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Hitchhiker's Guide Movie Greenlighted
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.
So.. The Guide will be really shaky, oddly cut, using all the current 'trendy' angles.. In other words.. Really really annoying ?
I'd probably have preferred Jay Roach on the project.. alas..
So who do y'all see as possible casts ?
Venlig Hilsen / Regards
John Hinge - shayera /
"Buffy I love you... Please God No!" S
Neil Gaiman was here in Stockholm the other day, holding a q&a with his fans. One of the questions was "How come you aren't involved with the Hitchhiker's movie, writing the script and directing it?"
His answer?
"If Douglas [Adams] couldn't do it, I can't either."
He also said that the best Hitchhiker's movie is and will always be the book, or the radio show. "Hollywood can never render Ford turning in to an infinite number of penguins better than you can in your head," as he put it.
This movie should have some spectacular CGI. A whale plummeting to its death, Ford Prefect turning into a penguin, and a humongous cavern where entire planets are manufactured. Now that I want to see.
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Would have been the Monty Python gang. Terry Gilliams as Zaphold (and as a director, of course!), Eric Idle as Ford, and John Cleese as Arthur.
Alas, it is too late for that... A pity. We take comfort in that, at the time, there was a finite (im)probability for this movie to exist, so we you need to do to obtain a copy it is a time machine and hot cup of tea.
At least he beat the inifinite improbability of ever getting the movie through Hollywood :-)
You have to remember that the BBC series was the original. The book(s) was(were) written after the BBC series. Having read all of them, you could tell that DNA had run out of puff half way though book-4, where it became a cash-cow and a real hard read.
:)
Some things are best left at their natural ending.
Personally, I like the original BBC series and I think they will have a hard time capturing the overall theme. In the same sort of way that they lost the plot with "Lot in Space". Besides, I think they're going to have a hard time finding a naturaly large girl to play the part of Trillian
I'm of the opinion that the reason HHGTTHG: The Movie was snarled up for 20 years was Douglas himself. He had a vision, he wanted to translate it to the screen. But I'm of the opinon that he didn't really know what it was he wanted.
Given enough time he'd have given us something I'm sure. It would have been totally different to anything he'd already given us. Would it have been any good? I'm not sure. But I'd have rushed out to the cinema to watch it.
Okay. So now Douglas is no more. And somebody is going to translate his works into a movie. If they and take what they need from the various HHGTTG source material, adding just a dash here and there to get the pieces to mesh - great. But if they start rewriting vast tracts of Douglas's work... hideous.
So for now I'll be cautions. I'll hope for the best. But I'm not going to celebrate just yet. After all, the movie business has a past record of raping decent stories...
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Peter Jones, the voice of the book. In fact, so key was he to the success that he was billed as the star (each radio episode always begins with "Starring Peter Jones, as the book"). He was utterly superb, and again gave one of those performances that fixes a thing in my mind.
It's going to be hard for anyone to match him. Best of luck to the person that eventually gets the job, but they have some work to do.
Cheers,
Ian
Hell, if it wasn't for the RIAA...
Last I knew BBC stood for BRITISH Broadcasting Corporation. Nowt to do with the America....
Hasn't Aunty has decided to put their entire archive online? How soon before anyone who cares to can listen to HHGTTG for free?
Do you mind, your karma has just run over my dogma.
Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Well, I'm hoping on a scene which includes Radiohead's Paranoid Android - the name of the song was a tribute to the DNA character, so maybe they could return the favour. I think it would also fit in with the moment of Marvin's death - although as that is in book 4, I'm not sure whether this film will cover it.
Mattb90
Editor, allaboutgames.co.uk
No, it probably won't... Marvin's death wouldn't make any sense without a significant amount of story to establish how many times the poor guy has to live through the entire life of the Universe.
Really, the resilience of those diodes down his left side which were never replaced is quite impressive. Perhaps the manufacturers could put a sticker on the box saying
'Guarenteed to last thirty-seven times longer than the Universe itself'
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
I certianly don't discount the value of books' entertainment, I have shelves full of fiction novels that I enjoy thourghly. However, that doesn't mean that movies are without value or that books have some kind of inherant superiority. There are advantages to both formats. It is often nice to see another person's vision of something, how they would realise it. Also there are thing you can communicate with a visual medium that you cannot with text, or can only with dificulty.
I think that well done movies of good books are great. They present a different way of telling the story, often even a better one. For example I really like Dave Barry's Big Trouble, but I thought the movie did an even better job, though omitting some of the book. I also though Fight Club was just excellent, and a mucst watch even, no especially, if you read the book.
I think some people need to quit being so stick-in-the-mud about rendering text into a visual format. Just because it is different doesn't make it bad.
Secret cameo: You know the cow who wants to be eaten at the restaurant at the end of the universe? That's Peter Davison, the 5th doctor. (AKA the Shark-jumping doctor)
Ideal Director: Terry Gilliam
Ideal Narrrarator: John Cleese
Ideal Arthur Dent: Cary Elwes
Ideal Ford Prefect: Tony Slattery (watch old Whose Line Is It Anyway? episodes on Comedy Central to see what I mean)
Ideal Slartibartfast: Sean Connery (imagine "It was made from the rib cage of a stegosaurus!" in a Scottish accent)
Everyone else is negotiable.
Schnapple
I still think that a proper HHG2G movie should have been an animated one. Imagine a Pixar HHG2G? That would seriously rock. Then again they seem to have a pretty busy schedue right now.
I still think that 2D drawn animation is pretty cool too...I wonder how a prestigious Japanese studio like Gainax would handle a HHG2G movie? They'd certainly make Trillian nice and bouncy for all the fanboys...^_^
Seriously, there is so much in the book and in the radio show that really would lend itself well to animation. With animation, you would be able to make everything and everyone as outrageous as you want to without bumping the budget up too high. CGI+Live Action is often more expensive than animation.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
There are lots of good reasons to dislike the BBC's TV series (mangling of the storyline would be tops on my list) but I honestly doubt the movie will have a better Ford, Arthur, or Narrator (the Guide). Douglas Adams felt that the casting for them was perfect (and clearly nobody will ever be a better "guide" than Peter Jones). If I were to cast it, I'd put Jack Davenport (of BBC's Coupling) as Arthur, and hope Peter Jones is still alive to do the Guide.
Also, the "Computer Graphics" of the guide will never, ever be topped. To quote from Don't Panic - The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galazy Companion written by none other than the great Neil Gaiman:
"The graphics...were incredibly detailed, apparently computer-created animated graphics, full of sight gags and in-jokes, and presumably designed for people with freeze-frame and slow-motion videos, since there was no way one could pick up on the complexities of the graphics sequences in a single watching at normal speed. Would one have noticed, for example, the cartoons of Douglas Adams himself, posing as a Sirius Cybernatics Corporation Advertising Executive, writing hard in the dolphin sequence, and in drag as Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings? Could one have picked up on all the names and phone numbers of some of the best places in the universe to purchase, or dry out from, a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster? One of the phone numbers in the graphics of Episode Six was that of a leading computer magazine who phoned Pearce Studios, responsible for the graphics, to ask which computer it was done on, and whether a flat-screen television was built into the book prop used on the show. The comment beside the phone number was not flattering."
The reason the TV series was, in many ways, very good, is because Adams realized with the medium of television, he had a whole new outlet for his humor that was simply impossible to do on Radio. Also, there's simply no way you can condense the book into an 1.5 hour movie. THGTTG isn't an anecdote to be shortly told with expensive special effects... it's a Decameron, a Canterbury Tales collection of stories that gives the reader (or listener, or viewer) a rolicking feeling of traveling from place to place.