based on 17 critics, indicating "mixed or average" reviews.^[16]

In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote "In many ways, Breakfast of Champions is an incoherent mess. But it never compromises its zany vision of the country as a demented junkyard wonderland in which we are all strangers groping for a hand to guide us through the looking glass into an unsullied tropical paradise of eternal bliss."^[17] Entertainment Weekly gave the film an "F" rating and Owen Gleiberman wrote, "Rudolph, in an act of insane folly, seems to think that what matters is the story. The result could almost be his version of a Robert Altman disaster — a movie so unhinged it practically dares you not to hate it."^[18]

In his review for the San Francisco Chronicle, Peter Stack wrote "Rudolph botches the material big time. Relying on lame visual gimmicks that fall flat, and insisting on pushing almost every scene as frantic comedy weighted by social commentary, he forces his actors to become hams rather than believable characters."^[19] Sight and Sound magazine's Edward Lawrenson wrote "Willis' performance, all madness, no method, soon feels embarrassingly indulgent."^[20] In his review for the Los Angeles Times, Kevin Thomas wrote "As it is, Breakfast of Champions is too in-your-face, too heavily satirical in its look, and its ideas not as fresh as they should be. For the film to have grabbed us from the start, Rudolph needed to make a sharper differentiation between the everyday world his people live in and the vivid world of their tormented imaginations."^[21]

In her review for The Village Voice, Amy Taubin wrote "Another middle-aged male-crisis opus, it begins on a note of total migraine-inducing hysteria, which continues unabated throughout."^[22] The French filmmaker and critic Luc Moullet, on the other hand, regarded it as one of the great films of the 1990s.^[23]

According to Rudolph, "everybody was furious with the film except for the people who made it—we were proud of it. I thought people were more aware of how they had to peel the happy face off of society in the late 90s to see what was going on, but people did not want that. They didn’t want to look under the tent."^[4]

At the close of the Harper audiobook edition of Breakfast of Champions, there is a brief conversation between Vonnegut and his long-time friend and attorney Donald C. Farber, in which the two, among making jokes, disparage this loose film adaptation of the book as "painful to watch."^[24]

• Cross-dressing in film and television

• Breakfast of Champions at IMDb
• Breakfast of Champions at Rotten Tomatoes
• Breakfast of Champions at Box Office Mojo