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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.
Forty-Second Post!
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
Yes, it is sad DNA passed away a premature death, but I'm sure he'd be happy to know that people still enjoy, and will for a long time, his excellent and humorous style of writing. I saw a few stills from the BBC Version of the film and I can say . . ."Woah" I really do hope the new people in charge redo a few characters. I've always invisioned Marvin as something like a Bender from futureama.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
If this isn't yet another false hope...
WAHOOOOOOO
And of course the special effects will be better than the BBC version's were. That was made in 1981, after all, and on about the same budget that Doctor Who had at the time, so it's not exactly unexpected is it?
The DVD release of it is, of course, wonderful, because the TV series' animated sequences still stand out as some of the best I've ever seen. Hand-drawn too. I hope they preserve that look for the film, although no doubt these days it'd be done on a computer.
Music will be critical for the atmosphere too. Fingers crossed...
Miri it is whil Linux ilast...
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.
but good news for his fans.
I'm not so sure about that. For me, almost all the 'goodness' and 'funniness' of HHGTTG in is Adam's writing style and narration. I imagine watching the events on screen would be rather flat. HHGTTG is very well tailored to the book medium.
bring a towel to the opening premiere.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
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
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.
from the article:
;) Besides, the BBC DVD version has some great interesting subtitles of where the stuff was recorded etc. for those of us who remember watching it the first time round on TV
;)
The novel was previously adapted into a cheap-looking BBC series, which you can see on DVD and anticipate slightly better special effects for the new version.
This sounds cool as long as it doesn't turn into some Hollywood style space jaunt full of effects and no character. The BBC effects were straight from Dr. Who's reject cupboard but I thought it suited the underlying sarcasm of the book
Actually, thinking about it, I could stand Zaphod's heads being slightly better
ermmm... don't take any notice of me... I'm too old...
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 :-)
What a surprise now the suits .
a) Dont have to pay the author anything.
b) He's not around to maintain quality.
Conclusion. It will probably suck.
siggy played guitar
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 don't think that they can improve on the original. For exactly the same reason we still watch ST TOS - we love the style of the original stuff - I'd say you couldn't remake it if you tried.
Having said that I am all for the project - and I will be taking my towel (just in case).
Jon - TheSpork
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
I can just see it now:
Disney's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
I'd sooner watch the BBC version than have a Disney funded film. Who cares about the FX anyway? the strong points of the novel and TV series are the story and all it's humour.
anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects
I dunno. They tried to improve Red Dwarfs special effects and ended up making it worse. Sometimes, flashy new special effects are not what you need. A decent and funny story is much much more important.
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.
The whole point of "The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy" was that it was on the wireless, and therefore there were no pictures outside of your own head. This meant you had to work harder to suspend your disbelief.
Adapting it to TV was always going to be difficult because some of the people who had heard it on the radio would have developed their own ideas of how the characters looked and acted, which would not tally with the TV producer's ideas. Now, I know the BBC's special effects were a little on the cheesey side, but a TV licence was cheaper in those days - especially as there were still many people watching in mono and paying an even cheaper licence. {Stating the obvious, the BBC is funded from TV licence fees and does not carry advertising. This means, in theory at least, that the programmes it shows are ones that people have paid to watch, rather than ones that advertisers have paid to show in order to interrupt}. Again, you had to suspend your disbelief: make a conscious effort to believe that that lampshade dangling on a length of fishing line was really a spaceship.
Maybe I'm just being pessimistic, but I can't imagine Hollywood making anything but a massive pig's ear of the story. Today, a mass of special effects are generally used to cover up a thin plot {invariably with some kind of sex angle added} and/or one-dimensional characters {and ac(tors|tresses) who were chosen more for their unrealistic conformance to the ideal of Conventional Beauty than anything else}. In mediaeval paintings, before anyone had worked out that light travels in straight lines and so distant objects appear smaller than close ones, the most important character in the scene was painted the biggest. In Hollywood movies, the most important character is either the "prettiest" or "ugliest" depending on whether they are a "goodie" or a "baddie". Plots, too, are reduced to a simple battle of "good" versus "evil". This doesn't work for complex characters, so sometimes characters are distorted so as better to fit the stereotype. {Can you imagine Hollywood's take on something like "Trainspotting"? All the characters are basically on the same side. Disney probably would make them all the Baddies, and introduce a young orphan boy for the Goodie. Or it might be more politically correct to have a girl this time. Uh, yeah, maybe we could use that baby instead of making her a cot death victim. [Never mind that the whole point of that scene was that you were hoping all along that she wasn't dead, but at the same time you knew she was anyway - and the confirmation knocked the wind out of you]. Said child meets a Special Friend - an improbable character, who {after a little playfighting and banter} helps them break into an underground laboratory and poison a batch of junk. Renton and Sick Boy are seen cooking up in the Mother Superior's flat. Child looks out of window. Dead bodies lie still. Solitary church bell rings. Tommy [not dead of AIDS] and Spud solemnly promise never to touch junk again. Tearful scene in which Special Friend departs forever, while outside the sun is shining. The end}. And, while my imagination is generally capable of making up for poor SFX, I find plots and characters harder.
For an example of what I mean, look at Star Wars Episode I. There are just too many things out of that film that don't gel when you come to think about them afterward. Explosions, obviously. Pod racers? Someone's having a giraffe. What keeps the outside part of those engines from rotating? Battle droids? Come on, if you're going to make an entire army of foldy-uppy robots, you should at least give them proper weapons. The original Star Wars {now re-named Episode four - A New Hope} stood up far better to post-movie analysis.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
"anything will be an improvement on the BBC series' special effects."
Oh come on, that's not very fair. It was made with the best effects available at the time, including some groundbreaking work. (Watch the extras on the DVD set for more info.)
LOTR was made with the best effects available, including new stuff. If the effects don't look primitive in 20 years time I'd be very surprised. That doesn't mean they're crap. If LOTR is remade in 20 years, it's highly likely that anything will be better than WETA's current abilities.
At the time nothing was better than the BBC special effects. Of course it could all be done now with a PC in half the time and looking 10 times better, but that's the nature of technology.
The obvious choice would be Parminder Nagra, the star of Bend it Like Beckham
If I recall correctly, the book Trillian described as having dark skin, being either from the Middle East or India. She also had advanced degrees in mathematics and astrophysics.
The TV series portrayed her as a ditzy blonde, probably because some marketroid thought it was good idea.
George W. Bush. Vogon.
My HOUSEHOLD APPLIANCE is on DRUGS.
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.
This is the same author, after all, who wrote the whole middle of "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish" in response to the publisher's demands, but then prefaced the section with a note that the middle of the book was crap, please skip to the end which has a nice bit about Marvin in it.
I shudder to think how he was planning to sabatoge the movie, which he must have regarded as a worse sellout than books four and five.
This has made a lot of people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move.
The important answer to your important question: 42
There. I did it. Someone had to...
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.
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".
End of lesson. You may press the button.
- Dawkins' Lament for Adams
- Adams's interview with American Atheists
- Adams' s excellent speech at Digital Biota
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.
"Weapons should be hardy rather than decorative" - Miyamoto Musashi
I think that goes for OS's too
Funny. I always thought it was the other way round: He was poking fun at fans who insisted THHGTTG be all about robots and spacecraft.
...precisely because it is a little calmer and, dare I say it, romantic in its quirky, wistful fashion.
Then again, "So Long..." _is_ my favourite in the series
What I'm dreading is a movie that focuses on the "jokes" alone. Then again, if they at least get them _right_, that'd be something too. But there's always been more to it than breakneck pace "gags". In the comparatively mediocre and not-quite-so-funny "Life...", I liked the thoughtful moments best -- Trillian and how she relates to the Krikkit warlords (or Haktar), for example.
And "Mostly Harmless" was sort of bitter, weary and brooding throughout. That, too, was a sellout? Hm.
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
...you also have:
- Junk mail
- Pocket fluff
- A thing your aunt gave you which you don't know what it is
- A buffered analgesic
~Philly
Corollary to Moore's Law: The IQ of new computer owners is declining.
I hpoe tehy can brorow Weta Dgitali's rneedr fram to pcfrceet smoe of the ctarhacres,...
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They Are Vermin Feeding On Each Other's Feces.
I Hate \.
Yeah, it's a really, really expensive PDA. But it's definitely an impressive one. God, I hate Sony. They belong to both the MPAA and RIAA, yet they still crank out uber-l33t electronic products.
However, you might not feel comfortable about writing "DON'T PANIC" on the cover. After spending $700 on something like this, you might get really paranoid about anything that would deface it.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
Douglas Adams spoke to this himself in a 1998 interview
-Dave
Just get Sean Connery to play any part. LXG, anyone? -_-''
Circumcision is child abuse.
I'm not sure of that. There is a point were it stops making a difference, and it's indistinguishable from real. IMHO LotR a milestone- is at that point (mostly - don't mention the ents). It is the end of special-effects-as-special-effects, you know, stuff that you look at and go "hey, that's pretty special". After a while the brain adjusts and you just accept that Gandalf is twice as tall as Frodo and it seems normal not special.
Indistinguishable from real for you, maybe.
The practical perspective tricks used for LOTR have been used for years. There's nothing particularly new or impressive with them - just the scale of them, because they're in nearly every shot.
The computer graphics shots? I can still see some glitches.
When I can't see glitches, and someone who's at least twice as good as I am at seeing glitches can't see them either, then it'll be perfect.
Coming soon - pyrogyra
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.