Dont Panic
Page 14
spotted it immediately, but it was one of those things that was so
big and wrong that it takes you a while to see exactly what it is.
"What it was was this: there were two chapters missing.
"Those two had disappeared and actually turned up later in
America, by which time the number of pages in the final bound
copy had actually been determined. And that is why, in the
English edition, the text of the book carries on to the very last
page. There aren't any ads or anything in the back of the book.
But it's actually quite a long book.
"No, that stuff wasn't put in because the book wasn't long
enough, but because there was a bit I wanted to put in that I
hadn't managed to get in anywhere else, which was the story of
The Reason. That's one of my favourite bits, that no one else
seems to have responded to very well.
"When you write you often feel a constant salvage from
impending catastrophe. I mean, there's a constant disastrous bit
followed by disastrous bit, and just occasionally you come up with
a bit of which you think, `Oh, I'll pat myself on the back for that.'
That bit was one of those. I actually thought it was quite neat.
"But the problem of the third book is that I have a plot
which actually signifies something, and there are momentous
events afoot, but I'd created such a feckless bunch of characters
that before writing each scene I'd think, `Well, OK, who's
involved here?' and I'd mentalIy go around each of the characters
in my mind explaining to them what was going on, and they
would all say, `Yeah? Well so what? I don't want to get involved.'
Either they didn't want to get involved or they didn't understand.
"In the end, Slartibartfast had to become the character who
had to get them all to get a move on, and that really wasn't in his
nature either. You see, all the characters are essentially character
parts. I had a lot of supporting roles and no main character."
*********************************************
ON WRITING HUMOUR
"Writing comes easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank piece
of paper until your forehead bleeds.
"I find it ludicrously difficult. I try and avoid it if at all
possible. The business of buying new pencils assumes gigantic
proportions. I have four word processors and spend a lot of time
wondering which one to work on. All writers, or most, say they
find writing difficult, but most writers I know are surprised at
how difficult I find it.
"I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems
to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my
life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being
able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it's
the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot
of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It's usually
below the surface. It doesn't appear to tackle problems at a
personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.
"I'm not a wit. A wit says something funny on the spot. A
comedy writer says something very funny two minutes later. Or
in my case, two weeks later.
"I don't think I could do a serious book anyway. I'm sure
that jokes would start to creep in. I actually do think that comedy
is a serious business: when you are working on something you
have to take it absolutely seriously; you have to be passionately
committed to it. But you can't maintain that if you are going to
stay sane. So when I talk about it to other people I tend to be
flippant about it. I'm always so glad to have got through it, I say,
`It's just jokes'. It's a relief.
"What I do now on many occasions is have, say, an
inconsequential idea for a throwaway line that seems quite neat,
then I go to huge lengths to create the context in which to throw
that line away and make it appear that it was just a throwaway
line, when in fact you've constructed this huge edifice off which
to chuck this line. It's a really exhausting way of writing but.
when it works...
"Often the things that seem frivolous and whimsical are the
hardest to get right. Take the opening section of Life, the
Universe, and Everything, which is something I'm quite pleased
with. They are stuck on prehistoric Earth, and then suddenly
they find themselves on Lord's Cricket Ground, which comes
about because they chased a sofa across a field. It all sounds
inconsequential or ilIogical or whatever, but completely belies the
fact that I tried over and over again, and rewrote that bit over and
over, going absolutely crazy with it until I eventually found the
right elements to create the air of whimsical inconsequence, if you
like. So I could come right-up at the end of that long section with,
`They suddenly found themselves in the middle of the pitch at
Lord's Cricket Ground, St John's Wood, London, with Australia
leading and England needing so many runs to win' (I forget the
exact quote). Now, in order to chuck away a line like that at the
end of the chapter, you needed all that stuff about Ford coming
back and explaining what he has been doing in Africa, which was
obviously very unpleasant, and then him trying to explain about
the flotsam and jetsam, and eddies in the space-time continuum
(which was really a very silly joke, but you are allowed the odd
silly joke) and the sofa, and so on.
"lt required all that just to be able to suddenly say Bang!
Here they were somewhere else, because if you do just say that
without getting all the rhythm right, then it doesn't work. It
wouldn't have been enough for them to just be magically
transported without it suddenly being a tremendous surprise
coming at that moment.
KIt's those kind of effects that take an awful lot of
engineering, when you don't necessarily know what the answer is
going to be, you are just thrashing around in the dark trying to
find something somewhere that's going to help you get to that
point. And when you are operating within a convention which
says (or seems to say) `anything goes', you have to be extremely
careful how you use that. I think if I have a strength as a writer it
is in recognising that and trying to deal with it, and if I have a
weakness it's that I don't always deal with it as well as I would
like to be able to.
KAnyway, the reason I liked that bit where they appeared at
Lord's so much was that I knew what a huge problem I had
solved and the fact that it wouldn't appear to the reader to be a
transition from one bit to another. And the reader would feel,
`Well, that was easy, wasn't it? You say Here they are in one
place, then Here they are in another?' But for that to be easy you
have to do an awful lot of engineering."
- Douglas Adams,1984.
********************************************************
When Life, the Universe, and Everything was released the critical
response was far less favourable than that for the first tw
o books
- and most of the critics said similar things:
"The third time around I found Arthur Dent and his
ridiculous dressing gown - why hasn't he found a change of
clothes somewhere along the line? - increasingly tedious (As noted, Life, the Universe, and Everything is the first place it is seen in print that Arthur is still wearing a dressing gown, something Douglas only discovered in the television series when the sequence that reclothed him on the Heart of Gold was cut.); never
a very substantial hero, he is in danger of being shrivelled in the
heat of his author's imagination. Perhaps Adams should now look
beyond SF; I feel that his cynicism and detachment are too strong
for a genre which depends so much on naivety and trust. . ."
(Kelvin Johnston, The Observer)
"... the humour depends on a limited repertoire of
gimmicks, and this third volume, though by no means lacking in
enthusiastic drive, does little to suggest that the idea could or
should be taken much further from here..." (Richard Brown,
Times Literary Supplement)
"Fans will relish the mixture as before... but signs of
padding and self-parody suggest that Adams would be wise to
avoid a fourth." (Martin Hillman, Tribune)
Even the interviewers, most of them obviously fans, were
complaining to Douglas that Life, the Universe, and Everything
was less funny than the earlier books. And Douglas, hating the
book, couldn't have agreed with them more. In his defence, he
pointed out how depressed he had been during the writing, how
he felt he was no longer writing in his own voice, how writing a
third Hitchhiker's book had been a major mistake, and one he
would not repeat.
"After I wrote the second Hitchhiker's book, I swore on the
souls of my ancestors that I would not write a third. Having
written the third, I can swear on the souls of the souls of my
ancestors there will not be another," was a typical quote, and, "I
utterly intend not to write another sequel," was another.
What he wanted to do next, he told all the interviewers,
would have nothing to do with the Hitchhiker's characters.
He'd write a stage play, perhaps. Or a film on something else.
Definitely, indubitably, unarguably, nothing else with
Hitchhiker's connections in any shape, colour or form. But it was
not long before the souls of the souls of Douglas's ancestors were
revolving in the graves of their graves.
17
Making Movies
****************************************************
I WENT TO HOLLYWOOD, and I kept thinking, `This is just like
going to Hollywood' The experience of it conformed far more
closely to the one that everyone said I'd have than the one I
expected to have. I told people, `This is going to work! It's going
to be great!' But I fell foul of all the clichs of Hollywood...
- Douglas Adams, November 1983, on his return from LA.
******************************************************
In 1979 Douglas was approached with an offer he found almost
irresistible: a Hitchhiker's film. All he had to do was sign a piece
of paper, and he would have $50,000 in his hand. The only
trouble was that what the director seemed to have in mind was
"Star Wars with jokes".
"We seemed to be talking about different things, and one
thing after another seemed not quite right, and I suddenly realised
that the only reason I was going ahead with it was the money.
And that, as the sole reason, was not good enough (although I
had to get rather drunk in order to believe that). I was quite
pleased with myself for not doing it, in the end. But I knew that
we were doing it for TV anyway at that time.
"I'm sometimes accused of only being in it for the money. I
always knew there was a lot of money to be made out of the film,
but when that was the whole thing prompting me to do it, when
the only benefit was the money, I didn't want to do it. People
should remember that."
******************************************************
FORD: What is it you're after?
ZAPHOD: Well, it's partly the curiosity, partly a sense of
adventure, but mostly I think it's the fame and the
money.
FORD: Money?
2APHOD: Yes, money in mind-mangling amounts.
FORD: Zaphod, last time I knew you, you were one of the
richest men in the Galaxy. What do you want
money for?
ZAPHOD: Oh, I lost it all.
FORD: All of it? What did you do, gamble it away?
ZAPHOD: No, I left it in a taxi.
FORD: Stylish.
- Unused dialogue, first radio series.
*******************************************
A couple of years later, Terry Jones (of Monty Python, and a
scriptwriter and director in his own right) decided that he would
like to make a Hitchhiker's film. The concept was to do a story
that was based solidly in the first radio series, but pretty soon
Douglas began to have second thoughts. He had done it four
times (radio, theatre, book, record) and had recently done it for a
fifth time (television), so decided that, in order to avoid the
problems of repetition that would occur if he wrote the same
script again ("I didn't want to drag it through another medium-
I was in danger of becoming my own word processor"), they
would create a new story that would be "totally consistent with
what had gone before, for the sake of those people who were
familiar with Hitchhiker's, and totally self-contained for the sake
of those who weren't. And that began to be a terrible conundrum
and in the end Terry and I said, `It would be nice to do a film
together... but let's start from scratch, and not make it
Hitchhiker's.' Also, Terry and I have been great friends for a long
time, but have had no professional links. And there's a slight risk
you take, when you go and do a professional job with a friend,
that it might spoil things. So we didn't do it."
In 1982 Douglas went to California with John Lloyd to write
The Meaning of Liff, and it was then that he was approached by
two people with whom he got on extremely well, Michael Gross (Gross was originally an artist and designer for Natwnal Lampoon, and was the man responsible for the famous cover showing a dog with a pistol to its head, captioned `Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog!') and Joe Medjuck, about a Hitchhiker's film.
At the time Douglas was excited by the possibilities of what
could be done with computers, having seen some amazing special
effects and technical work (imagine real computer graphics, done
with computers!), and decided that he would write the film. He
moved to Los Angeles, taking his girlfriend Jane Belson with him,
bought a Rainbow word processor, and began to write.
Mike and Joe were producers working for Ivan Reitman,
then known only for Animal House, now better known for
1984's smash-hit Ghostbusters, and unfortunately there was not
the same rapport between Adams and Reitman as there had been
between Adams and the other two.
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FRANKIE: Now, Earth creature. As you know, we've been at
this Ultimate Question business for seventeen and a
half million years.
BENJY: Oh, longer, surely.
FRANKIE: No, it just seems longer.
- White mice dialogue, cut from first radio series.
**********************************************************
Douglas now describes 1983 as a `lost year'. He and Jane hated
Los Angeles, missed London and their friends. He found it hard
to work, spending much of his time learning how to work a
computer, playing computer games, learning to scuba dive, and
writing unsatisfactory screenplays.
Transforming Hitchhiker's into a film hit two snags. The first
was that of organising the material: "There are inherent problems
with the material. It's a hundred minute film, of which the first
twenty-five minutes are concerned with the destruction of Earth;
then you start a whole new story which has to be told in seventy-
five minutes, and not overshadow what went before. It's very
very tricky, and I've had endless problems getting the structure
right. With radio and television you have three hours to play
with.
"The material just doesn't want to be organised. Hitchhiker's
by its very nature has always been twisty and turny, and going off
in every direction. A film demands a certain shape and discipline
that the material just isn't inclined to fit into.
The other problem was that Ivan Reitman and Douglas Adams
did not see eye to eye on the various drafts of the screenplay. Again
Douglas started using the phrase of "Star Wars with jokes".
Unfortunately this time he had already signed the contracts, was
signed up as a co-producer, and had accepted amazingly large
amounts of money to work on the film.
The versions of the script done in Los Angeles were attempts
by Douglas Adams to meet Reitman half-way, of which he says,
"They fell between two stools - they didn't please me, and they
didn't please them."
****************************************************
FRANKIE: We've got to have something that sounds good.
ARTHUR: Sounds good? An Ultimate Question that sounds
good?
FRANKIE: Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure