Robert B. Weide Explores His Friendship With Kurt Vonnegut In Long-Awaited Documentary

It all started with a letter sent from a hopeful young filmmaker to his favorite author. It was a simple yet direct question: Would you consider me in making a documentary about you? Robert B. Weide was 22, and had just made his first feature-length documentary. Luckily, his idol, the revered author Kurt Vonnegut had seen Weide’s The Marx Brothers In A Nutshell, a salute to the hilarious sibling comedians. He liked what he saw, so he invited the young Southern California filmmaker to come see him. That visit evolved into a friendship that lasted for more than a quarter century. The documentary would take more than another decade to make, following the author’s death in 2007. It also would morph into something other than a traditional biography as it also delved into the friendship between the acclaimed author and the Emmy winning writer/director.

The result is Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck In Time, Weide’s loving tribute to the acclaimed author of 14 novels, three short story collections, five plays and five non-fiction works, along with additional material that was published after his death. The title is a reference to the condition of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five protagonist Billy Pilgrim, who bounces from one moment of his life to another, rather than day-to-day in that novel.

Vonnegut, of course, is the Indianapolis, Ind., native who most notably wrote Cat’s Cradle, The Sirens of Titan and the aforementioned Slaughterhouse-Five. His 1962 novel Mother Night, about an imprisoned American propagandist who cannot reveal he was actually a double agent during World War II, was adapted for the screen by Weide for the 1996 drama starring Nick Nolte.

Weide began filming Vonnegut in the 1980s and continued, on and off, with his subject throughout the rest of the author’s life. He made other documentaries and plied his craft as a director, writer and producer on TV projects, notably as an executive producer and principal director on the first five years of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, earning an Emmy in the third season.  Throughout that time, he’d collect material for the Vonnegut doc. There was no apparent hurry in completing it, for the practical reason that he didn’t have the necessary funding to do so. Vonnegut didn’t press it and Weide didn’t feel a sense of urgency. There were, however, times when he wondered if it would ever materialize. As time went on, he also worried that filming would get in the way of their friendship. After Vonnegut died in 2007, Weide even considered shelving the project altogether but, at the encouragement of friends and colleagues, he enlisted a seasoned documentarian, Don Argott (Believer), to co-direct with him. It became clear too that the story he needed to tell was not just about the author, but about his longstanding friendship with the man.

“Don could focus on the ‘meta’ story, while I continued to focus on Vonnegut’s biography,” recalls Weide via Zoom. “We created this hybrid, which is mostly a biography about Kurt, but also a film-within-a-film about the story of our friendship and my struggle to get the film made.”

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time spans Vonnegut’s emergence as a young writer from an upper-middle-class Midwestern family, who joined the army and ended up a POW confined to a slaughterhouse during the Allied bombing of Dresden (which influenced his writing later on), married his college sweetheart with whom he had three children and later adopted his four nephews when his sister and brother-in-law passed away. It covers his career as a journalist, a short story writer and, ultimately, an author, whose career took off in the late 1950s, with the publication of his novels The Sirens of Titan and subsequently Cat’s Cradle. Eventually becoming a college instructor and later a professor, Vonnegut would deliver speeches before packed audiences of (mainly) devoted college students who hung on his every word.

The documentary also reveals the conversations, letters and phone messages exchanged between Vonnegut and Weide over the years, with footage of their visits to Vonnegut’s childhood home in Indianapolis as well as interviews with his children and nephews. Weide’s personal life enters into the story as his wife, Linda, an actress, deals with health issues.

Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time premiered Nov. 11 at Doc NY on what would have been the author’s 99^th birthday. It arrives in theaters and on VOD Friday Nov. 19.

Angela Dawson: How do you feel now that the film is complete and audiences finally get to see it?

Robert B. Weide: There is a period of decompression after spending two-thirds of my life on it. Occasionally, I’ll see something and think, “Oh, I’ve got to include that,” and then I have to remind myself that it’s finished, it’s over. It’s actually a relief to not have to think about whether I have to include something or not. My stock answer is I don’t know how my life is going to feel once this film is behind me, although I’m really eager to find out. It’s sort of strange. I barely remember what life was like before I started making this film, so much has changed. You get a touch of my wife’s (Linda) story and Vonnegut is still such a big part of our lives. So, he goes on. I’m grateful to be able to clear the slate because there was every possibility that this film was never going to get finished. But I love that it’s finished and people will see it. To me, it’s like sharing the work of somebody I love with the world. If a few people (unfamiliar with Vonnegut’s work) see the film and decide they want to read his stuff and pick up his books and have the same experience I did, then it’s all worth it. That’s what all of my documentaries have been about—wanting to share with people these artists that I love and hope they pick up an appreciation for them as well.

Dawson: As far as you know, was Vonnegut ever approached by other filmmakers wanting to make a documentary about him?

Weide: I don’t think anybody was using the length of my film as a way of talking him into abandoning ship but I know there were offers to do other kinds of things. There was a series hosted by Walter Cronkite that was on great books, and they wanted to do something on Slaughterhouse-Five. Kurt came to me and said he didn’t care about it one way or the other, and asked me if I had a problem with this. I said, no, as long as they focus on the book. But as they got into it, they started to go into areas (of Vonnegut’s life) outside the book, and we saw there was too much overlap, so he called it off.

In 1984, there was something on the BBC—in fact, I have a few clips from that in my film—but it was a very different thing. So, there may have been other offers from filmmakers who approached him. He’d been asked by reporters over the years why he responded to me, and his response was, “Bob’s a professional.” What he meant by that was that was I’d made one film when I was 22, which he’d seen because he loves old comedies. So, when he got this letter from me, I wasn’t just some young film school reject; I had made a film that he liked, and he thought of me as a professional. He took me seriously and wrote back and said, “Sure. Here’s my phone number. Give me a call so we can get together and talk.”

He was a guy who was pretty true to his word. Once he agreed to do it, he wasn’t going to abandon the project or get seduced by another filmmaker trying to talk him out of it. It was embarrassing to me that years were turning into decades. I was always apologizing to him. He had this delightfully indifferent attitude about the whole thing in that he was happy to sit down and do interviews, allow me to film him and follow him around in Indiana or whenever he would do a public speaking engagement. By the same token, he didn’t need a film like this. He didn’t feel like he had to do it. If I had called one day and said, “I can’t do it,” he wouldn’t have cared. So, I didn’t feel any pressure.

Dawson: It’s a testament to your friendship that he was confident that you would complete it at the right time in the way it needed to be made.

Weide: As I say in the film, this started out as a conventional sort of PBS-style author documentary—the type of thing you’d see on American Masters, which is a series I love. But as the years went on and he and I became very good friends, I was a little concerned about it. It wasn’t a question of journalistic integrity so much because he wasn’t a controversial figure. I felt it was now a film about a friend of mine, so how do I deal with that or do I deal with it? So, I was a little concerned that the friendship might have some kind of impact on the film. 

Then, once our relationship really grew and I would spend a week with him at his place in Sagaponack (N.Y.), I’d think, “Maybe I should have a film crew come by.” Then, I’d think I didn’t really want to do that, and then I thought this is really flipped. I didn’t want the film to infringe on our friendship because, by that point, the friendship was more important to me than the film. It was only after he died that I had to think hard about how do I move forward with this, or do I abandon it? That’s when the suggestion came from others that the story of the evolution of my friendship with the subject—my literary idol—and the challenge of all these years of trying to get this film made, that our story should be told too. That’s when I brought in my co-director, Don Argott.

Dawson: Did Vonnegut ever tease you about the length of time it was taking to complete this? Did he joke that you might be waiting for him to die?

Weide: No, but one point, he was ready to pull the plug. It wasn’t anything mean. I think he thought he was letting me off the hook. He felt I was struggling so much; he just wanted to let me know it was OK (to stop), and I said, “No, that’s not going to happen.” We were going to include this in the film but we ended up cutting it for time. The last filming we did together was a couple of years before he died. Afterwards, I was struggling with, “Now, what do I do?”

The other part of it was financial. The delay, for many years, was due to financing. I never had any real financing for this. There was some early financing from American Masters in 1988, which allowed me to do some filming. Then, it was out of my own pocket from that moment forward, and my pockets aren’t that deep. So, I would film now and then when I had some extra money. Eventually, Don (Argott) and I launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 and we raised some pretty good money from that. (They received over $300,000 in pledges, according to the Kickstarter website.) That helped get us out of the mud and push the project back onto the road, and do a cut. Then IFC came in, picked up the film, and gave me an advance that allowed me to finish all of my post-production. So, yeah, it’s been a long journey.

The quick way to sum this up is that when I first approached him, I was a 23-year-old kid, and he was just about to turn 60, and I referred to him as “the old man”—affectionately. And now I’ve finished the film and I’m 62. I’m older than he was when I called him “the old man,” so the joke’s on me.

Dawson: You initially didn’t want to be part of the film, right?

Weide: I really was hesitant but people told me it’s a nice way in because we all have that fantasy of meeting somebody in the public eye, who’s important in our lives and has influenced us in some way. We dream that we get to meet them and we become friends. It’s kind of a borderline psychotic fantasy, almost a stalking kind of mentality. But, in my case, it actually happened. So, (the film) is kind of a fantasy fulfillment for people—certainly Vonnegut fans—but also anyone who’s imagined this could happen. Also, Vonnegut was an unconventional author so why do a conventional film about him? This meta element makes this a different kind of film.

Dawson: With all the footage you gathered over the years, did you ever lose any material or were you meticulous about cataloguing everything?

Weide: There were some scary moments when I thought I’d lost some things, but I’m pretty organized. For years, I didn’t have an editor, let alone an assistant editor, who would log things. I just had boxes and containers of tapes. I had 16mm film that was in storage. I started out shooting on film, which no one does anymore. Then, I went through every variation of (video recording) technology: beta-cam, digi-beta and then, ultimately, hi-def. But it was really a thrill to go back to the 16mm negatives and make hi-def transfers off of them. The unfortunate thing is the stuff I didn’t have room for in this two-hour-seven-minute film. A lot of stuff ended up on the cutting room floor. It’s preserved, though.