Ask 'Hitchhiker's Guide' Exec. Producer Robbie Stamp

After nearly three years of waiting, the movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is almost upon us. I've been impressed with the casting, and with the trailers I've seen of the film -- enough that I'm taking the rather unhappy early review posted the other day with a large grain of salt. Now's your chance to ask whatever you'd like of Robbie Stamp, the film's executive producer; we'll pass on to Robbie some of the best questions and publish his answers as soon as he gets them back to us. (As usual, please -- confine yourself to one question per post.)

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Um.

[devphil]

Douglas Adams wrote multiple versions of the screenplay, including the one used in the movie. The "new" characters, such as the one played by John Malkovich (sp?), were added by Adams specifically for the movie.

If Adams wrote it, grilling the producer about it seems pointless.

Also, fans of the Guide universe(s) will already know that the books, the TV series, the radio series, and all the other media versions have all been contradictory. Douglas Adams himself lost track of how many variant plotlines there were. Having read the interviews and seen the trailers, I'd say they're as close to following "the spirit" of the books as they can be.

Re:One question

[Yonder Way]

Not very [planetmagrathea.com].

Avoid Repitition

[Relic of the Future]

Please read this most-recent interview with Robbie [douglasadams.se] before posting any (more) questions that have already been answered.

Re:HHGG

[MynockGuano]

Thus the reason they're dubbed the "Increasingly Innacurately-Named Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Trilogy".

(Yes, I know you put a sarcasm tag in there, but I'm not quite sure that you actually meant it in that respect.)

Re:Um.

[91degrees]

If Adams wrote it, grilling the producer about it seems pointless.

He didn't write all of it. Look at the writing credits. Douglas Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick. According to the Writers Guild, to get a credit, he had to have written a reasonable proportion of the script himself.

Re:Um.

[Anonymous Coward]

It seemed to me that the problem with the screening wasn't that they weren't big fans, they were "too big" fans. Of the book. Everyone whined about how this or that quote wasn't in the screenplay, or about how this or that scene wasn't in the screenplay, despite the fact that, say, the scene with God disappearing in a puff of logic has never been done the same way twice, and not even Adams knew what the "right" way was supposed to have been by the time someone pointed it out to him. Additionally, a lot of the work always seemed to be "off-the-cuff". The book of radio play scripts discusses that, especially when it comes to Life, the Universe, and Everything. When he made the script he never realized until afterwards that multiplying six and nine was not in fact 42. (It's a very good read, it also explains how they made the dialing sound effect and some others.)

The Ultimate Question to Life, The Universe...

[ZeLonewolf]

If you'd read the books carefully, you would know that it is impossible to know both the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer for any given universe. Thus, since the Ultimate Answer is known (42), the Ultimate Question can never be known.

Re:Um.

[Scrameustache]

Douglas Adams wrote multiple versions of the screenplay, including the one used in the movie.

No!
Adams had finally written what he considered the final draft, then he died, and the studio rewrote the script. Most probably to undo all the compromises they had to grant the living Adams.

Here, read how the CEO of the studio spins it [go.com]:

It was well over a year after his passing that Douglas' widow, Jane Adams, encouraged us to move forward with the film as Douglas undoubtedly would have wanted. Karey Kirkpatrick, who had written the hugely successful "Chicken Run",

was hired to complete the work Douglas had started on a film adaption of the book.

Re:If..

[TsukasaZero]

If more films are made how will the refrences to God (The babelfish entry) and God's message to his creation be handled? In the current politically correct world will these be dropped or edited to refrence something different? It's simple.

They don't put them in there, like you said. The babel fish scene was cut (http://planetmagrathea.com/notinthefilm.html [planetmagrathea.com]

Re:On casting

[babbage]

Why the decision to go with an almost totally American leading cast)? Other big book to movie adaptations (Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings) did outstanding with a fully british, and very mixed (respectively) cast. Was this by design to win over American audiences, or studio pressure, or just because they were the best auditioned actors these right roles? and also, were they the 1st choice for the roles.

In an interview [theconnection.org] on The Connection [theconnection.org] on WBUR radio this week, Danny Boyle -- indie director of "Trainspotting" and other movies [imdb.com] -- commented on this very point.

Basically, according to Boyle, there's a checklist of British-isms that are believed to cut into the marketability of a film when it is screened in the USA. The bigger the movie, &/or the more likely the producers intend to bring the movie to the American market, the more closely they need to adhere to this checklist. Every checked-box on the list is a compromise for the director -- a little movie like Boyle's Millions [foxsearchlight.com] can get away with mostly ignoring it, but a high profile movie like Hitchhiker "has to" pay more attention to the list.

For better or worse, this checklist comes up all the time. Jokes based on references to "zebra crossings" and "Ford Prefect" will be lost on the vast majority of Americans, for example. (And it's not just the Hitchhikers movie: the green smiling mascot familiar to American readers of the books never showed up in the British editions [at least at first, not sure about later ones]; with the Harry Potter books and movies, some of the names & dialog were changed so that they'd be less alien to American kids.)

If the director has a lot of clout, or doesn't care about the American mass market, then they can get away with this, but with something as prominent as Hitchhiker, they'll feel like they "had" to Americanize it, whether or not fans of the original versions of the story agree with sanding down all the quirky bits that made the stories so fun to them in the past.

"Burn Hollywood, burn."