The Vonnegut Screenplay (Or: Garcia, Bill Murray, and the Grateful Dead Movie That Never Happened)

The Rights

In the early 1980s, Jerry Garcia did something no one expected.

He bought the film rights to Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s The Sirens of Titan.

Not optioned. Bought. Vonnegut personally sold Garcia the rights—a transaction that connected two of the 20th century's most distinctive American voices across the divide between literature and music.

Garcia was a lifelong Vonnegut reader. The Grateful Dead's publishing company was already named Ice Nine—a direct reference to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. But this wasn't a vanity purchase or a celebrity whim. Garcia intended to make the film.

In early December 1983, SNL writer Tom Davis traveled to Garcia's home in Marin County. They sat down and started writing.

The Screenplay

The collaboration lasted over a year. Garcia and Davis worked at Garcia's San Rafael home, with Justin Kreutzmann (Bill Kreutzmann's son) present for some of the script sessions.

The first draft was completed in January 1985.

Garcia had a clear interpretive framework for the material I find fascinating. He believed most Vonnegut novels were unfilmable because "his voice is so crucial to the overall feel"—the authorial narration that makes Vonnegut Vonnegut doesn't translate to screen. But he identified The Sirens of Titan and Mother Night as exceptions.

He described Sirens as "one of the few Vonnegut books that's really sweet, in parts of it, and it has some really lovely stuff in it"—suggesting he was drawn to its emotional warmth and humanistic undertones rather than its satirical edge alone.

The most revealing creative decision in the screenplay: for the Martian war scene—a sequence of cosmic absurdity where a ragtag army invades Earth—Davis suggested using Holst's grandiose "Mars, the Bringer of War" as the score.

Garcia overruled him. He wanted "Dixieland rag with kazoos."

That single choice tells you everything about Garcia's artistic instincts. Where Davis reached for cinematic bombast, Garcia reached for irreverent humanity—Vonnegut's tonal register of absurdist comedy undercutting cosmic horror. He understood the book not as science fiction but as a comedy about the futility of taking yourself seriously, and he wanted the music to reflect that.

The Casting and the Pitch

With a completed draft in hand, Garcia moved toward production.

Casting discussions centered on:

• Bill Murray as Malachi Constant (the protagonist)
• John Lithgow as Winston Niles Rumfoord (the omniscient antagonist)

A lunch meeting took place in Manhattan with Murray and Columbia Pictures executive Shel Schrager. The project had real momentum—a completed script, A-list casting interest, studio attention.

Garcia also pursued directors. Justin Kreutzmann personally carried the draft to Francis Ford Coppola via Sofia Coppola. Coppola declined outright. Jonathan Demme discussed the project with Garcia at an undetermined later date but did not commit. Columbia suggested that Davis himself direct; Davis turned them down.

Gary Gutierrez of Colossal Studios was commissioned for storyboards and illustrations—meaning the project had progressed past script to visual development.

Then, on July 10, 1986, Garcia fell into a diabetic coma.

The Coma and the Slow Death of the Project

Garcia's coma didn't kill the screenplay immediately. But it devastated the creative momentum at the worst possible moment—the critical post-draft development phase when a project either finds its director and financing or dies.

The coma was catastrophic. Garcia's heart stopped, his kidneys shut down, and he had to relearn how to talk, walk, and play guitar. The musical rehabilitation consumed the next year. The Grateful Dead's return to touring consumed the year after that.

But Garcia didn't abandon the project. Justin Kreutzmann confirms that script work continued after the coma. By November 1987, Garcia was still publicly discussing Sirens as a "personal project" requiring patience.

The problem was structural. The screenplay had stalled at the directorial-attachment stage—the point where someone with the authority and vision to actually make the film says yes. Coppola said no. Demme didn't commit. Davis wouldn't direct. And Garcia, increasingly consumed by the Dead's touring schedule and his own health crises, couldn't push it over the line.

The project lingered for years. Garcia discussed it occasionally in interviews. The script existed. The storyboards existed. The casting conversations had happened.

But no camera ever rolled.

The Reversion

Garcia died on August 9, 1995.

Two weeks later, Vonnegut exercised a contractual reversion clause, repurchased the film rights, and offered them to documentary filmmaker Robert B. Weide—who had been working on a Vonnegut documentary and had expressed interest in Sirens for years.

The speed of the reversion suggests the contractual deadline may have technically already passed before Garcia's death—meaning the rights might have reverted regardless. But the timing is stark: two weeks from Garcia's death to Vonnegut's phone call to Weide.

Copies of the Garcia-Davis screenplay have surfaced as collector's items in private hands, confirming that at least one complete draft survives. Tom Davis wrote about the collaboration in his memoir Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss: The Early Days of SNL from Someone Who Was There, which constitutes the most detailed firsthand account of the writing process.

The storyboards by Gary Gutierrez may also survive but are not confirmed extant.

The Pattern

The Sirens of Titan screenplay fits a pattern in Garcia's creative life that's easy to miss if you only know him as a guitarist.

Garcia was a proofreader for Lenny Bruce. He was credited as "musical and spiritual advisor" on Jefferson Airplane's Surrealistic Pillow (1967). He appeared as an *extra in Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind**. He named his publishing company after a Vonnegut novel. He was a lifelong reader who recommended books to journalists and bandmates—Ken Kesey gave him John Clellon Holmes's The Horn, which Garcia championed as "really a musician's book."*

The screenplay wasn't an anomaly. It was the most ambitious expression of a literary and cinematic sensibility that ran through Garcia's entire life—a sensibility that his musical career overshadowed but never extinguished.

Garcia believed he could make a Vonnegut film that captured the author's voice—the warmth, the absurdity, the cosmic sadness undercut by kazoos. He spent two years writing it. He spent another decade trying to get it made.

He never did. But the script is out there, somewhere, in a collector's hands. And the casting—Bill Murray as Malachi Constant, directed by Jerry Garcia—remains one of the great unmade films of the 1980s.

Dixieland rag with kazoos. That's the movie Garcia wanted to make.

Sources

• Tom Davis, Thirty-Nine Years of Short-Term Memory Loss (memoir, firsthand screenplay collaboration account)
• Justin Kreutzmann oral testimony (script sessions, Coppola pitch via Sofia Coppola)
• Garcia November 1987 interview ("personal project" discussion)
• Screenplay timeline: December 1983 (start) → January 1985 (first draft completion)
• Casting documentation: Bill Murray (Constant), John Lithgow (Rumfoord), lunch with Shel Schrager
• Gary Gutierrez / Colossal Studios storyboard commission
• Vonnegut reversion clause exercise (two weeks post-Garcia death, rights to Robert B. Weide)
• Garcia's interpretive framework: "Dixieland rag with kazoos" vs. Holst's "Mars"
• Ice Nine Publishing (Grateful Dead company, Cat's Cradle reference)