FFB: BETWEEN TIME AND TIMBUKTU or PROMETHEUS-5: A SPACE FANTASY by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., David Odell, Bob & Ray, et al. (Photographs by Jill Krementz and NET PLAYHOUSE cinematographers/videographers.) Delacorte Press 1972

"Between Time and TImbuktu, or, Prometheus-5: A Space Fantasy" was an episode of NET Playhouse, which series had continued to run on the new network PBS after it was created to supplant the National Educational Playhouse (NET) network, seen by the Nixon Administration and even some of the public stations around the country as too leftist, too likely to seek controversy, and otherwise problematic as the program supplier for stations that depended on the public's goodwill for their funding. This episode was first broadcast on 13 March 1972.

This episode can be seen in its entirety here. This is from a mildly degraded videotape copy, but certainly is watchable, and is probably also the only gray-market video available; there's never been an authorized release of the program on home video. The first segment of the same source material can also be seen on YouTube here:


John Whiting also recorded a BBC-TV2 interview of Vonnegut by Adrian Mitchell wrapped around the UK debut of the episode, which Whiting describes in detail here, and which he posted the audio of here.

Photo of Vonnegut on-set. Courtesy Jake Goldman at The Airship blog.

The book, published by Dell hardcover subsidiary Delacorte and in large-format paperback in their Delta line, features a long essay by Vonnegut as introduction, in which he praises star William Hickey and the production generally, while also noting he wanted nothing more to do with film/television production after the nearly simultaneous production of the films Slaughterhouse-Five (which he approves of enormously), Happy Birthday, Wanda June, the film of Vonnegut's stage play, which he abhors, and this television production, which is mostly positive about. However, the amount of money even modest productions cost to mount rubs him the wrong way, as does the way that audio/visual media can delimit the ability of the reader or even the radio listener for deciding how characters might look or incidentally behave...that film and television spell things out far too concretely. Primary scripter George Odell took bits and chunks from Cat's Cradle, The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, Wanda June, "Harrison Bergeron" and other KV writing to work it into a fairly coherent whole, and Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, old favorites of Vonnegut's, apparently improvised a lot of their dialog, playing characters, who're covering the time-travel mission Hickey's character has been chosen for, in a manner reminiscent of and somewhat parodying Walter Cronkite and Wally Schirra's Apollo coverage for CBS. In addition, the producers and some of the rest of the cast made on-set rewrites and did a bit of improvisation; the producers went on to two more SF literary adaptations for PBS: the fine standalone telefilm based on Ursula Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven and the atrocious American Playhouse adaptation of  John Varley's "Overdraw at the Memory Bank".

The book, which must be close to the most obscure and unreprinted in the KV bibliography, is made up mostly of dialog and photos, taken by Jill Krementz or, more often, stills from the production. There's also a flip-pages animation in the bottom corner of a number of pages...all rather reminiscent of the paperback derived from the Pennebaker/Dylan film Don't Look Back. And, as with that book, in the days before convenient home recording and playback of a/v materials, this book was the closest thing most of the audience could have to a portable copy in 1972. And it certainly makes a few bits of the dialog more clear, though not necessarily more smoothly integrated into the whole.

Secondhand copies of the paperback, particularly, are widely available on the secondhand market.