I hadn’t planned to do a promo for the play. But the book’s been a favorite for years. Anyway, I was looking at Kyle Cassidy’s photography for the play (http://kylecassidy.livejournal.com/691978.html), and I really liked the blood spatters on the play’s title. I thought about the book’s opening line, and it wasn’t long before I got the idea of showing it in nonsequential bits to echo Billy Pilgrim’s progress.
And best of all, it wouldn’t require videotaping a performance. Most of the work could be done on the desktop.
So how’d I do it? I typed up the sentence, using Kyle’s font (Futura Bold, a fave of Kubrick’s, too). I cropped it to a few letters, and then rolled the crops horizontally so I had a clip where the words were shown across the screen, like this mechanical speed-reading things we had in my middle school. I took this clip, and then sliced it into bits and scrambled them around.
I ran the draft past Curio, who liked it, and I said I’d like to do a soundtrack of the actors reciting lines from the play– some major, some innocuous, some mysterious. I had this idea of having the sound build like the crescendo in “A Day in the Life,” but we didn’t have licensed sound effects. Each actor also recited Vonnegut’s signature line, “So it goes,” so that had to be used at some point.
I’d originally wanted the words “Slaughterhouse-Five” appear with no sound, or maybe that bird tweeting. But Ken Opdenaker’s line about knowing your address was a great choice, and here, it seemed as though “Slaughterhouse-Five” was the address of the whole twentieth century.