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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!
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
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.
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.
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.
Douglas Adams spoke to this himself in a 1998 interview
-Dave