The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time (17 page)

less than perfect, but you can keep on worrying over something forever. The thing is pretty damn good.

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

D.A. 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 fifteen 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. 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, 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.

D.A. 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 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 fifteen 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 fifteen 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 fifteen 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? D.A. 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.

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.

It’s been nearly twenty years since the radio program, right?

D.A. Well, it’s almost exactly twenty years. It’ll be twenty years next month.

O. What’s the enduring appeal of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? D.A. 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 liked 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?

D.A. 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. O. Which version of Hitchhiker are you happiest with?

D.A. Not the TV version, that’s for sure. In different moods I will feel either the radio or the book, which are the two other versions left, so it’s got to be one of those, hasn’t it? I feel differently about each of them. On the one hand, the radio series was where it originated; that’s where it grew; that’s where the seed grew. Also, that’s where I felt that myself and the other people working on it—the producer and the sound engineers and so on, and, of course, the actors—all created something that really felt groundbreaking at the time. Or rather, it felt like we were completely mad at the time. I can remember sitting in the subterranean studio, auditioning the sound of a whale hitting the ground at three hundred miles an hour for hours on end, just trying to find ways of tweaking the sound. After hours of that, day after day, you do begin to doubt your sanity. Of course, you have no idea if anybody’s going to listen to this stuff. But, you know, there was a real sense that nobody had done this before. And that was great; there’s a great charge that comes with that. On the other hand, the appeal of the books to me is that that it’s just me. The great appeal of a book to any writer is that it is just them. That’s it. There’s nobody else involved. That’s not quite true, of course, because the thing developed out of a radio series in the first place, and there is a sense in there of all the people who have contributed, in one way or another, to the radio show that it grew out of. But, nevertheless, there is a this-is-all-my-own-work feel about a book.

And I’m pleased with the way it reads. I feel it flows nicely. It feels as if it were easy to write, and I know how difficult that was to achieve. O. Do you ever get tired of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy? D.A.

There was a period where I got heartily sick of it, and I really never wanted to hear anything more about it again, and I would almost scream at anybody who used the words to me. But since then, I went off and did other things. I did the Dirk Gently books. My favorite thing that I’ve ever done was a thing I did about ten years ago: I went around the world with a zoologist friend of mine, and looked for various rare and endangered species of animals, and wrote a book about that called Last Chance to See, which is my own personal favorite Hitchhiker now is something from the past that I feel very fond of; it was great, it was terrific, and it’s being very good to me. I had a conversation a little while ago with Pete Townshend of The Who, and I think at that point I was saying, “Oh God, hope I’m not just remembered as the person who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And he kind of reprimanded me a little bit. He said, “Look, I have the same thing with Tommy, and for a while I thought like that. The thing is, when you’ve got something like that in your history, it opens an awful lot of doors. It allows you to do a lot of other things. People remember that. It’s something one should be grateful for.” And I thought that was quite right.

was terrific, and it’s being very good to me. I had a conversation a little while ago with Pete Townshend of The Who, and I think at that point I was saying, “Oh God, hope I’m not just remembered as the person who wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” And he kind of reprimanded me a little bit. He said, “Look, I have the same thing with Tommy, and for a while I thought like that. The thing is, when you’ve got something like that in your history, it opens an awful lot of doors. It allows you to do a lot of other things. People remember that. It’s something one should be grateful for.” And I thought that was quite right.

Have you put Dirk Gently aside?

D.A. Well, I started to write another Dirk Gently book, and just lost it. For some reason I couldn’t get it going, so I had put it aside. I didn’t know what to do with it. I looked at the material again about a year later, and suddenly thoug “Actually, the reason is that the ideas and the character don’t match. I’ve tried to go for the wrong kind of ideas, and these ideas would actually fit much better in a Hitchhiker book, but I don’t want to write another Hitchhiker book at the moment. So I sort of put them on one side. And maybe one day I will write another Hitchhiker book, because there’s an awful lot of material sitting around waiting to go in it. But going back to Dirk Gently, I sort of put Dirk aside, really. There was a student production of Dirk Gently, Holistic Detective in Oxford two or three months ago, so I went along to see it. And it’s an enormously complicated plot ... Part of the complexity is there to disguise the fact that the plot doesn’t really quite work ... It was funny watching it on stage, because I suddenly began to think about it again, and think, “Well, they did this well, but what they should have done was this, and they should’ve done that.” You know, it starts the whole ball rolling in your head. What was also interesting to me was that while I was sitting there being quite critical of the production, I was astonished by how much the audience was enjoying it. It was rather sort of a peculiar situation. I suddenly thought,

“I would love to see this happen as a film, because I can now see, having thought about it freshly in this context, what kind of a movie it could be, and it could be great.” So maybe, once the Hitchhiker movie has gotten to the stage where I can turn my attention to other things as well, that’s what I’d like to do next. And with that movie under way, I hope more doors will open as far as filmmaking is concerned. I would love to do movies, but this is a man saying this innocently who’s never done one.

Interview conducted with Keith Phipps, 1998

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April 14, 1999

David Vogel Dear David, I’ve tried to reach you by phone a couple of times. Perhaps it would have helped if I’d explained why I was calling: I was in the States for a few days and thought it might be helpful if I came across to L.A. so that you and I could have a meeting. I didn’t hear from you, so I’m on a plane back to England, where I’m typing this.

We seem to have gotten to a place where the problems appear to loom larger than the opportunities. I don’t know if I’m right in thinking this, but I only have silence to go on, which is always a poor source of information. It seems to me that we can either slip into the traditional stereotypes—you’re the studio executive who has a million real-world problems to worry about, and I’m the writer who only cares about seeing his vision realised and hang the cost and consequences—or we can recognise that we both share the same goal, which is to make the most successful movie we possibly can. The fact that we may have different perspectives on how this can best be achieved should be a fertile source of debate and iterative problem solving. It’s not clear to me that a one-way traffic of written “notes” interspersed with long, dreadful silences is a good substitute for this.

You have a great deal of experience nursing major motion pictures into existence. I have a great deal of experience of nursing The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy into existence in every medium other than motion pictures. I’m sure you must feel frustrated that I don’t seem to understand the range of problems you have to contend with, just as I feel frustrated that I haven’t had any real creative dialogue with Disney about this project yet. I have a suggestion to make: Why don’t we actually meet and have a chat? I could be in L.A. for next Monday (4/19) or early the following week. I would invite Disney to bear the cost of this extra trip over. I’ve appended a list of numbers you can reach me on. If you manage not to reach me, I shall know you’re trying not to, very, very hard indeed.