by Nick Webb
In early 1983, he and Jane flew out to California again and rented a house in Coldwater Canyon, a pleasant district of Los Angeles with a famous park. He was in heaven—tooling about in open cars,* 156 buying computers, having lunch and “working” on the movie. Jane, on the other hand, found the combination of sun, orange juice, the beach and the whole open-weave lifestyle a bit stupefying. However, she is not the sort of person to let her brain idle in neutral for long. Realizing that Douglas had fallen for the West Coast in a big way and that they would spend a lot of time there, she decided to take the California bar exams. God forbid that the mysteries of the American legal profession should be impugned by outsiders, but Jane’s crisp verdict on the exams was “a surprising amount of multiple choice questions. You have these questions to which there are four possible answers. None of them is right. One of them is merely less wrong than the others. All my friends at the bar told me I wasn’t allowed to fail. They made a terrible fuss about it. It really wasn’t very difficult.” She qualified, but in the end did not practise.
Ed takes up the story:
I sold Hitchhiker’s four times. The first time was to Don Taffner and ABC. Then I sold the film rights to Columbia for Ivan Reitman. Douglas went out there to reincarnate himself in Hollywood. He was thrilled. He had a parking space with his name on it.
They [Ivan Reitman and team] were in the middle of making Ghostbusters and were completely preoccupied with that. They just left Douglas alone. Douglas turned in a 250-page script. It was too long.
And then it turned out that Ivan Reitman did not think that forty-two was a very good answer. “It’s just not a great punchline,” he said. “What does it mean? Will the audience get it?” He’s not Sonny [Mehta]. Douglas knew he was in trouble then.
Anyway, they played with it and played with it. They brought in another writer and they told us they were unhappy. It was a miserable experience. Various other people also played around with it. They would buy it and put it into turnaround. David Puttnam became involved. Jeffrey Katzenberg was interested. At one point there was an attempt to bring the film to Disney because Katzenberg had just gone there. Remember Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel? They developed Max Headroom.* 157 They were going to direct Hitchhiker’s. But then they made a film for Disney which was a remake of a very famous forties love story called DOA [dead on arrival]. It came out, and was DOA. So it opened, and it closed—and Katzenberg pulled out.
Douglas was dreadfully upset that the second screenplay did the rounds without him having contributed so much as a comma to it. It bore his name and that of the new writer, Abbie Bernstein, who, in an attempt to organize the material into a more movie-like pattern, had cut it brutally, taking out much of the humour in the process. Douglas abominated this version and it fuelled his anxiety about ever losing control of the project again. He also feared that the new screenplay would blacken his name with the movie moguls. In fact, he need not have worried. Producers are so deluged by a tidal wave of material that in self-defence they have developed the attention span of a flea with an amphetamine sulphate habit. Besides, they tend to remember the turkeys that do get made rather than the multitude that don’t.
Much more damaging to the movie’s prospects was Douglas’s desire to have more creative control than Hollywood normally grants to tyros. In this tough town, the power-brokers are exquisitely alert to any foreigner, Brit or otherwise, who arrives with this attitude: “I’m unspeakably talented, and available—now please give me $100 million and I’ll show you how it’s done.” Douglas was never guilty of that particular sin, but his protectiveness towards his vision could easily have been misconstrued.
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a book that borders on being intractably difficult to turn into a film, especially a Hollywood film. The investment is so great that it would be a foolhardy producer who jettisoned the well-tried storytelling structures. Having been written in episodes, Hitchhiker’s remains stubbornly and indefatigably episodic. It just does not have what the scriptwriting guru, Robert McKee, calls a narrative arc. There’s no exposition, the build-up meanders discontinuously, the climax is at the beginning for God’s sake, and the resolution, albeit funny, is bleak. To work as a film, the whole book would have to be radically restructured, but without losing its essential humour and the ferro-concrete underpinnings provided by its ideas. Of course, Douglas understood this, and his screenwriting craft improved with every iteration. But the lesson was nonetheless slow and painful.
One bonus of being in Hollywood was another terrific friendship. Richard Curtis, now famous for Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill amongst other goodies, had been imported to California like some amusing variety of British grape that Hollywood hoped would graft on to local vines. How things started with him and Douglas is itself movie-like. Richard reminisces:
The most interesting section of our relationship was the beginning. I think I probably paled into a pretty ordinary friend thereafter, although I did like him a lot. But my first meeting with him was absolutely extraordinary, because I was in Los Angeles, having a very hard time—well, not hard compared to someone in Peru—because I was writing a film which I didn’t really understand and I was away from home, which I find very difficult.
What happened was I met an American producer who came up with an idea and commissioned me to write it. I wrote it, but it wasn’t an idea I really believed in in my heart. Ever since then I’ve always written ideas that I’ve already had for five years. Finally I wrote a draft. He said there was a funny scene to do with slippers, and as for the rest—well, you could see there was a glimmer of something in it. So he flew me over to America to live in his house, work with the director and write it. I didn’t know the director, and I’ve learned to be very fussy about such things these days. I don’t think he believed in my script at all. He was just interested in the possibility that it might turn into a script he loved. The producer was a perfectly lovely man, but, you know, living with a person you are working for is a bit odd. After three weeks I kind of cracked and rang Douglas’s number, which I’d been given by John Lloyd, because even though I’d been friends with a lot of people from Cambridge, I’d never met Douglas.
And the long and short of the tale is that we went out for lunch—and I left two months later.
We went to lunch, and talked until half past four. At the end of lunch he said, “Come on back to the house.” Then we had dinner and Jane turned up. She’d been studying for her law exams. He said—or she said—“Why don’t you stay the night?” The next morning they both said: “It’s ridiculous if you’re finding it tricky living with your employer, why don’t you continue to stay here?” And I stayed there a long, long time. That’s a remarkable degree of exuberant hospitality, to take someone from total stranger to the longest house guest you’d ever had with no intermediate phase.
Richard is as entertaining and clever a guest as anyone could wish for; Douglas could have advertised for him. It must have been blissful not writing on the grounds that you’re gallantly rescuing a compatriot from the claustrophobic embarrassment of living with his employer. They had a lot of fun together, though Richard winces at the recollection of Douglas lurching into one encounter with the finesse of an army lorry . . .
Staying with Douglas was a wonderful way of learning about America. We went bowling together; we went to the movies together. One thing I particularly recall—which would only be one of a string of things—was that I took him out to dinner with the director I had been working with. It was a bit like the old girlfriend meeting the new girlfriend. Michael *** came in and I misphrased my opening remark, so instead of saying “Douglas, this is Michael *** who made Quest for Fire,” I said: “Douglas, do you remember Quest for Fire?” And before I could interject, he said: “Oh God, that was an awful film. I absolutely hated that film. The make-up was so unconvincing. The anthropology was rubbish. Who could possibly believe that men would be like that at that time? What a ridiculous waste it all
was . . .” What’s more, he didn’t back off with much embarrassment when I told him who Michael was, and it certainly didn’t, as it were, stop his flow.
Eventually it became clear that Ivan Reitman was not the right man for Hitchhiker’s. With the spurious insight of retrospect it seems like a mismatch in all respects. The broad comedy of National Lampoon and Ghostbusters is perfectly fine: it’s full of energy, slapstick and innuendo that appeal to millions. But it’s miles away from the surreal cerebral wittiness of Hitchhiker’s. The film rights were returned to Columbia where they languished, possibly in development hell, or maybe forgotten half to death.
The next deal was a tribute to the role of inadvertence in human affairs and to Douglas’s talent for friendship. It revolved around the alliance that sprang up between Douglas and Michael “Nez” Nesmith—TV and film producer and former Monkee.
Those of you who remember that Ringo Starr was once in a pop group before he became the narrator of Thomas the Tank Engine will also know the Monkees (“Hey, Hey, we’re the Monkees!”)—the rock band and stars of the 1966 TV series produced by Bob Rafelson and Bert Schneider. People tend either to like or loathe the Monkees—and for much the same reason: they were utterly manufactured, which was sickening if you believed that the music was about social change and not just Tin-Pan Alley (this was the sixties). On the other hand, the Monkees were utterly manufactured by professionals who knew what they were doing. Using a format loosely based on the Beatles’ movie A Hard Day’s Night, each episode followed the high-spirited adventures of a rock group played by four engaging young actors. It was a brilliant piece of multi-media marketing.
Somewhere in Monkee history the balance shifted from a sitcom about a band to a sort of semi-real band using TV for promotion. As rock’n’roll went, they were wholesome rather than dangerous. Commercially, they were huge.
The four actors were Micky Dolenz (the wild-looking drummer), Peter Tork (the funny one with the boy-next-door phizzog), Davy Jones (the cute, jockey-sized Brit who always got the girl), and Michael (“Nez”) Nesmith, the cool Texan with the green beanie hat and the dry smile.
Nez has an interesting background. His mother, Bette Graham, worked as a secretary. She was struggling to fend for young Michael and herself when she had a bright idea. Wouldn’t it be neat, she thought, if you could fix all those infuriating typing errors that oblige the pernickety (or those working for them) to start a document all over again? (This was decades before word processing.) She invented Liquid Paper in her kitchen and it quickly became essential for offices all over the world. The family fortunes were emphatically made.
In his career after the Monkees, Nez among other things is credited with being one of the founders of MTV. He is a delightful man with a streak of fantasy in his imagination that lent wings to his magical realist novel, The Long Sandy Hair of Neftoon Zamora. (Douglas gave it a generous quote: “It rises in the imagination like a fantastical building in the desert.”) Like Douglas, Nez is interested in unconventional thinking. From time to time, using the Gihon Foundation (founded by his mother and dedicated to productive innovation), he organizes the Council of Ideas in which creative people from different disciplines can come together for truly blue sky speculation.
Ed Victor picks up the story:
I went to a dinner party one night at my lawyer’s home. Michael Nesmith was there, and I mentioned that I represented Douglas and that the film rights were free. Michael turned out to be a fan, and he and I talked about doing a joint venture with Douglas. Douglas went out to Michael’s ranch in Santa Fe. They got along famously, really liked each other. Douglas was convinced that Michael would help him make the film and that it was going to be a huge high-rolling thing to do. But first we’d got to get the rights back from Columbia . . .
By now it was 1992, and nearly a decade had whizzed past without the movie getting any further. But Douglas was confident that the next deal was imminent, so, with Ed’s help, he bought the film rights back from Columbia for $350,000. Not having that much in cash, he had to raid his pension fund. As a general rule, authors prefer receiving large cheques to writing them, and it was painful to stump up the money for rights that were passively marinading in some studio’s inventory of intellectual property. It says a lot for his ambition to make this movie.
Douglas went out to Santa Fe, state capital of New Mexico, and stayed on Nez’s ranch to write the screenplay for the movie that Michael would produce. James Cameron, no less, was one of the directors who was said to be interested. Nez and Douglas discovered that they laughed incessantly together and had in common a sideways view of the world. (Jane thinks that Nez, who’s a kindly man and very grounded, was to some extent one of Douglas’s father surrogates.)
Santa Fe appealed to Douglas. It’s sunny and affluent, and the altitude and the surrounding desert lend the light a mysterious quality. The town is a mix of the hard-boiled and the dreamy. The Santa Fe Institute (home of Murray Gell-Mann, amongst others) contains some of the brightest brains on the planet. In the bars you might find yourself sandwiched between a Nobel Prize-winner and a mystic local fruitcake. Douglas fondly carried a memento of his time there in the form of a large Native American silver bracelet which he wore all the time. “It’s so heavy,” he told Jane, “that when I take it off it feels as if my arm should float up to the ceiling.”
One evening on the ranch, at the end of an exhausting day (for there had been a meeting of the Council of Ideas), Nez and Douglas were sitting on the veranda looking at the sun putting on its daily spectacular when, apropos of nothing in particular, Douglas said: “You know when I was young I didn’t know what I would do. Then one day I saw this cartoon. It showed me a whole new way of thinking about comedy. Up till then I confused comedy with sarcasm. Sarcasm is Oxbridge’s biggest export, you know.”
“That’s strange,” said Nez, “because when I was a kid I saw a weird cartoon as well that I just loved. It might have been in the New Yorker. I’ve been trying to find it ever since. I’ve never forgotten it. There were these two hippos . . .”
At this point much head-slapping and cries of “stone me” ensued, for they realized that they had both been inspired by the same cartoon.* 158 At just the right ages for their young minds not to suffer from sclerosis of the categories, this cartoon had given them a nudge towards the surreal. They were soul brothers. Douglas may have had an echo of the cartoon—reproduced above—in his mind when Arthur Dent complains that, “It must be Thursday. I never got the hang of Thursdays.”
“I KEEP THINKING IT’S TUESDAY.”
Ever since that day, when Nez and Douglas worried that their conversation or ideas were getting too sensible or prosaic, they would say that what they needed was a sprinkling of Hippodust, a magical coating of the crazy.
Douglas worked hard on the screenplay out in Santa Fe. He also managed to have some stimulating dinners at the Institute with the megabrains. Meanwhile, Michael Nesmith opened doors in Hollywood and inveigled the work under the noses of all kinds of powerful people whose filtering services would otherwise have assassinated the very idea further upstream. Nez is streetwise in the ways of Hollywood. He has had the educational experience of becoming dangerous to know, for he fought, and won, a famous ten-year legal battle with PBS. There is not much he does not understand about how Hollywood works, and in part he saw his role as keeping Douglas out of harm’s way.
When the film still failed to appear, Ed Victor was terribly disappointed. He and Douglas had a complex relationship. Its warmth went well beyond the professional bonhomie between an agent and a bestselling author. Douglas needed fixed points in his life, and Ed was like a mature older brother, always there to get him money and dispense wisdom. Douglas wept with anxiety when a conspiracy of events misled him to believe that Ed had been on Pan Am Flight 103 that was destroyed over Lockerbie on 21 December 1988. That’s not to say that Douglas never ventured down those minor tributaries of conversational infidelity to which all of us are prone. Remaini
ng expediently silent while someone insults a pal is all too human. Writers are particularly likely to whinge about their agents. This is either on the grounds that their bloody agent never does anything or because their agent has got them into some ghastly commitment that the writer cannot possibly discharge without an incomprehensible extremity of angst. Authors are the original ingrates.
Ed recollects:
When Douglas had finished the screenplay, Michael Nesmith exposed Hitchhiker’s here and there, but no one bid. And that was the end of that. You know, the moment just passed. A lot of energy and effort had gone into it. When Douglas was out in Santa Fe, I went out there and had dinner with him. At that time he was working well on the screenplay, and Michael was helping him. On another occasion I remember there was a meeting that took place at Michael’s ranch. Alan Schwartz came from LA, Douglas and I flew in from Miami and we all sat round talking about it. We were all quite convinced that it was going to happen.
By October 1993, Douglas told Mostly Harmless, the fanzine, that he was sure the movie would finally be made. However, by the following February, there was a hint of ambivalence in his witty response to the eternal film question. “It’s off the back burner,” he said, “and being singed on the front burner.”
But the film didn’t happen. Nobody was interested enough to come up with a budget. Not only had Hollywood realized that Hitchhiker’s was too picaresque for a classical movie structure, and expensive to make, but there was also little evidence there was much of a market for comic SF. Portentous SF—no problem. Epic, mythic SF—clearly a winner. But comic SF had hardly ever been done—and probably for good reason.* 159
