With the passing of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. two weeks ago, the literary world lost a giant. Yet Vonnegut also deserves a tiny footnote in the annals of film history.

With rare exception, Vonnegut didn't adapt his own novels to the screen, allowing others to complete the tasks. As expected, the quality of the pictures culled from his novels and stories runs all over the map.

Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), directed by George Roy Hill in between helming Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting, remains an absorbing watch, with a sophisticated script by Stephen Geller (Kurt himself praised this screen version). On the other end of the spectrum rests 1999's awful Breakfast of Champions, writer-director Alan Rudolph's wrong-headed satire starring Bruce Willis and Nick Nolte. And while I've never seen it, Slapstick (Of Another Kind) (1982) is reportedly terrible, having been envisioned as a Jerry Lewis vehicle that sat unreleased on the shelf until 1984.

Vonnegut appeared in cameos in Night Mother (1996) and Breakfast of Champions, yet his finest moment came in his split-second appearance in the hilarious Rodney Dangerfield comedy Back to School (1986). Dangerfield plays a millionaire who returns to college late in life; more interested in partying than studying, he hires various academicians to do his homework. And for a term paper on Kurt Vonnegut, he hires no less than ... Kurt Vonnegut. The payoffs to this gag — the assignment's final grade and the ensuing telephone exchange between Dangerfield and Vonnegut — are priceless.