The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (17 page)

And then in May 2001 came the call to say that Douglas had died. In one week I flew out to California for Douglas’s funeral and home to England for my father’s. It was emotionally and physically exhausting. As friends gathered in the weeks and months after Douglas’s death, much of the talk was about the immense frustration Douglas had experienced over all the years of trying to make “the Movie.” It had almost become an obsession for him and sometime later I asked his widow, Jane Belson, whether, should it prove possible to somehow get the movie made, it would have her approval. She simply said yes, and made one comment in particular, that given the directing and producing team who finally brought the movie home was very prescient. “Get a young director, someone who didn’t grow up with
Hitchhiker’s
in its first flush of success. Remember that Douglas was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote
Hitchhiker’s.
Find somebody with a current energy, not trendy, but cool.
Hitchhiker’s
was cool when it first came out.”

So I spoke to Roger Birnbaum again and as always he offered his support and continued enthusiasm. He remembers the call well. “After Douglas’s death we froze, and then it was a call from you, saying that the estate was still up for making the movie, that started us going again. We still loved the project and out of respect for Douglas were happy to try and get it made.”

I also spoke to Jay Roach, whose support I knew would be essential. The project needed all the allies we could find and a film like
Hitchhiker’s
had to have “insider” support if it was to stand any chance of being made. Once he knew that Jane Belson wanted the movie made, his deep affection for Douglas meant that Jay also gladly stepped back into the ring as director.

We all knew that without a new draft we would go nowhere;
Hitchhiker’s
could be in limbo for years. It was absolutely necessary to hire a new writer, and through Jennifer Perrini (Jay’s partner at his production company Everyman Pictures) at Jay’s company, Everyman Pictures, we were very lucky to find Karey Kirkpatrick. He tells the story of his involvement in his own self-interview (page 268). Karey was not a
Hitchhiker
fan—although he became one—but simply came to the screenplay as an experienced writer who could see where some of the problems lay. His starting point was Douglas’s final script, and I was able to make available a lot of material from the hard drive on Douglas’s Mac—earlier drafts, back stories and notes on solving problems. And so Karey and Jay, back in the director’s chair, set to work on a new “take,” establishing the basic direction in which the screenplay could now go.

Several months later, on an early spring morning in 2002, a meeting was called at Roger Birnbaum’s house in Beverly Hills. There, with a log fire in the grate and smoked salmon and bagels on the table, Karey Kirkpatrick pitched the take that he and Jay had worked on to Nina Jacobson, Jay Roach, Jennifer Perrini, Roger Birnbaum, Jon Glickman and Derek Evans. This was the core group of people who could get this movie made. Karey began his pitch with an overview of how the narrative in the movie might work. He just read the “story so far” from the beginning of
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
which summarized the events of
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy.

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of readout, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever.

Or so it would seem.

Two of these strange, apelike creatures survived.

Arthur Dent escaped at the very last moment because an old friend of his, Ford Prefect, suddenly turned out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he had hitherto claimed; and, more to the point, he knew how to hitch rides on flying saucers.

Tricia McMillan—or Trillian—had skipped the planet six months earlier with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the then President of the Galaxy.

Two survivors.

They are all that remains of the greatest experiment ever conducted—to find the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Nina proclaimed that she got that. We had a broad narrative shape: start with the destruction of Earth, and tell the story of the journey to Magrathea, the fabled planet-building planet. Much of the new material that is now in the movie is about the difficulty of getting to Magrathea and it is here that Douglas invented new plot devices and characters such as the fabulous “point of view” gun and Humma Kavula, the crazed missionary, who preaches about “the coming of the great white handkerchief.” The other key decision was that the movie would have Arthur as the central character and we would experience the galaxy from his point of view. It sounds very simple, but over the years various drafts had tried placing Zaphod or even the Vogons at the centre of the story; but perhaps feeling less of a creative need to reinvent than Douglas, Karey worked his way towards a narrative structure that worked. He has a very good ear for English humour—its irony and its wariness of sentiment—but also a very good grip on the Hollywood structural sensibility.

Finally there was a sense that we were on the right track. But then barely had it sputtered into life again than the movie nearly faltered again. In the weeks following the “fireside pitch,” Disney, which had already spent considerable sums on rights acquisition and various drafts, balked at paying Karey’s rewrite fee and the whole thing looked like it might fall apart. But Roger Birnbaum and his partner Gary Barber saved the project: Spyglass demonstrated their absolute commitment to making the movie by paying for the rewrite themselves. Jon Glickman of Spyglass describes this crucial episode.

“We had this meeting with Disney at which Nina Jacobson—who’s a big supporter of the movie now, but at the time still felt the thing was just too weird—said, ‘I’m not going to pay for Karey.’ Now Karey’s an expensive writer: he’d just had a big hit movie in
Chicken Run
and had written
James and the
Giant Peach
and we were all in danger of the
Hitchhiker
movie just slipping away, yet again. I don’t know what got into Spyglass at that moment except that we loved the material so much. We’d lived with this for six years and I think a little bit of it for us was the emotional connection to Douglas. It was completely out of synch with how we normally do business. But we picked up the tab for Karey’s rewrite. This was extremely risky . . . we were just paying for the draft basically and thinking, ‘Hopefully Karey will figure this out.’ That’s just what Karey, working with Jay directing the rewrite, set out to achieve.”

Bob Bookman, one of Hollywood’s most experienced agents, comments on the phenomenal commitment of so many people to
Hitchhiker’s:
“Movies are a collaborative medium, both getting them to the starting block and actually making them. There were so many people involved over so many years, you, Ed, Jay, Roger, several people you could look at and say ‘if they weren’t involved this wouldn’t have happened’ and yet the magic of it is that all these people hung in there to the point where we could launch it.”

And the result was that in the late spring of 2002, Karey, continuing to work with Jay and with input from Spyglass and me, started to write. Whenever Karey hit a problem he went back to the radio series, to the books, to The Salmon of Doubt
⁵
, to the bits of Douglas’s hard drive that I had made available, for an insight into Douglas’s mind. He delivered his script just before Christmas that year. I came home late one evening and it was sitting in my e-mail. I sat and read it in one go with the hairs rising on the back of my neck. Here was a script that was utterly Hitchhiker in its sensibility but had now made the leap and felt like a movie, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Ed Victor recalls a conversation with Michael Nesmith about the critical importance to a movie of getting the right script. “Michael said, ‘If you are a producer of a film, you have a property, and what you are doing is bringing the studio head to the mouth of a dark cave and saying, “Inside that cave is a golden statue. Just give me 100 million dollars.
⁶
You will have that statue. Go in and get that statue.” Well, the studio chief doesn’t want to give you 100 million dollars so that he can go into the dark.’ And then Nesmith pauses and says, ‘The screenplay is a flashlight and with it you can point into the dark cave and just see the glint, the outlines of a statue. Then he gives you the 100 million dollars and goes in and sees if he can grab the statue . . .’ I thought that was a very clever metaphor. You had to see someone doing a script of
Hitchhiker’s
before you could get it as a movie, for all that it had proved its success in book or radio form.” Now we had a flashlight.

In the new year, Jay could see that the project was accelerating, and with other movie commitments bearing down on him, decided that he should step aside as director for the last time although he remained on board as producer. So we needed to find a new director. Disappointing as this was, for the first time we did have a script. In all the long years of trying to make the movie it had always been the other way round— interested directors, but no script. Now there was a currency Hollywood understood and the script was biked around town. Jay knew Spike Jonze, director of
Being John Malkovich
and
Adaptation,
who had once been a leading music-video director, and sent the script to him. There was a general feeling that Spike, who had shown his touch with unusual material, would be a good choice to direct. He was a fan, read the script and liked it but was also committed to other projects. He did, however, play a crucial role in moving us on. He suggested Hammer and Tongs, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, a very creative and respected music video and commercials partnership, whose collaborations have included work for bands and performers such as REM, Blur, Fat Boy Slim and Ali G.

Initially Hammer and Tongs told their agent Frank Wuliger not to bother even sending them the script. They were working on a movie project of their own and they feared that a
Hitchhiker
script emerging from Hollywood with no Douglas around to fight his corner would be likely to ruin something about which they both cared a great deal. But Frank played another small but vital part in keeping the momentum going: he sent the script anyway. It sat on a desk unread for a fortnight until Nick took it home. The next day, with customary understatement, he quietly suggested to Garth that he should take a look. Garth took it home and read almost all of it on the loo, emerging to tell his wife that it actually “wasn’t bad at all.” They could see what a great job Karey had done in letting Douglas’s genius breathe.

As Nick and Garth were on my patch in London I was the first to meet them in person. On a fine spring morning, almost a year on from the log fire in Beverly Hills, I found them on their converted canal boat, ironically just ten minutes’ walk from Douglas’s house in Islington. After all those air miles and moving his family out to California to try and get the movie made, it was about to be “brought home” by a team who lived in England on Douglas’s doorstep. There were chocolate biscuits, a very friendly black dog called Mack and best of all the boat was a homage to the Apple computer. Douglas, as all of his fans know, was a huge Apple devotee—indeed he became an “Apple Master”—and somehow if Nick and Garth had worked in PC city I would probably have had to make my excuses and leave. But they didn’t and I didn’t. From the very first meeting it was clear to me that Nick and Garth had the awareness, the vision and the sense of fun to finally take the helm of the
Hitchhiker’s
movie.

There was one early meeting that sums up that sense of fun and the phenomenal attention to detail that characterizes Nick and Garth. We had a video conference call with Jay, Spyglass and the team at Disney headed by Nina Jacobson. This was boardroom in LA to boardroom in London but Nick and Garth at our end had arranged for a little theatrical curtain, classic red with gold brocade, to be rigged up in front of the camera. When the team in LA arrived for the conference, there on their screen, instead of the normal view of a big desk in a nondescript room, were the closed curtains. When we were ready to begin, Garth, who had attached the curtain pull to his chair, gradually shifted backwards, and the curtains opened and the words “Don’t Panic” rose up on a little board. Nothing sums up Nick and Garth’s sense of playfulness, the line they have trod between freshness and fidelity, and their love of gadgets better than those curtains.