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New Cast Information For 'Hitchhiker's' Movie
Kathleen writes "I was listening to the old Hitchiker's radio plays, and feeling nostalgic, I decide to check out how the movie version was going along. Well, they've filled out some important parts, Zaphod and Marvin have been cast. Zaphod is played by Sam Rockwell who's most recently been in Matchstick Men and Confessions of a Dangerous Mind. Marvin is being played by Warwick Davis (Who was Willow Ufgood in Willow). Slartibartfast will be played by Bill Nighy. This news is a little distressing, since I was under the impression that Stephen Moore would still be handling the voice of Marvin."
I can only hope they have a compotent narrator, a good percentage of the jokes in the book/radio show are from the narration of book passages and exposition.
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How far will they have to pare down the book to make a three hour (or so) movie?
EVERYDAY IS CATURDAY
Alright, kiddies.. am I the only one who's kept their head here?
Kathleen, you cite NO sources in this - just links to the actors' pages on IMDB.com.
What gives? We're now posting news articles with no sources at all? Let me rummage around for my bullshit flag.
Not that you /.ers can be trusted to actually read a page BEFORE commenting on it, but IMDB.com does add this note to projects that are still in the planning stages (like HhGTTG):
Note: Since this project is categorized as being in production, the data is subject to change or could be removed completely.
It is human nature to take shortcuts in thinking.
Second, to the anti-Garth Jennings camp, could it possibly be any worse than a low budget 1980's BBC TV production?
Yes, it could easily be much, much, worse. I'm taking bets it will be an unwatchable disaster but hope to be amazed to the contrary. Jenning's moron value aside, most of the casting announced is already extremely dodgy. Add to that the film is being made in Hollywood and you've got an almost sure fire loser.
Not that I have anything against Hollywood per se, but they just don't seem to get British culture (witness the absolute travesty that is the upcoming Thunderbirds movie - did they even watch any of the TV series?).
I actually sorta liked the BBC TV series, believe it or not.
One of the reasons the BBC TV series really worked was because of the limited effects, though some of them were really complicated for the TV of the time. All the "computer" parts for the Guide were (apparently) done by hand...
Anyway, with the (comparative) lack of budget they had to rely more on (shock!) acting and (horror!) humour to make it work. And it did (Trillian perhaps excepted).
Putting an MTV director in charge of Guide style humour and class is like having Bill Clinton teach Japanese schoolgirls - you know damn well someone is going to get screwed, and there's going to be a hell of a mess!
Someone else on slashdot, during the last hitchiker thread, addressed the issue of changes quite well: the series has appeared in a variety of mediums, and each time it was different than it was in the other mediums. It's going to be no different with the movies. So try to just enjoy the ride instead of saying, prematurely, "This person isn't right for this party for reasons x, y and z."
"Since it's not a BBC production, it stands a chance of having production values above that of a 2nd grade art class."
Crack jokes about it if you like. But HGtGttG was and Dr. Who were far better than the scifi we have today. When you have '2nd grade art class' effects, you have to focus more on making the script interesting.
Frankly, I wouldn't complain a whole lot about the fx they had back then. I recently purchased the DVD for Hitchhiker and they actually stunned me with one of their effects. The guide had a full color animated screen. Today that'd be done with either a PocketPC (like in Nemesis) or by digitally adding the imagery later. What they did back then was they found a neat way to funnel light from a projector in that thing. Ingenius.
It's also worth mentioning that the animations they did for the guide won awards. Despite being hand-animated, they were quite effective in selling people on the idea that they were watching a computerized presentation of the information the Guide contained.
As an artist who does that kind of work, I found Hitchhiker to be surprisingly good, even today. I nitpicked it far less than I did Episode II.
"Derp de derp."
Man on the Moon is also brilliant.
It really doesn't matter who plays whom. What's more worrying is that Adams' script is being rewritten. HHGTTG is probably the finest comedy written thus far in human history and the idea that somebody could do better than DNA is tantamount to heresy.
The main reason the film has never been made is that Adams was never happy with what Hollywod was offering. Do we really thing he'd be happy with some droid scriptwriter massacring his work?
If The Powers That Be didn't like DNA's script, they don't deserve to benefit from it.
I'm sure even the most patriotic of American slashdot readers will agree with me that the Englishness of the piece should be retained, and Arthur Dent not moved to New York state etc. etc. That said, I am mindful of the fact I said similar things about High Fidelity and was shown to be completely wrong.