The Sirens of Titan - Adaptations

Adaptations

In the 1970s, the Organic Theatre Company presented Sirens, a stage adaptation of The Sirens of Titan, designed by James Maronek and directed by Stuart Gordon, the company's founder; it utilized "a simple set, a few pieces of furniture and a white backdrop curtain as a space-time warp." It was staged in October 1977 at the University of California, San Diego.

Vonnegut sold the film rights to Sirens of Titan to Jerry Garcia, guitarist and vocalist for rock band The Grateful Dead. Garcia began working with Tom Davis in early December 1983 and finished their first draft in January 1985. Garcia commented on the book and the screenplay in a November 1987 interview:

There's really three basic characters that are having things happen to them. Three main characters. Rumfoord, and Bee. It's like a triangle, a complex, convoluted love story. And it's really that simple....So our task has been to take the essential dramatic relationships, make it playable for actors, so that it's free from the Big Picture emphasis of the book. There's also some extremely lovely, touching moments in the book. It's one of the few Vonnegut books that's really sweet, in parts of it, and it has some really lovely stuff in it. It's the range of it that gets me off.

Garcia died in 1995 before bringing the film to the screen. After waiting a "respectable period of time", Robert B. Weide, who had written and produced the 1996 film adaptation of Mother Night, and had worked on a Vonnegut documentary for years, asked the author about the status of the rights. Vonnegut bought back the rights from Garcia's estate and gave them to Weide on a "verbal handshake" where they remained for years while he attempted to write and find backers for his adaptation. By 2006, Weide reluctantly announced that he had lost the rights. In April 2007, it was announced that screenwriter James V. Hart wrote an adaptation which Vonnegut approved before he died.