If he gets any further into his role, he'll never get out of it.

Mar 21, 2010 16:32




Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. was a prolific writer of short stories, but relatively few have been adapted for the screen. One of the first and most successful attempts was Who Am I This Time?, which was made in 1982 and shown on PBS's long-running anthology series American Playhouse. Produced and adapted by Morton Neal Miller and directed by Jonathan Demme, who was coming off Melvin and Howard at the time, the film is about an introverted hardware store clerk (Christopher Walken) who only really comes alive when he's acting on stage and the love-starved phone company employee (Susan Sarandon) who gets cast opposite him in A Streetcar Named Desire and struggles to find a way to relate to him out of character. It's a rather sweet story that says a lot about how people define themselves by the roles they play. It's also a subtly humorous skewering of the machinations that go on behind the scenes of your typical small-town community theater. I've worked in enough to know how spot-on it is. A miniature masterpiece.

jonathan demme, kurt vonnegut

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