To date, TV Worth Watching has actively backed only one Kickstarter campaign – LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow revival. Now there’s another: a long-simmering documentary on Kurt Vonnegut…
The Kickstarter campaign, which was launched Wednesday, is the latest effort by Robert Weide to find a way to complete his film biography of Vonnegut – a project he first envisioned when he was a 22-year-old filmmaker, contacting the author for permission to film and interview him 33 years ago.
Vonnegut eventually agreed, and the first filmed interview took place in 1988, six years later. Weide continued to meet with the author over the decades, in a relationship that blossomed into friendship, until Vonnegut’s death in 2007. Since then, Weide has teamed with another filmmaker, Don Argott, whom Weide enlisted to film the larger story of Vonnegut and Weide as they worked on their ever-elusive project.
That film needs help to be completed, which explains the Kickstarter campaign. Weide, though, has finished plenty of wonderful projects without asking for help from the kindness and support of strangers. His first was The Marx Brothers in a Nutshell, the documentary that piqued Vonnegut’s interest – and since then, Weide has directed and produced, just to name three impressive projects, the launch of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, and the American Masters documentaries on Mort Sahl and Woody Allen.
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time is the proposed film by Weide and Argott – and having discussed this project with Weide over the years, I can assure you to expect a quality, significant project, with lots of rare and enlightening footage. Here’s a brief video by Weide, providing background:
Kurt Vonnegut: Unstuck in Time teaser from 9.14 Pictures on Vimeo
You can go to the Unstuck in Time website to glean more information, or directly to the Kickstarter page to choose from among the levels of financial support – and the respective gifts.
I was fortunate enough to have interviewed Vonnegut a few times over the years, and I couldn’t be happier that this documentary may, at long last, come to fruition. I also couldn’t be happier if, with help from similarly minded TVWW readers, we can help make that happen…