Slashdot Mirror
H2G2 Cast Finalized, Starts Shooting in April
akahige writes "According to The Hollywood Reporter, Martin Freeman (The Office, Love Actually), Mos Def (Showtime, The Italian Job), and Zooey Deschanel (Big Trouble, Elf) have signed on to play Arthur, Ford, and Trillian, respectively. Stephen Moore is once again doing the voice of Marvin. No word on who's playing Zaphod (but wouldn't Eddie Izzard be great?). It worries me when they say things like, "Adams adapted his own novel for the screen. After his death, Karey Kirkpatrick came aboard for a rewrite." But it's Disney, so what do you expect? Shooting begins in April."
For those who don't know ...
HitchHikers Guide to the Galaxy
http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
H2G2 is the name Adams used for the Hitchikers website (h2g2.com) now owned by the BBC. That was the first I heard of it, but I think it's pretty common now.
I highly recommend you read Fast Food Nation. The author goes into some detail about marketting to children. Some parts are a bit alarmist but overall it's a thought-provoking read.
Trolling is a art,
The BBC (who sponsored the first radio versions) use it on their website.
It's HHGG (HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy), only written like a condensed chemical formula.
I admit it's not exactly an obvious acronym... I read the 2 as "to" myself the first time I saw it.
Maybe the radio listeners thought the visual versions ruined it for THEM!
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Additionally, the first three books are the best (Hithchiker's Guide to the Galaxy; Resturant at the end of the Universe; and Life, the Universe, and Everything -- I may have mixed up the order of the last two). So Long and Thanks For All the Fish and Mostly Harmless are ok, but get worse and worse. The trilogy probably would have been best if it had remained thus.
The draw, at least to me, is the sci fi humor and use of language that Adams used, "Huge yellow spaceships that hung in the air exactly the way bricks don't," and "'Hyperspace travel is rather unpleasantly like being drunk,' said Ford. 'What's wrong with being drunk?' asked Arthur. 'Ask a glass of water,' responded Ford."
...and that's the way the cookie crumbles.
- Read the first three books a few times over.
- Play the infocom game
- Read the first three books again
- Buy "The more than complete hitchhiker's guide", read it
- Read the radio scripts
- Read the whole series over again (repeat yearly)
- Read So Long and thanks for all the fish
- Yup, the whole series again
- Download from napster the radio show and listen to it
- Read Mostly Harmless
- Watch some chapters of the TV show
- Series
- Salmon of doubt
Somewhere in there you should read The meaning of liff, the expanded meaning of liff, and of course the Dirk Gently books.cross-posting this from IMDB boards (yay, a quote of a quote of a quote):
by The Duke of Dunstable:
For those of you who are worried about the Disney involvement of the movie, here's what Douglas said about it in December, 1998.
"First of all, I have not tried to 'downplay' Disney's role in this. Disney is the studio which is making this movie, which is financing it, which will be distributing it. It couldn't really be much more central to the project.
What I have tried to explain is that people's ideas of who or what Disney is is a little out of date. Yes, it made Bambi and Snow White and Flubber, but it also made Pulp Fiction, The Rock, etc., etc. It is a huge entertainment corporation, one part of which still makes what it originally made, i.e. family entertainment. So to talk about 'Disney-fying' Hitchhiker makes as much sense as saying 'Columbia-fying' it or 'Universal-fying' it. Yes, each studio has its strengths and weaknesses at any moment, depending on who's running what, but generalisations based on Bambi no longer apply. The important issues as far as I'm concerned is - who are the individual people I'm working with? The director, the producer, the studio executive etc. As things stand at the moment, I'm feeling very happy, confident and well looked after. But we have a huge task and huge challenges. Let's see how it goes."
Run a pencil-and-paper RPG campaign with your far-off friends: Gametable!
H2G2 is just a different way of saying HHGG, which in turn is an abbreviation of HHGttG. The 2s are used to state the amounts of the different letters, not in place of 'to'.
You know you're lazy when an acronym is too much effort to type.
Don't forget the computer game, which followed the plot of the book to a certian point, then took a hard right.
Schnapple
The movie Starship Troopers actually spurred sales of the original novel Starship Troopers. Despite the movie being a horrible rendition of the book (emphasis on the "rend"). I may be mistaken but I think the movie actually launched the book back into the bestseller lists (the first time would be when it was first published and won a Hugo award).
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Let's face it, the way Douglas Adams wrote that character, I pictured a white english guy.
I didn't. I pictured Arthur as a white English guy, and Ford as a really irritating Southern California hipster, race unimportant. Like some obnoxious American tourist who barges into an English pub thinking he's the shit and talking too loud. (I'm an American, by the way.) I think body language and style are far more important here than race.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
Now, please refrain from slashdotting it until I've gone home for the day. I'm trying to listen to Fit the Third.
No, because it's HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, or HHGG, which "reduces" to H2G2.
See The BBC Website for a reference.
Insanity is a gradual process; don't rush it.
Looks like Karey Kirkpatrick might be a pretty good choice for this projct since Adams is, well, unavailable. IMDB shows that Kirkpatrick has writing credits on some good films:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Laws of Attraction (2004) (post-production)
The Little Vampire (2000)
Chicken Run (2000)
Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves (1997)
James and the Giant Peach (1996)
Rescuers Down Under, The (1990)
Especially notable is James and the Giant Peach, a great film which did a great job of capturing the intent of Rohl Dahl, an author with a lot of similarities to Douglas Adams. As for Honey, We Shrunk Ourselves, well everybody has to pay the bills.
Plus (you've got to love IMDB), his brother wrote the theme song to the TV series "America's Dumbest Criminals".
From memory: (at work - but it's lunchtime) Share and Enjoy, Share and Enjoy Journey through life with a plastic boy Or Girl by your side, let your pal be your guide And when it breaks down or starts to annoy Or grinds when it moves and gives you no joy Cos it eats up your hat or has sex with your cat Bled oil on your floor or ripped off your door And you get to the point you can't stand any more Bring it to us, we won't give a fig We'll tell you, 'Go stick your head in a pig Thank you, ladies and gentlement. I'll be here all week. Try the veal, it's rumptastic.
Of course it's going off the rails. How else is it ever going to fly?
Mos Def actually came from the theater community before he was a rapper.
Jack Valenti and Orrin Hatch will be first up against the wall when the revolution comes.
Regardless I'll be in the theater with my towel in hand.
I'm too lazy to compose a creative sig.
Ok, I'm straying totally off topic now. Mod me down, whatever.
You might be surprised. The book was written and first published in "younger" and more "innocent" times, and it caused quite a controversy. Not quite so much as Stranger in a Strange Land, but Starship Troopers wasn't an easily ignored thing. It portrayed women in combat roles as pilots of spaceships. It portrayed non-white and/or non-American characters in most (if not all) of the key roles. It portrayed a society in which the right to vote or hold office was gained only through military service. It contained public flogging and public hanging. It described "police action" that closely parallelled U.S. activities in Korea and later Vietnam -- some of these were acts we would consider terrorism today!
Aside from being controversial, the novel was also hugely inventive. The MI piloted what amounts to Robotech battle mechs.
Now go look up the first publish date and realize that all that was written probably before you were born.
Fun with Anagarams! LADS HOST, SHALT DOS. HAS DOLTS. AD SLOTHS, HATS SOLD. ASS HO, LTD.
Heavy sigh...
h2g2 (note the lower-casing) is the name of the online guide inspired by The Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy. It's considered "official" because it was created by The Digital Village Ltd., the new media company that had Douglas Adams amongst its directors, and he assisted in its creation. It is not the name of the book, the radio series, the game, or anything else. Just the online, fact-based guide.
If you want to reference the fictional story or Guide with an abbreviation, I'd recommend HHGTTG. Or HHGG. Or HHG.
-- Yoz, who was one of the four original developers of h2g2.com, and is also horrifically pedantic
Reading the HHGTHG robs a person of the chance to experience the wonderful world of Douglas Adams *first hand*
No it doesn't. The books weren't the original version of the story, but since they were written by DNA himself, they do give DNA's first-hand account of the story.