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Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Greenlighted

Posted by timothy on from the gold-brick-cast-in-velvet dept.

Overly Critical Guy writes "According to Chud, the Hitchhiker's Guide movie is a go." It's too bad DNA won't be around to see it, but good news for his fans. I hope they can borrow Weta Digital's render farm to perfect some of the characters, though anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects.

17 of 411 comments (clear)

  1. Special effects by Colitis · · Score: 4, Informative

    As they say..."The BBC Special Effects department. Neither special nor effective".

    Blake's 7 fans know all about this. And anyone who managed to watch the Doctor Who story "The Green Death" without being a gibbering wreck after seeing the giant fly effect has my undying respect.

    As someone noted earlier though, I liked the graphics for the Guide entries - lovely style.

    1. Re:Special effects by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Thanks for the thought, but they're on usenet every 3 days...

  2. Torrents by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Here are some torrents of the TV series:

    Episode 1 & 2 VCD

    Episode 3 & 4 VCD

  3. Re:Well... by mccalli · · Score: 2, Informative
    ...on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time

    ...and with a lot of the same people. Douglas Adams for one, who worked on Doctor Who. Simon Jones for another, plus the production crew.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  4. Re:Gaiman didn't want to by 91degrees · · Score: 2, Informative

    Had he read the book? Ford only turned into a single penguin. There were an infinite number of monkeys with a script for Hamlet though.

  5. IMDb says 2005 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    http://imdb.com/title/tt0371724/

    Very light on details, so far the only cast member they show is the guy who did Marvin's voice in the BBC TV show.

    By the way, just finished "The Salmon of Doubt" (phostumous book put together from pending writings found in Douglas Adams's Macs),
    http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detai l/-/1400 045088/ref=ase_pelmanism-20/104-4026186-4413552?v= glance&s=books

    Of course it felt uneven, unfinished and patched together. But I enjoyed it more than I expected. It was bittersweet to go "hitchhiking the galaxy one last time" with DNA.

  6. Re:Well... by xA40D · · Score: 2, Informative

    To my knowlege, he wrote two episodes, "Pirate Planet", and "Shada". Unfortunately filming of Shada was interrupted by a striking technicians and was never made... Douglas later recycled some of the plot in the first Dirk Gently novel.

    However, during his time as producer, Douglas had a very hands-on approach, rewriting stuff if he felt it could be better. Indeed, my favourite Doctor Who story of all time, "City of Death" was rewritten by Douglas it almost entirely.

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  7. Re:DNA?? by aaribaud · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just about everyone who read a bit about Mr Douglas Noel Adams, born the same year as his narrow-minded scientific counterpart, but in a more artisanal fashion.

  8. Re:DNA would enjoy... by Verteiron · · Score: 2, Informative

    Actually, DNA desperately wanted the movie to happen. For once, it was everyone around him dropping the ball, over and over again, that kept it from happening. Read "A Salmon of Doubt".

    --
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  9. spectacular book by evenprime · · Score: 2, Informative
    This book is a collection of the stuff off his hard drives from right after his death. The title "Salmon of a Doubt" is from a beginning Adams had written for another novel. (The novel-in-progress was originally supposed to be about Dirk Gentley, but that might have changed if he had lived to finish it.) That partial story is part of this book, but that's a very small portion near the back. The bulk of Salmon of a Doubt is essays , speeches and interviews on a variety of topics. This is a great book for someone who wants to know more about the way adams thought, and how he was thought of by his friends. The non-eulogy at the end by biologist Richard Dawkins is really touching. That, and several other portions of the book, are already available online: The essays cover everything from a hilarious step by step guide to making the perfect cup of tea to a story about what it is like to climb mt. kilamanjaro(sp?) while wearing a rhino suit (He was very passionate about environmental causes, and was one of the people doing this to raise money for rhino conservation.)

    BTW, Adams said that of all the book he had written, his favorite was Last Chance To See. I'd even recommend this book to people who don't care about environmental causes, because Adams talking about biologists is just as funny as him talking about sci-fi. Some of the descriptions in LCTC (e.g. traveling on a boat with chickens who eye you warily because they suspect you will be eating them later) are priceless.
    --

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    I think that goes for OS's too
  10. Re:Well... by TomV · · Score: 2, Informative

    Well, strictly speaking, Douglas the Writer and Douglas the Script Editor. Graham Williams was the Producer throughout DNA's time as Script Editor (Season 17, from Destiny Of the Daleks to Shada). DNA wrote three Doctor Who stories, The Pirate Planet in season 16 (also produced by Williams), Shada in series 17, and the sublimely wonderful City Of Death, also in season 17 but credited as 'David Agnew', as Script Editors weren't supposed to script their own show at the BBC back then.

    "I say, what a wonderful butler. He's *so* violent!"

    The race is on. Doctor Who season 27 starts sometime in 2005, with scripts from the wondrous Russell T Davies, and with HHGTTG coming too, I'm really looking forward to 2005.

    tV

  11. Re:Don't think so. by TomV · · Score: 2, Informative

    You're right on the timing. The Radio Series *is* the HHGTTG (for me!). The spin-off books are wonderful, but they are, nonethless, a spin-off (for me!). The radio series started on March 8th, 1978 and series 2 ended on 25th Jan 1980. The book was published in September 1979, at about the time the first double LP was released. Part 1 of the TV series aired on January 5th 1981. all contain variations, subtle of huge, from eachother, and it's largely a matter of personal choice. Personally, I was hooked uttelry by the radio series when a friend told me about it about half-way through the first run, so for me, that's the 'definitive' version. Yours may vary :-) Personally, I wouldn't give up the Total perspective Vortex or the Bird People Of Brontitall for all the tea in China.

    "I should have you revoked. K-IL-L-E-D: revoked."

    tV

  12. DNA comments on Hollywood fiddling by e7 · · Score: 2, Informative
    See the /. interview, in answer to the question 'Comedy or Tragedy?':
    I've hit a certain amount of difficulty over the years in explaining [Arthur] in Hollywood. I'm often asked 'Yes, but what are his goals?' to which I can only respond, well, I think he'd just like all this to stop, really. It's been a hard sell. I rather miss David Vogel from the film process. He's the studio executive at Disney who was in charge of the project for a while, but has since departed. There was a big meeting at one time to discuss, amongst other things, Arthur's heroicness or lack of it. David suddenly asked me 'Does Arthur's presence in the proceedings make a difference to the way things turn out?' to which I said, slightly puzzled, 'Well, yes.' David smiled and said 'Good. Then he's a hero.'
    --
    Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
  13. Re:Well... by prbt · · Score: 3, Informative

    "AKA the Shark-jumping doctor"

    Now, that's not quite fair on Peter Davison. The quality of the scripts took a severe nosedive towards the end of his reign, and bumped along the ground for the whole of Colin Baker and Sylvester McCoy's tenure.

    IMO, some of the 5th Doctor's early adventures were amongst the finest in the whole Doctor Who canon.

  14. Re:DNA would enjoy... by bigdavex · · Score: 4, Informative

    You know, I always got the feeling that "Mostly Harmless" was deliberately written by a bitter man to piss his fanbase off so that they'd stop bugging him to write sequels to the first four books.

    Douglas Adams spoke to this himself in a 1998 interview

    Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and I just lost it. For some reason, I couldn't get it going, so I had to put it aside. I didn't know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thought: Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don't match. I've tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don't want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there's an awful lot of material sitting 'round waiting to go in it. Another reason is that the last one, Mostly Harmless, is a very bleak book. People have tried to read all sorts of complicated reasons into it, and the reason was that I just had a lousy year. Just for all sorts of personal reasons, from a terrible death in the family to... Every kind of area, whether it was personal or professional, had just gone sour on me, against a background in which I had to write a funny book, which turned out not to be very funny. So I'd quite like to maybe do another Hitchhiker book that sort of perks up the tone again.
    --
    -Dave
  15. Exactly, he said so in interviews by spoco2 · · Score: 2, Informative
    Exactly, this needs more modding up... DNA DID want a movie to happen, worked really hard at it in fact, and it's so very sad that it took his death to kick it into action.

    In this interview he said:
    Question: When will we here in the US be able to see [one of] your books put to movie?
    DNA: The Dirk Gently books are currently in development as a television series. The "Hitchhiker's Guide" is currently under development. I'm very confident that it will actually go into production any decade now. When... I want to know when too.

    So this is what he wanted, and I hope it's done well.

  16. Re:FSP by fredrik70 · · Score: 3, Informative

    THat'd have been your first ever wasted mod point as well as said elsewhere. Also, please read the moderator guidelines, You should *NOT* moderate anyone down just because you disagree with them. Moderation is not about getting your view seen, but to keep the discussion going and clean from trolls, flamebaits, etc.

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