Slashdot Mirror
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
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.
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.
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
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.
The BBC *radio* series was the original. I believe you can buy it now as mp3 CDs. The BBC TV series was basically just a filming of the radio script, with a few minor adjustments. And then in the books he fine-tuned many of the jokes to absolute perfection.
For me the radio plays will always be the highlight, though, with the books in second place. The animations on the TV series were *wonderful* but everything else looked wrong. Trillian is a sight classier than that, for a start (she's an astrophysicist ffs, not an airhead Essex blonde). Ford and Arthur looked nothing like they did in my head. And Zaphod... spare us. And as someone else said, Marvin doesn't really look like *that* does he?!
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
"You humans. When do you gonna learn that size doesn't matter Just because something is important, doesn't mean it isn't very very small, tiny.."
(and for the record, it's *brain* the size of a planet, not head!)
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
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.
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!
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)
"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.
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.
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.
"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.
Douglas Adams spoke to this himself in a 1998 interview
-Dave