Wednesday, December 02, 2015

Ginger Strand's "The Brothers Vonnegut," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Brothers Vonnegut: Science and Fiction in the House of Magic by Ginger Strand.

The entry begins:
The Library Journal review of my nonfiction book The Brothers Vonnegut said it was ripe for adaptation into a film. I couldn’t agree more. In fact, I’ve spent hours Googling “hot young actors.” Not for prurient reasons, really. I was trying to identify actors who might want to produce it. After all, what hot young actor wouldn’t want to play Kurt Vonnegut?

The events of the book unfold in the late 1940s, when Kurt Vonnegut, as yet unpublished, is working in PR at General Electric. His older Bernard, a hotshot scientist at GE, got him the job. Bernard has invented something fantastic: cloud seeding to make rain. But the military has gotten involved and Bernard is having doubts about letting his invention be weaponized. Watching him struggle, Kurt, after years of bombing out with editors, starts writing a new kind of story, about scientists and the military and inventions getting weaponized. That lands him his first magazine acceptance, and the rest is history.

The young Kurt—GE company man by day, would-be writer by night—is not the Kurt Vonnegut you see in your head. Before the Mark Twain suit and Einstein hair, Kurt Vonnegut was a tall, thin, dapper young man. In his twenties, he looked a bit like a lighter-haired Zac Efron. Think Zac Efron in a gray flannel suit, toting a manual typewriter and smoking like...[read on]
Learn more about the book and author at Ginger Strand's website.

The Page 99 Test: Killer on the Road.

The Page 99 Test: The Brothers Vonnegut.

My Book, The Movie: The Brothers Vonnegut.

--Marshal Zeringue