A lot of myth and movie lore are attached to the cinema’s epic flops. The long-gestating, all-star-cast 1999 film of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s “Breakfast of Champions” carries its share of such baggage.

No, it didn’t end adapting screenwriter and director Alan Rudolph’s career. The miss-or-hit Altman-acolyte and cult filmmaker behind “Trouble in Mind,” “Afterglow,” “Songwriter” and “Choose Me” made four more films after “Champions,” with only “The Secret Lives of Dentists” being worth anybody’s trouble.

Rudolph was involved with this adaptation back when it was pitched as Altman’s follow-up to “Nashville” and “Buffalo Bill an the Indians,” but the latter flopped and we never got our ’70s “Altman” take on Vonnegut, set to star Peter Falk, Sterling Hayden, Ruth Gordon and Alice Cooper.

“Champions” came out the same year as “The Sixth Sense,” which lessened any impact it had on the early 2000s fall-off in Bruce Willis‘s screen career. He didn’t avoid “challenging” material after this, either. He’d star in Sam Shepard’s “True West” on TV a couple of years later, before settling into indifferent comedies, generic action pics, ensemble pieces and cameos as his star faded.

Co-star Nick Nolte‘s best years were already behind him, and his credits already included a pretty good version of Vonnegut’s “Mother Night.”

But “Champions” did scare Hollywood out of ever taking another shot at a feature length film based on Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s quirky, prescient and human-foibles-skewering science fiction. We got a film of his masterpiece “Slaughterhouse-Five”and “Happy Birthday, Wanda June” in the adventurous early ’70s, a disastrous “Slapstick” in the ’80s, “Mother Night” and “Breakfast of Champions” in the ’90s, and that was all she wrote.

“And so it goes,” and so it went, all because a funny book didn’t turn into a funny movie.

The multi-point-of-view story has Albert Finney play a reclusive “cult” writer invited to be feted in suburban Midland (not quite Texas, and the movie was shot in Twin Falls, Idaho). Whatever his literary rep and national profile, Kilgore Trout has a rich fan and is properly praised to the heavens by that fan’s mouthpiece and conference organizer (Buck Henry).

Our Vonnegut alter ego decides to keep the travel honorarium and hike or hitchhike his way West. He meets fans who know of his myth and never suspect they’re in the prescence of The Master.

Midland is also home to the greatest car salesman of them all, hype master Dwayne Hoover (Willis), the telegenic emperor of the Exit 11 Motor Village. Dwayne’s all smiles and this week’s hype — “HAWAIIAN week!” But when we meet him, he’s sticking a revolver in his mouth.

Married to the broken Celia (Barbara Hershey), cheating with the dizzy employee Francine (Glenne Headley), father of flaky lounge-singing son Bunny (Lukas Haas), it’s hard to pin down the source of Dwayne’s existential angst and mental health crisis.

His old Army buddy, salesman Harry Le Sabre (Nolte) is barely keeping it together himself, manic in his TV sales pitches, unwinding by dressing in women’s wear with his domineering wife (Vicki Lewis).

And a convict (Omar Epps) figures the fact that his name — Wayne Hoobler — “sounds like” Dwayne Hoover is reason enough to pursue employment at the Motor Village the minute he gets out of prison.

“Champions” is Rudolph at his “Made in Heaven,” all-star cast, Altman-imitating worst, making his players flail about for laughs when there aren’t any, throwing big names into many a role so that the viewer can think, “Oh look, it’s so-and-so” rather than focusing on how bad this movie is.

The dialogue is littered with Vonnegutisms or imitations of Vonnegut’s wry, cutting style.

“I can’t wait until my head’s as empty as the day I was born,” writer Trout complains.

The suicide-encouraging messiness of everything going on in Hoover’s personal life has him opining that “It’s all ‘life’ until you’re dead.”

“Our awareness is all that’s alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”

And get your mind around this social media prediction — “You are surrounded by machines whose only purpose is to stir you up in every conceivable way.”

Aside from these observations, most of them from our mad-writer-as-sage, there isn’t much to grab hold of in this film. A novelist obsessed with time-bending saw his book turned into a film decades later, and the movie feels as out of place and “off” as every moment Willis and/or Nolte go off in some bugeyed blast of fear, fury and salesmanship.

Almost nothing here is funny, save for Haas donning more and more elaborate hairdos and outfits for his lounge act and Lewis vamping her dominatrix “brand.”

Perhaps the book, whose narration provided many of the laughs, is unfilmmable. Perhaps Rudolph went through it a few too many times trying to attract a cast and the financing to finally get it made. I can’t imagine he didn’t “get it,” but the evidence on the screen speaks for itself.

And nothing that we see or hear delivers much more than a short giggle, no matter how insistent on being “deep” and “funny” this fiasco was in 1999, and remains as it is re-released on Nov. 1.

You want to “restore” and re-release a worthwhile Vonnegut adaptation? Try “Mother Night” or “Slaughterhouse-Five.” “Breakfast of Champions” is sugar cereal that left out the sugar and doesn’t serve up much that’s nutritious, either.

Rating: R, suicide attempts, sex, profanity

Cast: Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Glenne Headly, Barbara Hershey, Nick Nolte, Lukas Haas, Vicki Lewis and Omar Epps, with Owen Wilson, Michael Jai White, Alison Eastwood, Michael Clarke Duncan and Will Patton.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alan Rudolph, based on the novel by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. A Buena Vista release restored and re-released by Shout! Studios.

Running time: 1:50