by Nick Webb
This was the received wisdom for nearly twenty years until something occurred that radically changed the climate of opinion, and enabled Ed to make his fourth and final deal. Men in Black, with Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones, came out. It was huge, what Variety calls a “boffo”—a box-office phenomenon. Suddenly everybody wanted funny SF.
Ed resumes the saga:
We just happened to have comic SF and Disney had the money. At the end of 1997, with the help of my co-agent, Bob Bookman at CAA, I sold the rights to Roger Birnbaum for Jay Roach to direct. He was just finishing Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, which was going to be huge. Jay seemed very committed to Hitchhiker’s. He wanted it to be his next film. That was the plan. Jay would direct it and Roger Birnbaum would produce it. I’ve always felt that if you made a halfway decent movie of Hitchhiker’s, you’re on to a huge hit. It was going to be an $80 million movie.
It all looked promising. Douglas comforted himself with the thought that the years in development limbo had enabled the technology to catch up with his imagination. It would be a much better movie made in the late nineties than in the early eighties.
Yet even with all these favourable portents, there was a hiccough. New personnel at Disney had looked in some dismay at the Hitchhiker’s project and its awesome budget, and felt icy winds wuthering up the corporate trousers. Ed recalls:
I was sitting in a little bar in my hotel with Douglas when the whole Disney thing collapsed. He was in despair . . . The reason Disney took a walk is that they had actually greenlit the movie at $45 million. They told Jay [Roach] to make the film for $45 million and that they’d back it . . . But Douglas and Jay said this film is an $80–85 million movie because we’ve written it that way. They’d have to reconfigure it to make a $45 million movie. I said to Douglas: “You’re crazy. Grab it. It’s still a $45 million movie.” And he said: “No, Ed, it would be cheesy.” I remember, taking my courage in both hands, I said: “Hitchhiker’s is cheesy—that’s its charm. It’s not Star Wars. You keep on wanting to make Star Wars with jokes. But it’s not Star Wars. It can be cheesy . . .”
Douglas and Ed did row about that observation, but Ed was right. Hitchhiker’s is the juxtaposition of jokes about a sandwich and the cosmos, the man in the dressing-gown and the starship crossing the galaxy at superluminal speeds. It’s scruffy, but philosophically wild. That’s its brilliance.
Briefly, Douglas considered mobilizing his fans to bombard Michael Eisner, the head of Disney, with protests. Robbie Stamp, then Managing Director of H2G2, the successor to Douglas’s company, The Digital Village, remembers that:
Douglas sent this achingly sad email . . . My heart really bled for him. It was copied to everybody. Just looking at it you could see it was sent in the wee small hours of the morning. I knew and loved Douglas and I could just feel him there in the night—because he often couldn’t sleep—thinking: “When is this ever going to happen?” So he sent this email which said: “Let’s organize a writing campaign to Disney to show them how big the market is out there and why they should be doing it.” It never happened—we managed to head it off. I think it was left to me to say that it was probably not the best idea. You can imagine Michael Eisner getting email from some sixteen-year-old in Harlesden saying, “You arsehole, why haven’t you made this film?”* 160
It was daft of Douglas after all those years of anguish not to seize the offer of a $45 million movie. Perhaps having carried the torch for so long and having been so steadfast about preserving the special quality of the work, he thought that it would be crazy now—out of sheer fatigue—to compromise. Maybe he gambled that the offer was the first step in a back and forth gavotte that would culminate in something closer to the desired budget—or that the era of men in suits would pass and be replaced by a period of more sympathetic men in suits. But there are thousands of films looking for money. The great William Goldman estimated the ratio of aspiration to execution as ten thousand to one. Douglas’s bluff was called. He felt defeated. His entire family had transplanted to Santa Barbara so he could follow his dream. He was utterly despondent.
It is odd, by the way, that such a super-intelligent man did not have greater clarity of vision about his film, because Ed was spot on. Hitchhiker’s is not Star Wars; it doesn’t need $80 million. It’s script-led. The fx needed to be credible, but they are not the essence of the movie. There may even have been some demon of the perverse at work in Douglas’s complex nature—even so, the hint of fear that he felt at being put to the test would have been far outweighed by his desire to see the movie made.
Then in May 2001, Douglas died.
It is an irony too obvious to labour that the film of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is once again on the stocks and looking more probable than at any moment in the last twenty years. At the time of writing (April 2003), Robbie Stamp is pushing it along with a judicious mixture of tact and steel. Jay Roach now has other commitments but Karey Kirkpatrick, whose pin-sharp screenwriting has given us such delights as James and the Giant Peach and the blissful Chicken Run, has produced an excellent screenplay. The budget may no longer look like the population of a large country, but it will be substantial.
Woody Allen once said that some seek immortality through their work, but that he preferred to achieve it by not dying. Lacking that option, Douglas does leave work behind him that will give many generations pleasure and pause for thought. Personal extinction is something only a few of us, usually in the grip of religious mania, rate highly; the truth is that it’s bleak. But however bloody awful it may be, we are not just our bodies. We all contribute something to the world—and this is especially true of creative artists.
Douglas scoffed at superstition. Robert Heinlein, the SF writer, once had a pedantic alien who would not say “good luck” but insisted on the locution “benign random variable factors to you.” Benign random variable factors to the Hitchhiker’s movie then. Millions of fans are hoping it will be added to Douglas’s many achievements.
TEN
On Love
“. . . there was Arthur Dent the smooth and casual, in corduroys and a chunky sweater. His hair was cropped and washed, his chin clean shaven. Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop.”
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy proves mathematically that there is nothing in the universe. If the universe is, as many cosmologists believe, infinite then any quantity, no matter how chunky, divided by infinity tends to zero. Confusingly there are many different varieties of infinity recognized by mathematicians, and many physicists believe that the universe is finite but unbounded, a counter-intuitive notion that demands instant retreat to a quiet pub for further pondering. This is just the sort of thing that Douglas enjoyed discussing.
But there is no doubt that space is big. The basic notion holds. To put it in more elegant notation: n/° Æ 0. This simple formula encapsulates the ultimate triviality of mankind, and life itself, so it is just as well that we do not think about it all the time. The same dismal truth suggests that there is no money, and no conscious entities to spend it even if there were. Continuing the thought, this is what Douglas had to say about the amount of sex in the universe:
None. In fact there is an awful lot of this largely because of the total lack of money, trade, banks or anything else that might keep all the nonexistent people of the universe occupied.
However, it is not worth embarking on a long discussion of it now because it really is terribly complicated . . .
And here is the authentic voice of Douglas on the subject of human relations:
“Here I am, Zaphod Beeblebrox, I can go anywhere, do anything. I have the greatest ship in the known sky, a girl with whom things seem to be working out pretty well . . .”
“Are they?”
“As far as I can tell. I’m not an expert in personal relationships . . .”
&nb
sp; Trillian raised her eyebrows.
“I am,” he added, “one hell of a guy. I can do anything I want only I haven’t the faintest idea what.”* 161
Like Zaphod, Douglas was no expert at human relations. Sometimes he could be slow on the uptake, as in this story that he told against himself. Here Jon Canter recounts it:
Douglas was in New York, I think on his first promo tour. He met this incredibly beautiful woman in a bar. He talked and talked. You know what writers are like. He talked for an hour and a half—he told her everything about himself, his plans, his book, and what he was doing in New York. And finally he said: “And what do you do?” And she said: “I entertain men.” Even then, he didn’t pick up on it. He said: “Oh, that’s interesting. How do you do that?” And she said: “Sexually . . .”
Douglas was a big man with large appetites. He was amusing, hedonistic, wealthy and, for much of his life, single. He moved in sophisticated media circles; you may guess that he did not live with austere monk-like chastity all the time. He liked women: he was romantic, extravagant, entertaining, and sometimes a little careless.* 162
He also did not do things by halves, for, in late 1980, he fell deeply, precipitously, passionately in love. He could no more have resisted than a deckchair could resist a tornado. He was blown off his feet.
He met Sally Emerson at a writer’s talk in Sterling, Scotland, when her first novel, Second Sight, was published and he was publicizing The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. They were both young novelists of about the same age. He was Cambridge; she was Oxford. Sally is a talented writer, and she had been a terrific editor of the literary magazine, Books and Bookmen, before its publishers self-destructed. She is slim, dark-haired and with a sexy smile. At the time she was in a state of change; her job had vanished and she had been with the same man for eight years when, just as they were both getting restive, she married him. As it turned out, this was not so foolish since he really was the man for her in the end.
However, at this time, Sally and Douglas were attracted to each other in a way that was all the more intense for their feeling that it was dangerous. She was tremendously drawn to him. She writes:
He struck me as enormously vulnerable, and the combination of his huge, masculine form and little-boy-lost manner was attractive. The first time we met he was sincere and intense rather than funny. I can see him now, slouched low in a chair late at night talking, with his limbs somehow all over the place like an octopus . . . I remember thinking then on that first evening that Douglas definitely needed me, or someone very like me.
They had much in common, but it was not until they met each other again in New York, where Sally’s novel was being published, that they started an affair. They went off to Mexico together. The relationship continued back in London where Sally lived around the corner from Douglas in Highbury. She nudged him to change his flat and his agent and helped him find the duplex in St. Alban’s Place. It never appealed to her, however, as much as to Douglas; Sally says there was something just too showy about it.
Their relationship was tortured and romantic.
We understood each other very well, and we were on exactly the same imaginative wavelength. It was the joy of our relationship but it also contained within it the seeds of its destruction. When one of us was upset, so was the other. It was as though there were no walls between us. I would be constantly leaving him, furious at his massive egotism, but would return before I was even at the bottom of the stairs.
Douglas was knocked over by his emotions. Here he was—a materialist sceptic with a scientific world view—completely, sentimentally, embarrassingly in love. He knew all about the mechanistic explanation—the pheromones, the endocrine system, the unimaginable stretches of time over which our genes, through the blind repetition of Darwinian processes, had tweaked us into sophisticated vehicles for their own propagation. But what was going on? Why did he feel so blissfully soppy? Had his brain gone? (Douglas has Arthur Dent, in a similar state, apologize in a shop for a non sequitur: “Forgive me,” he says, “I’m terribly happy.”) It just didn’t compute. An evolutionary biologist might argue that love has been selected because close relationships make for reproductive success, but couldn’t mutual need account for stable bonding just as well? Where does the joy come from? Love is as hard to explain to a materialist as the genius of Bach.
Sally and Douglas lived together in St. Alban’s Place, both writing. Douglas’s writing was getting harder all the time—three on the Beaton Scale of Author Angst, with occasional peaks at four. Sally, on the other hand, wrote fluently and had made a respectable literary debut, gaining some excellent reviews in the sort of papers that Douglas resented. Douglas held Sally up for approval of his prose far more often than vice versa, and she was glad of being in sympathy with him creatively and able to help. The image of these two writers tapping away in different rooms in the large apartment, passing each other on the stairs or meeting in the kitchen for coffee, comparing notes about their output (or lack of it) has a certain sitcom-ish quality, perhaps with a hint of Strindberg. (“I’ve done a thousand words. How about you?” “I’ve done twenty-seven, but every one is placed with the precision of a haiku—so there . . .”) It was an intense affair; they were thrown in upon each other.
The book Douglas was writing at the time was Life, the Universe and Everything, which recycled some of the ideas in his TV treatment, Dr. Who and the Krikkitmen. Though it uses the well-loved cast of Hitchhiker’s characters, it was his first novel not based on radio scripts and it contains some fresh, unearthly invention. For instance, Wowbagger is a creature condemned to eternal life by a bizarre accident. (“Me only cruel immortality consumes . . .” said the ever-aging Tithonus in Tennyson’s poem.) Wowbagger, tortured by his infinite longevity, bored to the bone, but unable to be bored to death, makes it his mission to insult personally every conscious entity in the universe. Slartibartfast also reappears in a more active role than in his previous outing. There is a lot of battling in this novel, much inadvertent warfare and accidental killing. It is funny, but quite violent and disturbing. The ultimate question and ultimate answer are proved to be unknowable simultaneously—a sardonic reflection on humankind’s stupid yearning to know one or two Really Big Things as opposed to lots and lots of interestingly complex little things. Douglas really didn’t want to write any more Hitchhiker’s and was trying to draw a line under them with this book. He tried even harder with the next, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.
There are many ideas in Life, the Universe and Everything, a book which is dedicated to Sally. She says that he told her in a letter that he had intended to write “To Sally—who I love above the title,” but she had left him by then so he couldn’t. Interestingly, it was Douglas’s next book which reflects the relationship more than the one being written while the affair was going on. He was hurt by the hostility of the critics who by and large felt that this third outing was veering towards self-parody and repetition. (“Arthur Dent is in danger of being shrivelled in the heat of his author’s imagination,” wrote Kelvin Johnstone in the Observer.) It is also the novel in the trilogy (all five of them) that many fans find the least satisfactory, for it is a love story in fantasy camouflage, more tender than cosmic. This did not stop the book selling in huge numbers, and it may tell us something about the fans, of course. Life, the Universe and Everything was the first book for which Douglas toured Australia, a country that he liked hugely for many of the same reasons that he found California so appealing.
One particularly engaging notion in Life, the Universe and Everything, which Douglas developed in more depth in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, is being able to fly like a bird. It’s his metaphor for love and a kind of ecstasy. In chapter two of Life, the Universe and Everything, Ford explains to Arthur how to fly. Solitude has so ravaged him by this point in the novel that his social skills and even his vocabulary have fallen into disuse. In all senses he needs Ford to give him a lift:
“Th
e Guide says there is an art to flying,” said Ford, “or rather a knack. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.” He smiled weakly. He pointed to the knees of his trousers and held up his arms to show the elbows. They were all torn and worn through.
Fenchurch, “Fenny,” adored by Arthur Dent in So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, also has a problem with everyday physics. Her feet do not actually touch the ground, a fine example of Douglas’s ability to take the familiar (in this case, a figure of speech) and make us wonder what would happen if it were literally true. Fenny, rather like many of the women in the novels of Douglas’s hero, Charles Dickens, is a slightly fey and mawkish character. Arthur loves her dearly—or perhaps he loves the idea of her rather more.
Fenchurch and Arthur learn to fly together, and their flight is sustained by mutual confidence. The shadow of doubt brings them back to earth. As if in some enchanting cartoon, they pirouette and zoom above the London rooftops, surprising the birds and a passing 747. Flying, like love, is an altered state, an escape from ground level and all the gravity of the daily round that imprisons us in the prosaic. Sally says that at first she was flattered to think she was the model for Fenchurch, but that when she read the book carefully she was less so. The novel is all about Arthur’s love for her, and not really about her at all.
Despite the fun and the access to smart restaurants, living with Douglas was hard work. Discretion was a quality foreign to his extravagant nature. He was bursting to let on, with the result that he told all his friends (in strictest confidence of course) how happy he was, and why. He might possibly have stopped passers-by on the street and told them too. Soon Douglas and Sally’s relationship was common knowledge in the circles in which they moved, and it wasn’t long before it was reported in London’s daily paper, the Evening Standard. Sally was very upset about this, but she says that Douglas was much better at being supported than being supportive. It was, she says, like trying to get comfort from a black hole.
