The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Genre: Science Fiction/Comedy.

Studio: Hollywood Pictures.
Production Company: Unknown.

Project Phase: Development Hell.

Who's In It: Unknown.
Who's Making It: Jay Roach (Director); Douglas Adams, Jay Roach (Screenwriters); Roger Birnbaum (Producer); Douglas Adams, Robby Stamp (Executive Producers); based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy novel by Douglas Adams.

Premise: Arthur Dent starts his morning off by finding out his cozy English home is being immediately demolished to make way for a new highway bypass. By the time brunch is being served, Arthur's morning goes from bleak to miserable as he finds out his cozy blue-green planet is being immediately demolished to make way for a new interstellar highway bypass.

Rescued from the destruction of the Earth by Ford Prefect, Arthur's friend-who-is-really-an-alien, the two 'hitchhike' on-board spacecrafts and encounter the owners, who're often annoyed to see they have stowaways. Thankfully, there exists something to help Arthur cope with his loss of fixed address: the ultimate traveling companion and a necessity for any intergalactic bohemian, a copy of the bestselling book The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

It's a shame Arthur's still miserable, though.

Release Date: Summer 2000.

Comments: So you have been living under a rock for the past twenty years and this is the first you've heard about the book, eh? Ah. Well, what can we tell you? It's got the utter destruction of the planet, a race of aliens whose poetry makes you want to commit suicide, one paranoid and depressed android, a rubbery fish creature that when placed inside your ear canal translates any audible langauge instantaneously, the creators of Earth (who turn out to be mice) and ultimately the question to life, the universe and everything. It'll make you laugh out loud while you read it and have you sleepless at night when you realize that the universe actually does makes as little sense as the way Adams' wrote it.

Even though the property has had huge success being adapted into radio plays, a television mini-series and computer games, any plans for a big-budget feature have always ended up at the wrong end of a Vogon Constructor Fleet. But now that Sony Pictures has given Disney 250 million good reasons why they should do it (that's how much Men In Black grossed domestically, for those of you not hip to the lingo, sweetcakes), chances are better than ever before we'll get to see Arthur, Ford, Zaphod, Trillian, Marvin and the rest of the universe up on the big screen shortly after the turn of the millennium.

Rumors: Word has it the ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal is asking for a cameo or else he'll eat one of the associate producers.

Scoop Feedback:

November 23, 1997... We've heard trickles from the digital creek about what's not happening with this property for the past two years. But on this November day, a scooper came in from the cold and gave us our first semi-solid scoop that something was indeed beginning to form again from the on-again, off-again Hitchhiker's Guide film project...

" Douglas Adams along with Terry Jones of Monty Python were at the Carle Place New York Barnes and Noble on November 2st to promote the book 'Douglas Adams' Starship Titanic' which was written by Jones. Adams was asked if there would ever be a Hitchhiker's movie. His reply was that the film was finally going to be made and that final negotiations were being done while he was on the book tour. He expected that the offical announcement would appear before Christmas. He stated that he knew who the director was but could not yet announce it.He stated that the film was dead for all this time because the wisdom in Hollywood was that Sci-fi comedy didn't work. Enter Men in Black and its' huge take at the box office. (Terry Jones and Douglas Adams both denied Jones would direct.)" [Big thanks to 'Zaphod 9' for breaking the news to us and the world!]

We reported this in our Director's Cut page in early December, but the much-hoped for announcement never came...until...

January 6, 1998... Daily Variety reports that Disney has aquired the film rights to Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide property. David Vogel, the president of Disney's affiliate distrirbution company Hollywood Pictures, purchased the rights with the director of Austin Powers, Jay Roach, set to direct the film for an anticipated summer 2000 release. Douglas Adams and Roach will write the script, with the film hoped to be in pre-production in early 1999. Joy! [Submitted for inclusion in the Guide by 'rpouria', 'mattrobb', Todd Dupler.]

We did a bit of back-searching through our immense database and collated some of the THGTTG scoops from over the years, ironing out the project's rough childhood. The project was aquired by Ivan Reitman in the mid-eighties, then the rights were bought back by Adams (who was reportedly upset with the way that adaptation panned out.) Another scoop sent to us was during the time the property was still with former Monkee Mike Nesmith (the one with the toque!) and his company Pacific Arts. (Incidentially, Nesmith will still be involved with the Disney/Hollywood Pictures version, but in an unknown capacity -- which may mean Pacific Arts helped bring it to Disney?) In any case, the scooper sent us Douglas Adams' dream cast for the movie version of his book at that time, circa 1996:

Arthur: Simon Jones
Ford: Jeff Goldblum
Slartibartfast: Sean Connery
Zaphod: Michael Keaton
Marvin: Stephen Moore
Trillian: Amanda Donahoe

Mmm...Amanda Donahoe. And yes, that would be the same Simon Jones who starred in the 1982 BBC mini-series Adams dreamcasted for the feature. [The Vogon Poetry Appreciation Club would like to thank 'svensson' for forwarding us this information; additional gratitudes must be said of Leif Rustvold for netting the Adams' cast list. Your awards, the complete works of some of the greatest Vogon love poetry ever written, are in the mail.]

March 12, 1998... Douglas Adams gave a speech to the SQL server group at Microsoft in Seattle Tuesday March 10th. After delivering the speech, the scooper had the opportunity to ask the writer some questions about the developing Hitchhiker's Guide movie. ""The first movie will be drawn only from the first book," Adams said when asked about the movie's plotline. "With the scope of the books trying to adapt any more than one book per movie would be impossible. We do plan on sequels if the first movie is successful."

Adams also mentioned that there are plans afoot for adapting his other book, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency too... [Thanks to our man Keith @ Microsoft for helping us get where we want to go today.]

April 10, 1998... Our good reader 'Fuzzybutt' was perusing the print edition of The Onion, a Madison/Wisconsin area humor newspaper. In the paper was a recent interview with Douglas Adams, who addressed the latest goings-on with the Hitchhiker's feature...

Onion: You've got the movie, too. I'd heard rumors of a Hitchhiker's Guide movie kicking around for decades.

Douglas Adams: Oh, well, yeah. Although it sort of bubbles under, there have been two previous sources of rumors. One was when I originally sold the rights about 15 years ago to Ivan Reitman, who was not as well-known then as he is now. It really didn't work out, because once we got down to it, Ivan and I didn't really see eye-to-eye. In fact, it turned out he hadn't actually read the book before he bought it. He'd merely read the sales figures. I think it really wasn't his cup of tea, so he wanted to make something rather different. Eventually, we agreed to differ and went our respective ways, and by this time the ownership had passed from him to Columbia, and he went on to make a movie called Ghostbusters, so you can imagine how irritated I was by that. [Laughs.] It sat there owned by Columbia for many years. I think Ivan Reitman then got somebody else to write a script based on it, which is, I think, the worst script I'd ever read. Unfortunately, it has my name on it, and the other writer's, whereas I did not contribute a single comma to it. I've only just discovered that that script has been sitting in script city, or whatever it is, for a long time, and that everyone assumes I wrote it and am therefore a terrible screenwriter. Which is rather distressing to me. So then, a few years ago, I was introduced to someone who became a great friend of mine called Michael Nesmith, who has done a number of different things in his career: In addition to being a film producer, he was originally one of The Monkees. Which is kind of odd when you get to know him, because he's such a serious, thoughtful, quiet chap, but with quiet reserves of impish glee. So his proposal was that we go into partnership together to make this. He's the producer, and I do the scripts and so on. We had a very good time working on it for quite a while, but I just think Hollywood at that point saw the thing as old. It's been around the block. And basically, what I was being told an awful lot was essentially, 'Science-fiction comedy will not work as a movie. And here's why not: If it could work, somebody would have done it already.'

O: That logic seems kind of flawed.

DA: So what happens, of course, is that Men In Black came out this past year, so suddenly somebody has done it already. And Men In Black is... How can I put this delicately? There were elements of it I found quite familiar, shall we say? And suddenly, a comedy science-fiction movie that was very much in the same vein as Hitchhiker's became one of the most successful movies ever made. So, that kind of changed the landscape a little bit. Suddenly, people kind of wanted it. The project with Michael... In the end, we hadn't gotten it to take, so we parted company very good friends, and still are. I just hope that there will be other projects in the future that he and I will work on together, because I like him enormously and we got on very well together. And also, the more time I get to spend in Santa Fe, the better. So now, the picture's with Disney -- or, more specifically, with Caravan, which is one of the major independent production companies, but it's kind of joined at the hip to Disney. It's been very frustrating not to have made it in the last 15 years; nevertheless, I feel extremely buoyed by the fact that one can make a much, much, much better movie out of it now than one could have 15 years ago. That's in technical terms; in terms of how it will look and how it will work. Obviously, the real quality of the picture is in the writing, and the acting, and the directing, and so on and so forth, and those skills have neither risen nor sunk in 15 years. But at least one substantial area, in how it can be made to look, has improved a great deal.

O: And Jay Roach [Austin Powers] is directing it, right?

DA: That's right. He's a very interesting fellow. I've now spent quite a lot of time talking to him. The key to the whole thing, in many ways, was when I met Jay Roach, because I hit it off very well with him, and thought, 'Here's a very bright, intelligent guy.' Not only is he a bright, intelligent guy, but here's a measure of how bright and intelligent he is: He wants me to work very closely on his movie. Which is always something that endears a writer to a director. In fact, when I was making the original radio series, it was unheard of to do what I did. Because I'd just written it. But I kind of inserted myself in the whole production process. The producer/director was a little surprised by this, but in the end took it in very good grace. So, I had a huge amount to do with the way the program developed, and that's exactly what Jay wants me to do on this movie. So I felt, 'Great, here's somebody I can do business with.' Obviously, I'm saying that at the beginning of a process that's going to take two years. So who knows what's going to happen? All I can say is that at this point in the game, things are set as fair as they possibly could be. So I feel very optimistic and excited about that.

O: It's been nearly 20 years since the radio program, right?

DA: Well, it's almost exactly 20 years. It'll be 20 years next month.

O: What's the enduring appeal of Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy?

DA: Well, I don't know. All I know is that I worked very hard at it, and I worried very much about it, and I think I made things very difficult for myself doing it. And if ever there was an easy way of doing something, I would find a much harder way to do it. And I suspect that the amount that people have found it is not unrelated to the amount of work I put into it. That's a simplistic thing to say, but it's the best I can come up with.

O: Is the idea that the movie will cover the first book?

DA: Yeah. It's funny, because I've been looking around the web at what people have been saying. I've seen, 'He's going to put all five books into it.' People just don't understand the way a book maps onto a movie. Somebody said, and I think quite accurately, that the best source material for a movie is a short story. Which effectively means, yes, it's going to be the first book. Having said that, whenever I sit down and do another version of Hitchhiker, it highly contradicts whichever version went before. The best thing I can say about the movie is that it will be specifically contradicting the first book.

[Submitted by the delightful itchy 'Fuzzybutt'; originally appeared in 'The Onion'.]

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