Douglas Adams’s celebrated sci fi franchise The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy took almost 30 years to make it to the big screen. We revisit Garth Jennings’s underappreciated sci fi parody.
This article first appeared in Film Stories issue #48.
In just about every incarnation, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy begins with a comedy sketch. On the morning that Earthman Arthur Dent’s house is demolished because it’s in the path of a planned motorway bypass, the entire planet is destroyed by the bureaucratic Vogons to make way for a new hyperspace lane. What makes it a story not a sketch is that it keeps asking “and then what happens?”
On the plus side, the modular nature of the story makes it very adaptable, and from the starting point of a BBC radio series in the 1970s, it was translated into a series of novels by Adams, as well as a stage show, a comic book, a text adventure game, a TV series, and – yes, eventually – a feature film.
Like many properties considered ‘unfilmable’, it was eventually filmed, and released in April 2005. Directed by Garth Jennings, the movie stars Martin Freeman, Zooey Deschanel, Mos Def, Sam Rockwell, Bill Nighy, and John Malkovich, plus a similarly stellar voice cast.
Despite early interest, the film version took a quarter of a century to make it to the big screen, largely because of that sketch-like shaggy- dog story format that we know and love. For starters, its style works against cinematic storytelling so far as the expectations of a big- budget sci-fi movie are concerned.
The story of its bumpy road to the big screen is similarly modular. Fire up the Infinite Improbability Drive and we might have had any configuration of Simon Jones reprising his TV role as Arthur, Bill Murray as Ford Prefect, Jim Carrey as Zaphod Beeblebrox, and/or directors ranging from Ivan Reitman to Spike Jonze, released at any point between 1980 and 2005.
Like the eventual film, though, it makes sense to go a bit more linear than the source material…
Don’t panic!
Adams once said the process of turning The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy into a Hollywood movie was like “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.”
In a 1980 interview, he stated that following the success of Star Wars in the late 1970s, he’d been approached by American producers to adapt the story for the screen but turned them down, because he didn’t want it to be turned into “Star Wars with jokes.”
Instead, a BBC TV adaptation was greenlit in 1979, during Adams’s one-season stint script- editing Doctor Who (and what a season that was!). The six-episode Hitchhiker’s TV series was broadcast on BBC2 in 1981, beating the eventual film version to screens by almost a quarter of a century.
However, talk of a movie version rumbled on throughout the 1980s and more of that story is detailed in David Hughes’s brilliant book, The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made. After attempting to develop a non-Hitchhiker’s film project with Monty Python co-creator and close friend Terry Jones, Adams was next courted by producers Ivan Reitman, Joe Medjuck, and Michael C Gross. Hot off back-to-back comedy hits Meatballs and Stripes, the producers persuaded Columbia to option the film rights for the next five years and contracted Adams to write three drafts of a Hitchhiker’s screenplay.
Still working on print sequels Life, The Universe, And Everything and So Long And Thanks For All The Fish during this time, Adams was well aware of the need to set the film apart from the umpteen other versions of the story. And by all accounts, he was open to the idea of American actors playing parts in the film, as long as Arthur Dent remained British.
But one of the American stars Reitman considered for Ford Prefect was Dan Aykroyd, who separately pitched the director a little film called Ghostbusters. So, while Reitman was preoccupied with that film and then its sequel, Adams finished his three drafts and Columbia maintained the rights.
Mice control the world
Once Columbia let its option lapse, the producers attempted to package Hitchhiker’s Guide for Disney and its then-CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg, whom they knew from their Meatballs days. Max Headroom creators Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel were in the frame to direct the project and another writer Abbie Bernstein, was hired to polish Adams’s adaptation, briefed to make it more commercial, conventional, and (not to put too fine a point on it) conceivable.
Indeed, the only available 1980s draft, dated September 1987 and credited to Adams and Bernstein, is prefaced with a note by Reitman and Medjuck, presumably to reassure Disney that they don’t intend to make the movie as expensive as it sounds. Taking a leaf from Adams’s book, they could have gone with “DON’T PANIC” in large, friendly letters on the cover page instead.
In this draft, we find that Bernstein hit upon another idea that survived to the eventual film – using the activation of Earth Mk II to replace the destroyed original as a happy ending. In other regards, it’s a more linear and less reverential telling than the script that finally got made.
Bernstein’s new material nods to more contemporary references like reality TV court shows, for a skit in which Arthur is summarily tried for disturbing the peace and sentenced to death for the more interesting and wholly imaginary charge of first- degree murder.
Then again, it also brings forth Adams’s best skit from The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, in which unarmed yet clinically depressed android Marvin flabbergasts a state-of-the-art war machine into defeating itself. That bit’s way too good to have saved for a potential sequel, and really should have been in every draft – but it didn’t make the cut.
It gives a good idea of the kind of compromise that had come about in development, but after Morton and Jankel’s Disney-backed thriller D.O.A. underperformed at the box office, the Hitchhiker’s movie was summarily put into turnaround.
Thumbs up
Almost a decade later, development revved up again, thanks to two decidedly more Hollywood-friendly comedy hits in 1997.
First, the surprise success of Men In Black, which Adams cited in interviews as proof that sci-fi comedy movies would play at the box office. And then, Austin Powers: International Man Of Mystery, whose director Jay Roach wanted to collaborate with Adams to finally bring Hitchhiker’s Guide to the big screen.
When Roach struck gold again with 1999’s Austin Powers sequel and 2000’s Meet The Parents, Disney subsidiary Hollywood Pictures optioned The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy for Roach to develop. Roach himself was busy with two massive comedy franchises, but things were finally moving.
Names like Hugh Laurie (Arthur), Jim Carrey (Zaphod), and Spike Jonze (in the director’s chair) were flying around. With some distance from the story, Adams was raring to make the movie and writing new drafts of the script, right up until he unexpectedly passed away in May 2001.
Unhappy to let Adams’s work and ambitions come to nothing, Roach and producer Robbie Stamp hired Chicken Run screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick to rewrite and restructure the author’s final draft – both writers are duly co-credited on the screenplay in the finished movie.
In a wonderfully frank 2004 interview on the film’s official blog, Kirkpatrick addresses the already-popular fan accusation that he’s ‘Not Douglas Adams’ (he wasn’t) and cops to not being familiar with the books before he took the assignment (and that’s alright too). Armed with Adams’s drafts and notes, he worked up a draft that reinstated some bits of the book that had been cut. At last, the studio enthusiastically approved of the script.
Read more: Conclave, and other movies adapted from Richard Harris’s novels
Meanwhile, as Jonze was moving on to other projects, he recommended music video supremos Hammer and Tongs, a.k.a. director Garth Jennings and producer Nick Goldsmith, for the job. Familiar with the books, Jennings and Goldsmith got to work on concept drawings for characters and settings right away and also worked with Kirkpatrick on the script.
Satisfied they’d found the right creative team, Disney’s Touchstone Pictures greenlit the film in 2003. Grant Gee’s excellent hour-long featurette, Don’t Crash!: The Documentary Of The Making Of The Movie Of The Book Of The Radio Series Of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, starts strong with camcorder footage of how excited Jennings and Goldsmith were driving away from that crucial pitch meeting.
While the film’s journey to the screen was comparatively quick from this point on, Don’t Crash! gives a terrific insight into how big a step up this was for Jennings and Goldsmith. Available exclusively on the two- disc Region 2 DVD release from 2005, it’s an inspiring look at the making of a then uncommonly big debut feature.
One thing that stands out is that it’s a British production even with (lots of) Hollywood money behind it. The first cast read through in February 2004 collected stars Freeman, Rockwell, Deschanel, and Nighy in Borehamwood Village Hall and ahead of principal photography at Hertfordshire’s Elstree Studios and on location throughout the UK. On this note, the featurette includes a nice candid aside from Freeman about choosing British movies over Hollywood tentpoles even though the locations aren’t as nice: “If they made Nil By Mouth in St Lucia, that’d be great.”
There’s another brilliant bit where the director energetically re-enacts an overheard speakerphone conversation with US studio executives who didn’t enjoy the daily footage rushes, with expletives replaced by bleeps such as “HECK”, “JOLLY WELL”, and “PUZZLING MATERIAL”.
He’s a man after our hearts, that Garth Jennings.
Star Wars with jokes?
Even if you don’t like the film, you may still enjoy Don’t Crash, because it has lots of funny bits in its own right and the benefit of not repeating 25 years’ worth of gags from other source material. Back in the day, Adams didn’t want the Hitchhiker’s film to be “Star Wars with jokes”, a quote that’s often been used by the 2005 movie’s detractors to beat it.
Well, for starters, it’s funnier than any of the Star Wars films to date, and at the time, it looked more like old-fashioned Star Wars than any films had for a while, including the Star Wars ones. Arriving in cinemas a month before Revenge Of The Sith, the third in George Lucas’s increasingly digitised prequel trilogy, Jennings’s film is visually splendid, from its production design to its creature effects.
On the micro level, Don’t Crash! draws attention to the brilliant teacup-inspired design of the Heart of Gold spaceship, complete with blue-and-white chinoiserie illustrations that are imperceptible without pausing the movie. The production value is up on-screen when you press play as well, especially in the Vogons.
With a design inspired by James Gillray’s vintage political cartoons, the alien bureaucrats are incredible creations bought to life by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop. They move unctuously and repulsively on screen, and they’re variously voiced by Henson puppeteers, working alongside actors Richard Griffiths (Jeltz) and the League of Gentlemen (additional dialogue).
Did we mention that the whole voice cast is superb?
Alan Rickman gives a supremely glum performance as Marvin. Stephen Fry, Helen Mirren, and Thomas Lennon voice the Guide, Deep Thought, and ship computer Eddie, respectively. And of course, Bill Bailey’s brief cameo, as a sperm whale ruminating on its existence while falling from the stratosphere to the ground, is the funniest performance of that familiar skit.
Not the Force
Ultimately, it’s not Star Wars with jokes because it can’t be. There’s nothing like-for-like in its narrative, which leaves Jennings free to raid Hollywood sci-fi iconography, partly because he’s got the budget, but mostly because that’s what the source material does. Just as Adams sent up sci-fi tropes with Arthur’s misadventures, the movie both essays and spoofs blockbuster spectacle. The best example is a brilliantly cinematic airlock gag, which prepares Arthur, Ford, and the audience for the opening of a big expensive spaceship bulkhead that never comes – the pair are unceremoniously dumped through a trapdoor instead. Like the Babel Fish for another creator, the sequence is a dead giveaway about Jennings’s grasp of the material.
The other comparison point that keeps coming up from the American side is Monty Python – much more of a cult concern in the US, and also far trickier for them to make as a studio comedy. Disney didn’t yet own Lucasfilm, but around this time it backed a movie that felt influenced by the more British tradition. Terry Jones may never have got near adapting Hitchhiker’s, but the most inspired Pythonesque choice right off the bat is to turn a gag about the dolphins leaving Earth into So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, a Busby Berkeley-style opening musical number.
Some cracking new bits came over from Adams’s drafts. There’s very literal slapstick on the Vogons’ home planet, which reveals they evolved on a world that does a Simpsons-calibre rake joke on them every time they get a new idea. The Point Of View Gun, too, is pure Adams – a movie-friendly McGuffin that was reputedly invented by women tired of arguing with men who “just don’t get it.”
Kirkpatrick was understandably reverent to Adams’s writing, new and old, but it’s one of the aspects that breaks the film for fans who are well acquainted with previous texts. Visually, there’s lots of uncharted territory, but the words are the same words across many mediums.
Reinstating so many of those sketches and routines invites comparisons, and the dissonance of a tweaked gag or a truncated punchline (“I had to go down to a cellar!”) seems to spread across the film. To reference one especially tedious example: the insistence that using CG for Zaphod’s second head and tucking it away under his chin when he’s not using it is somehow “cheaper” than a shoulder-mounted noggin from a BBC TV series with a 1980s budget. In retrospect, this feels like a low-key, but especially telling omen of today’s prevailing mode of online fandom: ‘just do it like you did it before.’
And another thing…
In the movie, the introduction of the Guide is prefaced by a tribute to The Eagles’ instrumental piece Journey Of The Sorcerer – long used as the Hitchhiker’s theme. Composer Joby Talbot builds with banjos until it erupts into a grand orchestral arrangement over the Guide floating in space. This short, fan-pleasing sequence is typical of the film’s loving tribute act.
The movie is an unabashed cover version of the source material, but the result is flattering – more so than Disney’s own recent spate of live-action remakes of its animated back-catalogue, or even the subsequent sixth novel, And Another Thing…, written by author Eoin Colfer and released in 2009.
Given the difficulty of translating Adams’s story, the film is as frantic and chaotic as you’d expect – and it was decently reviewed by critics, with the movie opening at number 1 at the UK and US box office. It performed respectably worldwide, but didn’t have the studio champing at the bit for a sequel either.
Hammer and Tongs went on to make the brilliant Son Of Rambow in 2007 instead, and Jennings has since directed the Sing movies for Illumination Animation. Though it has far fewer movie stars than intended at different points in its long road to the screen, the film does star lots of people who’ve gone on to bigger things, so it is still being discovered in retrospect.
It’s by no means definitive, but it was never supposed to be. The radio plays and the books and the TV series are still out there. Indeed, a new American TV series was set to go into production in mid-2020 but was delayed by the pandemic.
If there’s a lesson to be learned from the movie, a gorgeous and endearing remount of a sci-fi tall tale that’s only slightly dulled by its script being agonised over for almost 25 years, it might be that the text should be more of a jumping- off point than holy writ. Or, to keep it simple – DON’T PANIC…
