Article – The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Film

Awkward Genius

(Originally published in Inform Magazine, May 2005)

…Two words which do tend to go together, you must agree. Not least when it came to Douglas Adams and his creation The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the galaxy, there lies a small, unregarded green planet. And on this planet they tend to make things called feature films, which are so astonishingly primitive that they still think computer generated effects are a pretty neat idea. This is the story of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, a wholly remarkable film that has taken nigh on 25 years to get to the screen, which might possibly redefine the phrase ‘development hell’.

It starts with a house. This is the house that Douglas Nathan Adams (DNA to his friends) lived in, and in 1979 he’d just finished being script editor of Doctor Who and was now about to enjoy the success of his radio series The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy with the release of a novel based on the same. Even before the phenomenal success of this book (which came fourth in the BBC’s Big Read poll), people were interested in making a film of the story of how Arthur Dent finds himself lost and alone in a dangerous universe after the planet Earth is destroyed.

However, this early attempt to make a film soon ground to a halt when Adams realised that he was only doing it for the money, and money was no longer an issue, because the book was selling phenomenal amounts. Then, in the early eighties, none other than Ivan Reitman simply offered him more money than seemed strictly reasonable in order to make a film. In retrospect Reitman was perhaps not the best person to do a project like this, as his reputation at the time was based entirely on the sub-John Landis crudities of Stripes. When he and Adams failed to see eye to eye one too many times, Reitman walked away from the project and made Ghostbusters instead, and Adams gratefully left Hollywood and returned home to England, rather richer but less than happy with the whole affair. It was at this point he famously described filmmaking as, “grilling a steak by getting a succession of people to come into the room and breathe on it.”

Yet part of the problem with this whole thing may have been Adams himself. The stories about his lateness are legion, and he was also completely unable to be hands-off about anything. All through the making of both the radio and TV series he was ever-present (very unusual for a writer) and the perfectionism which, possibly more than anything else, made him so beloved also made him a nightmare to work with. Even after the Reitman effort, people were still queuing up to make the film, yet they all fell foul of Adams’ precision, even his good friend Terry Jones.

There was also Adams’ paradoxical desire to move away from the Hitchhiker’s world and yet retain total control over it. Over the years, Adams wrote many drafts of a film screenplay, often tinkering with the basic concept and inserting things which he happened to like at the time. Ask any filmmaker and they’ll tell you this is not very conducive to the collaborative process of making films. And as someone who always declared that he never wanted to be a writer and hated the actual process, Adams showed an almost masochistic desire to torture himself with his creation. He wrote four sequels to the book in the end, and even when he tried to get away from it with his Dirk Gently novels, was planning to make a sixth book when he died.

Alas, Douglas Adams’ death in 2001 may have been the best thing to happen to get the film made. Four years earlier he had signed another deal, with Austin Powers director Jay Roach assigned to the project. Once again living in Los Angeles, this is what occupied the last four years of Adams’ life, as he slowly produced yet more tortuous versions of the screenplay. The script which is finally being made has Adams’ name on it, but also that of Karey Kirkpatrick, who wrote Chicken Run. No doubt it was his job to make a coherent movie script out of the tortuous mess of Adams’ various versions.

The film arrives with an surprisingly good team – British producer and director in video makers Hammer and Tongs (who did Blur’s Coffee and TV and Supergrass’s Pumpin’ on Your Stereo) – as well as a pretty perfect cast: Martin Freeman is ideal as the eternally put-upon Arthur – one of Adams’ many stipulations was that he should be played by an Englishman. Rapper Mos Def seems an odd choice as Ford Prefect, although I suppose a black Brooklynite is as alien to Arthur as anyone from Betelgeuse. Sam Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox as the character was originally envisioned, a Californian beach bum with blonde hair (the two heads are still in place – you just can’t see the other one). And Stephen Fry is just about ideal as that fountain of all knowledge and wisdom, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy itself.

The film is probably not big enough to be a huge success, but for fans like myself it’s positively manna from heaven. Despite all Adams’ awkwardness when it came to his creation, he did write the best concepts and dialogue in existence. And the only person who could mess that up, seemingly, was Adams himself.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is out now.

Douglas and the Doctor

It’s appropriate that the revival of interest in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy should arrive at the same time as the revival of Doctor Who, as they are often inextricably linked. At the same time Douglas Adams was writing his first, seminal radio series – which would contain all the grand concepts that have been making people’s heads spin for decades now – he was also, thanks to some exceptionally bad planning, writing an episode of Doctor Who – Tom Baker episode The Pirate Planet. At the time, Doctor Who was just about the best place for a young writer interested in sci-fi and daft ideas to get work.

As a result, there is plenty of cross-pollination between the two. The Pirate Planet features plenty of Hitchhiker’s in-jokes and a typically bonkers plot that delights in taking the mickey out of sci-fi wordplay. Hitchhiker’s, on the other hand… well how can we say this politely? It’s ripping the almighty piss out of Doctor Who. Ford Prefect is the Doctor amalgam, full of aggravating knowledge about things that no-one should ever have to know and smarmy to boot – although he pointedly prefers to go to a party rather than saving the universe. Arthur is the companion substitute, except he’s got no interest in “excitement, adventure and really wild things”; he just wants to go to a home that no longer exists. It’s as if after writing pages for the good Doctor, Adams took out his frustrations with Hitchhiker’s.

Nevertheless, this never stopped Adams accepting the job of script editor of Doctor Who the following year, and this is often thought as the show’s golden age, with Adams himself (pseudonymously) writing the best episode of Doctor Who ever: City of Death. However, success was overtaking him and he left the show after a particularly knackering year. He felt frustrated by the huge work generated by one of the show’s strengths; that with ability to go anywhere, anywhen it provided a lot more work for producers and writers working on such a strict budget. Despite the obvious piss-taking he did of the show, he remained a fan and, like most true fans, was often highly critical of the show in subsequent years.

It would have been nice to hear his opinions of the highly regarded new series of Doctor Who, although there’s no doubt that Executive Producer Russell T. Davies has taken a lot from the fun-but-far-out template established by Adams. After all Billie Piper’s character does like a cup of tea.