Spring 2005 was a season of good news and bad news for science fiction fans. On the one hand, the sixth, and probably last, Star Wars film opened. On the other, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy made its appearance.
The question is: Which was the good news and which was the bad? The answer depends on your hopes and expectations. (And no, the answer is not “42,” smart alecks.)
Personally, I’m a fan of both…sort of. I was eighteen when the original Star Wars appeared; it was the first movie I ever paid to see twice. At twenty-one I was astonished by The Empire Strikes Back, which boasted a deeper, richer story than its predecessor and was gorgeous to look at to boot. But at twenty-four I was frustrated and angered by The Return of the Jedi, which seemed a redundant anticlimax.
When George Lucas started his prequel trilogy, I was cautiously optimistic, but The Phantom Menace proved my caution was more justified than my optimism. By the time Revenge of the Sith was on the horizon, I was looking forward to it the way I look forward to a dentist appointment: hoping things turn out all right, but expecting more pain than pleasure.
There was a certain symmetry, though, in seeing the last Star Wars movie premiere just a few weeks after the first, and probably only, Hitchhiker’s Guide movie. The two properties have been in the public consciousness, one way or another, for about the same length of time, and one was probably instrumental in the creation of the other.
Each property has a global base of fans who anticipated these movies with a mixture of excitement and dread. That’s every bit as true for Hitchhiker’s Guide as for Star Wars. Douglas Adams fans—and count me among them—may be fewer in number than George Lucas’s legions, but we’re every bit as passionate. If you’re a fan of either, you probably had some of these thoughts: What if it’s terrible? Will I be disappointed? If it’s great, will I be left wishing for more, knowing I won’t get it? Can it possibly live up to our hopes?
And that, in a nutshell, was the challenge facing Chicken Run screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick when he accepted the task of completing the screenplay for Hitchhiker’s Guide. Adams already had a working draft of the screenplay, but when he died in 2001 it was left unfinished. For Kirkpatrick, completing it meant assuming the legacy of a beloved author’s most beloved book—a task he took quite seriously. “I was in service of what Doug was trying to do, and my job was to be in the background as much as possible,” Kirkpatrick said. “If nobody could tell where Doug left off and I took up, I was successful. When the director came on board, I was in service of his interpretation. So I was a craftsman on this as much as a creator.”
That’s not to say Kirkpatrick made no creative contribution. In fact, he may be selling himself short. Kirkpatrick won’t say so himself, but many of the key players behind the film admit that Adams, brilliant as he was, had become an obstacle to the film’s completion, and it was Kirkpatrick’s work that brought the movie to fruition after almost twenty years of development.
For those who haven’t had the pleasure of reading The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, here’s an attempt at a synopsis—as much as it’s possible to synopsize something that has more in common with Monty Python than Obi-Wan Kenobi.
On an ordinary English day, an ordinary Englishman named Arthur Dent awakens to discover that his house is about to be demolished by an officious and bureaucratic construction crew to make way for a highway bypass. As he attempts to stop the bulldozers, his friend Ford Prefect comes round to tell him that they should go to a pub right away, because the world is going to end in ten minutes. Ford, it turns out, is being quite literal: In ten minutes, the Earth is demolished by a particularly ill-tempered and bureaucratic alien race, the Vogons, to make way for a hyperspace bypass.
Just before the implosion, however, Ford hitches a ride aboard a Vogon ship and takes Arthur with him. Ford, we learn, is really an alien, a galactic hitchhiker who’s been stuck on Earth for fifteen years doing research for the ultimate reference book, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. This tome, whose text is entirely electronic (think the Internet in a box), has on its cover one always-appropriate bit of advice: “Don’t Panic.”
Thereafter, Arthur finds himself a reluctant adventurer as he and Ford are thrown off the Vogon ship and, improbably, caught up in the quest of the galaxy’s rogue president, Zaphod Beeblebrox, to find the legendary planet of Magrathea and its vast hoard of gold.
Along the way, Arthur learns that he’s not quite the last survivor of Earth. The planet’s two most intelligent species escaped: the dolphins and the mice. (Mice, he discovers, are not at all what they’ve appeared to be all these years.) In an improbable twist, also among the survivors is a girl named Trillian whom Arthur had fancied. To Arthur’s frustration, Trillian shows up on the arm of President Beeblebrox. The president’s spaceship, the Heart of Gold, is powered by the new Infinite Improbability Drive, which permits near-instantaneous access to any point in the universe, but also causes wildly improbable things to happen with disturbing regularity.
Arthur also learns that some millions of years earlier, the second-greatest computer of all time had delivered the answer to the meaning of life, the universe, and everything: 42. Unfortunately, that computer could not deliver the question that “42” answered. That would require the greatest computer of all time. Arthur is surprised to discover that he holds the key to finding the output of that computer: the Ultimate Question.
By Adams’s own account, the idea for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy came to him while “lying drunk in a field in Innsbruck, Austria, in 1971.” He was traveling with a copy of The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to Europe, and as he watched the stars come out, “it occurred to me that if only someone would write a ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ as well, then I for one would be off like a shot. Having had this thought I promptly fell asleep and forgot about it for six years.” In those years, Adams attended Cambridge University, where he appeared in the school’s Footlights troupe, following in the footsteps of one of his heroes, Monty Python’s Graham Chapman. After Cambridge he became a freelance writer, and in 1977, when he was twenty-five, a BBC radio producer approached him about writing a science fiction comedy project.
It was the year of Star Wars, and lighthearted science fiction seemed just the ticket. The following year, March 8, 1978, saw the debut of Adams’s BBC project, a radio production called The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was modest about its success, but the show was a hit. Not that it made him rich: he went to work on the long-running British TV sci-fi hit Doctor Who before he was approached about turning Hitchhiker’s Guide into a book, and when he said yes it was largely because he needed the money. The book hit stores in September 1979 and promptly rocketed to the top of the bestseller lists.
Things snowballed from there: more radio episodes, a BBC TV series, and more novels: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe; Life, the Universe and Everything; So Long and Thanks for All the Fish; and Mostly Harmless. But the idea of a film adaptation loomed in his imagination. Adams’s close friend Robbie Stamp, who became an executive producer on the film, said that “Doug had always, always wanted there to be a movie…almost from the moment that Hitchhiker’s Guide was a big radio success.”
Adams wasn’t interested in a low-budget Doctor Who–style treatment of the story, either. “He always wanted it to be done in Hollywood,” said Stamp. He sold the rights to Ivan Reitman in the early 1980s and moved to Los Angeles to write the screenplay. But the project bogged down. The story proved to be very episodic—no surprise, given its origins as a series of radio episodes. “A series of stuff just happens to this character,” said Stamp. “It’s a very picaresque novel in that sense. You needed to find some character arcs, which took some time.”
Adams wasn’t idle. He developed new characters and sci-fi devices, added scenes, let go of big chunks of the book. Even so, the script lingered for years without gelling, while Reitman went on to direct Ghostbusters and other popular comedies. Mike Nesmith, of Monkees fame, worked with Adams on it for a while, but their collaboration came to nothing. Adams never gave up on the idea, but it wasn’t until the success of 1997’s Men in Black that Hollywood’s interest in the book revived.
At that point, Caravan Pictures and Disney Studios got involved, acquiring the rights and attaching Jay Roach, director of the Austin Powers series. Adams went back to work on the screenplay, still tinkering. As the years went by, the rights went from Caravan to a new entity, Spyglass Entertainment, formed by Caravan’s Roger Birnbaum and a new partner, Gary Barber. Adams was still working on the script—but by the late 1990s those working with him had begun to realize that he was as much a part of the problem as of the solution.
“We needed to edit ourselves, and it was difficult to do that with Douglas in the process,” said Birnbaum. “He wrote the book, it was his story, and he loved a lot of it. He wasn’t a filmmaker. It was harder for him to look at his work and say, ‘This part is not necessary in order to tell the story.’ He loved it all. We loved it all, too, but eventually we had to make a movie.”
Kirkpatrick defends Adams. “Hitchhiker’s Guide was an organic, living, breathing, not-sacred thing for him,” he says. “What plagued him more than his own [concern about] what to let go of was the fans saying ‘You can’t not have this, you can’t not have that.’ Being loyal to his fan base—that’s a conundrum.”
Adams finally turned in a draft that was well over two hundred pages. The project was stalled when he collapsed from a heart attack during a workout and died in May 2001 at the age of forty-nine. “When he passed away, he froze us all,” said Birnbaum. “We were stunned by the loss. He was the creator of that beautiful book and the reason we were all doing this.”
It was Robbie Stamp who called Adams’s widow and asked whether the project should go forward. If it could be done, she said, then it should.
But there was still that script problem. “The biggest challenge was bringing this wonderful story and making it contemporary,” said Birnbaum. “It was written twenty-five years ago. How do we make it relevant to audiences today and keep Douglas’s voice alive?”
The year before Adams died, Roach had seen and enjoyed Chicken Run, a Claymation feature by Nick Park of Wallace & Gromit fame. He sent the existing script of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the screenwriter, Karey Kirkpatrick.
An actor turned writer who’d graduated from USC Film School in the early 1980s, Kirkpatrick had heard of The Hitchhiker’s Guide but never read the book. “My first thought was, I don’t think I can do this, this guy’s too good. I don’t think my words can mingle seamlessly with his words. I was a little intimidated.”
But the chance to work with Roach was irresistible, and Kirkpatrick signed on. He inherited not just the published material, but access to Adams’s computer hard drive: a treasure trove of notes, new characters, new devices, and other elements Adams had invented to fill in the gaps in the story.
Kirkpatrick was highly aware of the importance of preserving the book’s spirit and tone. He saw his primary goal as “just to keep it satiric and not take anything too seriously…retaining its quirky, understated British sensibility, and its irreverence.” At the same time, he needed to find the strong linear story and character arc that had been missing all along. “That was Question Number One,” he said, “how do you create a strong, emotional story?”
The answer, it seemed, would be to focus on the growth of the hero. “We settled on this idea that Arthur’s journey is learning to become a hitchhiker. [At the start of the story,] the hitchhiker spirit is everything he’s missing. Trillian is looking for someone who gets her but who can also hang with her spontaneous spirit, and Arthur has everything except that.”
In the book, Arthur mentions in passing that he’d met a girl at a party, but she’d gone off with someone else. The girl turns out to be Trillian, the “someone else” Zaphod Beeblebrox. Yet the book is hardly a love story: At the party, as it’s depicted in the film, Trillian (then going by the more conventional name Tricia McMillan) sparks to Arthur, but when she asks him to go to Madagascar with her, he flunks the test.
“Arthur’s very rooted to his job and his cups of tea and his house,” said Kirkpatrick, “so he goes on this adventure that frees him from that choice, which prevents him from getting any happiness.”
That adventure, then, became the story’s controlling idea. The story had a strong start—nothing beats having the Earth demolished while the audience is still settling in—and a satisfying ending, but what came between them was still episodic. Kirkpatrick still needed a middle. “[All that] happens in the book is [that we] meet four characters, learn that they’re going to Magrathea, go to Magrathea, and have a long scene there,” he said. Part of his solution was to introduce a new villain: a cult leader named Humma Kavula, played in the film by John Malkovich. Kirkpatrick also added scenes of the Vogons pursuing Beeblebrox’s spaceship, and Trillian being kidnapped and taken to the Vogons’ home planet. As Kirkpatrick said, “All [these] things were created to strengthen the narrative drive.”
Everyone knew, though, that inventing new material had its pitfalls. As Robbie Stamp explained, “We were always careful after Douglas had died to invent as little as we could. The world Doug created was so incredibly rich, [our approach was,] don’t invent unless you’ve got to. That’s why Karey’s done such a stand-out job on this…. If we did need a piece of plot or something to [bring a] character across a scene, he did it. But it’s very, very seamless.”
To be true to the book, Kirkpatrick also had to keep in long sections of voice-over—quotations from the reference book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, which Arthur consults through the course of the story. Those sections were absolutely indispensable to keeping the tone and voice of the original story, but they created a headache for Kirkpatrick.
“When you’re in development and pre-production, script length becomes the god you’re serving, and when you have a Guide entry, that gives you pages and pages of additional page count.” This posed money problems for the production. “When you’re budgeting, they go by page count,” he explained.
“They break down a script into eighths of a page. How many eighths of a page do you get a day? How many setups?” Of course, the budget people understand that there’s a difference between an action sequence and two people sitting at a table, but length still proved problematic—“especially [for] a comedy,” said Kirkpatrick. “My first draft was one hundred fifty-two pages. Brevity truly is the soul of wit. Comedies just don’t play beyond ninety minutes. I think at the end the script got down to about a hundred and twelve pages.” But every step of the way, he says, all he heard was “It’s too long, it’s too long, cut it down.”
Kirkpatrick always maintained that the movie wouldn’t play as long as the budgeters claimed, because the voice-over material played over action, meaning that several pages of script would overlap. At one point he even produced a draft without the Guide entries—not because he was considering dropping them, but to show the true length of the script.
Money was a particular problem on Hitchhiker’s Guide because Disney wasn’t entirely sold on the project. The studio chiefs who had bought it for Caravan, Joe Roth and David Vogel, were gone, and their replacements—worried that they were backing a $120 million art film—grew wary of funding the project further. Spyglass eventually put up its own money to get to a finished script. Only when Disney saw Kirkpatrick’s script did they agree to go forward, and at that point, they offered to finance the movie entirely.
By the time the movie was ready to go, though, Jay Roach had moved on to other projects. Spyglass approached Spike Jonze, who told them, “You need me five years ago.” He sent them to a little-known British team, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, that called itself Hammer & Tongs. “They said they didn’t want to give their answer until they talked to the writer,” said Kirkpatrick, which proved just how un-Hollywood they were. Kirkpatrick told them the old joke about the actress who was so naive she slept with the writer. They wanted to meet him anyway.
Jennings and Goldsmith were fans of the book and liked the script, but were worried about an American writing such an iconic British story. “I told them I was trying to do the un–Star Wars. Whatever Star Wars would do, we’d do the opposite. They said they were thinking the same thing.”
Jennings was so determined to work on the film that—even before he got the job—he showed up to his first meeting with Disney’s president of production, Nina Jacobson, with almost the entire movie storyboarded. He came in with a strong take on how to give the film an appropriately rough-edged indie feel while keeping the budget down. Jacobson and studio chairman Dick Cook liked the approach; relieved to find a relatively inexpensive way to make the picture, they gave it a green light.
Even so, the studio didn’t know what to think until the movie’s first test screening. They were flabbergasted at the positive response. In the lead-up to the movie’s London premiere, Disney brass was calling the Internet buzz on the film the best they’d ever seen on any title. The movie opened strongly, winning its opening weekend with more than $21 million—hardly a big number, but good considering the film’s relatively cheap budget. But the following weekend the grosses fell off sharply. The fanatical core group of Adams fans had turned out to see the movie early, but thereafter the movie never found a broad audience. It topped out at around $51 million in the U.S. and $92 million worldwide—significantly short of the numbers the film needed to make much money for Disney.
In that battle of the 2005 space-opera debuts, then, George Lucas got the last laugh. Revenge of the Sith was hailed as probably the second best of all the Star Wars movies, behind only The Empire Strikes Back, and while it didn’t gross as much as some of its predecessors, it probably dropped nine figures’ worth of profit into Lucas’s coffers.
With Disney slashing its live-action film slate in recent years, we may not see a film version of Adams’s sequel, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, any time soon. But Hitchhiker’s Guide fans consoled themselves with the fact that the initial story was made at all—and that many of the surreal, fantastical, bizarre, and wildly improbable features of the book survived the transition to the screen. “If we, in a big Hollywood movie,” said Stamp, “can have a missile that turns into a whale that meditates on the nature of its existence and language as it falls and ends with a big funny joke—‘I hope the ground and I will be friends’—then you certainly have Hitchhiker’s Guide.”
Despite his excitement about the finished film, Stamp spoke for many when he said, “So many of these moments are so bittersweet. Every time we achieve something I’m desperately proud we’ve achieved it—and desperately sad Doug isn’t here.”
My Best Friend’s Wedding
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY P. J. Hogan
SCREENPLAY BY Ronald Bass
PRODUCERS: Ronald Bass and Jerry Zucker
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Gil Netter and Patricia Whitcher
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Predawn Productions, TriStar Pictures, and Zucker Brothers Pictures
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY James Newton Howard
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY László Kovács
FILM EDITING BY Garth Craven and Lisa Fruchtman
CASTING BY David Rubin
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Richard Sylbert
ART DIRECTION BY Karen Fletcher Trujillo
SET DECORATION BY William Kemper Wright
COSTUME DESIGN BY Jeffrey Kurland
MAJOR AWARDS
None
CAST
Julia Roberts…JULIANNE POTTER
Dermot Mulroney…MICHAEL O’NEAL
Cameron Diaz…KIMBERLY WALLACE
Rupert Everett…GEORGE DOWNES
Philip Bosco…WALTER WALLACE
M. Emmet Walsh…JOE O’NEAL
Susan Sullivan…ISABELLE WALLACE
Paul Giamatti…RICHARD THE BELLMAN
Carrie Preston…MANDY NEWHOUSE
Rachel Griffiths…SAMANTHA NEWHOUSE
Christopher Masterson…SCOTTY O’NEAL
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $46 million
RELEASE DATE: June 20, 1997
U.S. GROSS: $127.1 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $172.1 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“The summer-date-movie supreme for pretty women and the gay men they love…. Aussie director P.J. Hogan makes a funny, touching job of it…”
—ROLLING STONE
“One of the pleasures of Ronald Bass’ screenplay is the way it subverts the usual comic formulas that would fuel a plot like this.”
—ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“[The movie] employs the infamous green-eyed monster to propel the action. The bedrock of base instincts is unsettling but nonetheless holds one’s interest, and Ronald Bass’ script concocts an unusual resolution that’s unexpectedly satisfying.”
—LEONARD KLADY, VARIETY