The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

At 9:30 A.M. on 19 April 2004, “Shoorah, Shoorah” sung by Betty Wright blared out across an “Islington flat” built on Stage 7 at Elstree Film Studios in Hertfordshire. Under the eyes of the director, Garth Jennings, and the producer, Nick Goldsmith, who together make up the Hammer and Tongs production company, the first assistant director, Richard Whelan, shouted, “Action!” and finally, just over a quarter of a century since the first radio series was broadcast on Radio 4, a movie based on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was under way. Arthur Dent, played by Martin Freeman, stood by himself reading a book, while more than forty actors in fancy dress started dancing. In the midst of the crowd, which included a sugar-pink mouse, a drunk cowboy and an Indian chief, the American actress Zooey Deschanel as Tricia McMillan could be seen bouncing up and down, dressed as Charles Darwin.

Douglas Adams once famously described the process of making a film in Hollywood as like “trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.” Why indeed—despite the phenomenal international appeal of the Hitchhiker radio series, TV series and above all, the novels—had it taken over twenty-five years to get this movie made? It is a long story.

This afterword to the film tie-in edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is not an exhaustive account of the two and a half decades it took a senior Hollywood executive to finally say, “Yes, let’s make the Hitchhiker’s movie.” As Ed Victor, Douglas’s personal friend and literary agent since 1981, has said, “Many, many people nibbled at it, took a taste and rejected it.” To tell the full tale of all those nibbles would need a book in its own right. But as one of the executive producers, I can tell the story of how the movie finally came to be made, based on conversations with many of the key people involved.

I first met Douglas Adams in 1991 in his house in Islington, where he played Bach to me because there was a point he wanted to make about music and mathematics, and we talked about a television series on evolution he wanted to write and present. My overwhelming impression on that first meeting was of Douglas Adams’s powerful intellectual curiosity. We stayed in touch. He introduced me to sushi. We started a company together.^* We saw a lot of movies and I was lucky that he became a friend as well as a colleague.

Douglas and I continued to be good friends over the years and so it was not surprising that ten years later, when my father died, Douglas was one of the first people I called on returning home from the hospital. He had been compassionate and gently supportive when my father was ill, and we talked at length about the kind of man my father had been. After a while we strayed onto our normal topics of conversation, including new ideas Douglas was hatching, and—for the umpteenth time—talked about our frustrations over the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie, which was already well entrenched in Hollywood folklore for its seemingly endless stint in development hell.

The very next day, Friday 11 May 2001, I received a call from Ed Victor and, sitting in my favourite chair in the kitchen, where I had spoken to Douglas just the evening before, I heard the news that he had died of a heart attack less than an hour before in his gym in Montecito, California. I remember my wife calling out in shock as she heard me talking to Ed but I just felt numb and spent the evening fielding and making calls to friends and colleagues.

The outpouring of grief and affection for Douglas on the Web and in the press was a tribute to the enormous impact that Hitchhiker’s has had on people all over the world. Perhaps, sadly, Douglas’s tragically early death and the huge reaction it caused actually were the catalysts that finally got the movie-making process going. If so it is a very cruel irony. Ed Victor remarks on the frustration of trying to get the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie made, saying, “I was always trying to sell Hitchhiker’s. Douglas always, always wanted a film made of this. Four times I sold Hitchhiker’s and I’ve described not seeing the movie made for so many years as the single most substantial professional frustration of my life. This was something I’d always felt so sure about. I’d seen the mailbags. I just knew there was an audience out there. I sold it to Don Tafner for ABC to make a TV series. I sold it to Columbia and Ivan Reitman. We did a joint venture deal with Michael Nesmith and finally we sold it to Disney and even then it took seven years to get the movie into production.”

My own relationship with Douglas doesn’t go back as far as Ed’s, but I have been involved in the film project since the negotiations to sell movie rights to Disney began in 1997 when, following the huge success of the first Men in Black film, it seemed that there was interest again in comedy and science fiction. Bob Bookman, Douglas’s film agent at the powerful Hollywood talent agency CAA (Creative Artists Agency), organized meetings for Douglas and me with a variety of potential producers. And as a result of those meetings two people really began to drive the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie project forward. Roger Birnbaum at independent producer Caravan Pictures (which evolved into Spyglass Entertainment) had the “muscle” and enthusiasm to get Disney on board, and via Michael Nesmith, Douglas’s friend and former business partner on the movie, we had been introduced to Peter Safran, Nick Reed and Jimmy Miller, who together at that stage represented Jay Roach, then a hot new director coming off the back of his surprise summer hit, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Jay also had a strong relationship with Disney. Douglas and Jay struck up a warm creative relationship almost immediately and it looked like a winning triumvirate had been formed.

Hitchhiker’s started as a radio series, became a famous novel “trilogy in five parts,” a stage play and a computer game and was at the time being turned into a “real” guide to the planet Earth by The Digital Village. The rights situation was thus highly complex and concluding a deal took an enormous amount of effort. Ken Kleinberg and Christine Cuddy became the attorneys for the negotiations with Disney. Even with their hard work, the enthusiasm and support of Roger Birnbaum and Jay Roach, and the teams at CAA, Ed Victor’s office and The Digital Village all working overtime, negotiations went on for almost eighteen months. The deal was finally done just before Christmas 1998, and stipulated that Douglas and I would be executive producers and that Douglas would write a new script.

Douglas had been working on Hitchhiker movie scripts for many years and so, with input from Jay and Shauna Robertson, his business partner at the time, he was quickly able to produce a draft that was full of his extraordinary wit and intelligence; new ideas jostled for space with favourite scenes and characters from the books and the radio series. This early 1999 draft was good but the difficulties of striking the right balance between the episodic nature of Hitchhiker’s and a narrative drive that made sense had not truly been solved. Indeed this was the issue that had vexed draft after draft of the movie over the years and it continued to be a huge stumbling block. Jay remembers his collaboration with Douglas with great affection but also reflects on the problems they faced.

“Even during the writing time and what became a hellishly frustrating development process, I don’t remember ever enjoying a collaboration more. The dinners and the long talks and his laughter. Even later, in the middle of saying ‘it’s not happening,’ we’d still be making jokes about the absurdity of it all. So the process was extremely pleasurable. It just didn’t get anywhere. There was a combination of things built into the struggle to get Hitchhiker’s made … there was always a mismatch between, on the one hand, people’s perception of it being a very high-budget sci-fi extravaganza with a lot of spectacle and, on the other, the recognition that it was smarter, more sophisticated, a little more English, a little more ironic than the big moneymaker comedies here in the United States, and those things didn’t synch up, so it was hard to tap into Disney’s needs.”

On 19 April 1999, Douglas, frustrated with the pace of progress, sent a fax to David Vogel, then president of Production at Disney, suggesting a meeting. He wrote: “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 … the fact that we may have different perspectives 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…. Why don’t we meet and actually have a chat? I’ve appended a list of numbers you can reach me on. If you manage not to … I shall know you’re trying not to, very, very hard indeed.” With characteristic humour, he then provided dozens of contact numbers, including those for his own home and mobile, his nanny, his mother, his sister, his next-door neighbour (who he was “sure would take a message”), a couple of his favourite restaurants and even the number for Sainsbury’s, his local supermarket, where he was sure they would page him. It had the desired effect and shortly afterwards Douglas and I flew out to LA for a “summit” meeting. We talked for hours on that flight about what we both suspected was coming: Disney was going to suggest bringing in a new writer. Roger Birnbaum, who was at the meeting at Disney’s Studios in Bur-bank, remembers it well.

“I knew it would be tricky. I wanted him to know how much we respected him. I admired him a lot and did not want to compromise the material but I also thought that after so many years of working on so many drafts, Douglas was getting bogged down.”

Douglas was faced with an agonizing dilemma. The message was clear. Momentum, that most precious of Hollywood commodities, was slowing dangerously and if the movie was not to stall altogether—again—he was going to have to let another writer into the fold. Disney and Spyglass handled things with considerable tact and respect. In the meeting, David Vogel, a thoughtful man and a former Rabbinical scholar, likened Douglas to the designer of a cathedral, with the next step of the process being akin to hiring the master stone mason—not the man with the vision but a different kind of craftsman, concerned with making sure that the brilliance of the original conception had the right foundations.

An experienced writer was hired and wrote a new draft, which was completed in autumn 1999. There was not much collaborative work possible with Douglas and although it was by no means a bad script, it didn’t really move the process forward. More ominously it coincided with a regime change at the studio. David Vogel and Joe Roth, who had been in charge when Disney bought the rights, both moved on. Nina Jacobson, now president of Buena Vista Pictures, responsible for developing scripts and overseeing film production for Walt Disney Pictures, was now in charge. Her biggest concern was budget level and at that stage she was not sure that the material as it was could break out of its fan base to create a movie Disney could get behind.

Frustrated yet again, Douglas decided to write yet another draft and this he delivered in summer 2000. Disney were still not convinced, and in fact were increasingly unsure that this movie was for them. So, with their permission, the script was quietly sent to other studios. The project still had some very powerful supporters. Jay was by now an A-list comedy director and Roger Birnbaum and his partner Gary Barber at Spyglass were extremely influential. Nevertheless, all the studios and the key independents who were shown the new draft passed. One call in particular stands out in my mind as summing up everything that was so painful about this tantalizing period. Douglas phoned me from Santa Barbara while I was on a beach in Corsica with my family. He told me that Joe Roth, who was now at Revolution Studios, had passed. I remember the awful sinking feeling as I looked across to my family and saw my wife noticing the anxiety on my face. This call felt to me especially bad news as Joe was a close friend and colleague of Roger Birnbaum’s and had, behind the scenes, been very instrumental in bringing Hitchhiker’s to Disney when he was head of the studio. If he had no appetite for this, who would? Ed Victor also remembers this period all too well: “It fell into a black hole again. At one point we went to the bar next door to the office here, both ordered huge vodka martinis and Douglas said, ‘I estimate that I must have spent a total of five years of my professional life on this fucking film, Ed. Never let me do this again.’”

But of course Douglas never did really let go of the hope that one day there would be a movie of Hitchhiker’s.

In spring 2001, with the film still stalled, Jay Roach came to feel that after working on the movie for several years maybe he was simply not the right person to take things further, and very sadly and reluctantly he decided to bow out as director, although as producer he remained as committed as ever. Spyglass too were still determined to find a way forward. Jon Glickman, president of Spyglass Entertainment, and Derek Evans, who had first brought Hitchhiker’s to the attention of Roger Birnbaum when he joined Spyglass as a development executive, had been two of the staunchest supporters of the movie.^* Jon remembers seeing the need for realism about the budget and returning to their first instinct, which had been to find a director on the way up, as indeed Jay had been when we first met him back in 1997. But it was a pretty dispiriting time.

And then in May 2001 came the call to say that Douglas had died. In one week I flew out to California for Douglas’s funeral and home to England for my father’s. It was emotionally and physically exhausting. As friends gathered in the weeks and months after Douglas’s death, much of the talk was about the immense frustration Douglas had experienced over all the years of trying to make “the Movie.” It had almost become an obsession for him and sometime later I asked his widow, Jane Belson, whether, should it prove possible to somehow get the movie made, it would have her approval. She simply said yes, and made one comment in particular, that given the directing and producing team who finally brought the movie home was very prescient. “Get a young director, someone who didn’t grow up with Hitchhiker’s in its first flush of success. Remember that Douglas was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote Hitchhiker’s. Find somebody with a current energy, not trendy, but cool. Hitchhiker’s was cool when it first came out.”

So I spoke to Roger Birnbaum again and as always he offered his support and continued enthusiasm. He remembers the call well. “After Douglas’s death we froze, and then it was a call from you, saying that the estate was still up for making the movie, that started us going again. We still loved the project and out of respect for Douglas were happy to try and get it made.”

I also spoke to Jay Roach, whose support I knew would be essential. The project needed all the allies we could find and a film like Hitchhiker’s had to have “insider” support if it was to stand any chance of being made. Once he knew that Jane Belson wanted the movie made, his deep affection for Douglas meant that Jay also gladly stepped back into the ring as director.

We all knew that without a new draft we would go nowhere; Hitchhiker’s could be in limbo for years. It was absolutely necessary to hire a new writer, and through Jennifer Perrini (Jay’s partner at his production company Everyman Pictures) at Jay’s company, Everyman Pictures, we were very lucky to find Karey Kirkpatrick. He tells the story of his involvement in his own self-interview (page 268). Karey was not a Hitchhiker fan—although he became one—but simply came to the screenplay as an experienced writer who could see where some of the problems lay. His starting point was Douglas’s final script, and I was able to make available a lot of material from the hard drive on Douglas’s Mac—earlier drafts, back stories and notes on solving problems. And so Karey and Jay, back in the director’s chair, set to work on a new “take,” establishing the basic direction in which the screenplay could now go.

Several months later, on an early spring morning in 2002, a meeting was called at Roger Birnbaum’s house in Beverly Hills. There, with a log fire in the grate and smoked salmon and bagels on the table, Karey Kirkpatrick pitched the take that he and Jay had worked on to Nina Jacobson, Jay Roach, Jennifer Perrini, Roger Birnbaum, Jon Glickman and Derek Evans. This was the core group of people who could get this movie made. Karey began his pitch with an overview of how the narrative in the movie might work. He just read the “story so far” from the beginning of The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, which summarized the events of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

Many races believe that it was created by some sort of god, though the Jatravartid people of Viltvodle VI believe that the entire Universe was in fact sneezed out of the nose of a being called the Great Green Arkleseizure.

The Jatravartids, who live in perpetual fear of the time they call the Coming of the Great White Handkerchief, are small blue creatures with more than fifty arms each, who are therefore unique in being the only race in history to have invented the aerosol deodorant before the wheel.

However, the Great Green Arkleseizure Theory is not widely accepted outside Viltvodle VI and so, the Universe being the puzzling place it is, other explanations are constantly being sought.

For instance, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings once built themselves a gigantic supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate once and for all the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything.

For seven and a half million years, Deep Thought computed and calculated, and in the end announced that the answer was in fact Forty-two—and so another, even bigger, computer had to be built to find out what the actual question was.

And this computer, which was called the Earth, was so large that it was frequently mistaken for a planet—especially by the strange apelike beings who roamed its surface, totally unaware that they were simply part of a gigantic computer program. And this is very odd, because without that fairly simple and obvious piece of knowledge, nothing that ever happened on the Earth could possibly make the slightest bit of sense.

Sadly, however, just before the critical moment of readout, the Earth was unexpectedly demolished by the Vogons to make way—so they claimed—for a new hyperspace bypass, and so all hope of discovering a meaning for life was lost for ever.

Or so it would seem.

Two of these strange, apelike creatures survived.

Arthur Dent escaped at the very last moment because an old friend of his, Ford Prefect, suddenly turned out to be from a small planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and not from Guildford as he had hitherto claimed; and, more to the point, he knew how to hitch rides on flying saucers.

Tricia McMillan—or Trillian—had skipped the planet six months earlier with Zaphod Beeblebrox, the then President of the Galaxy.

Two survivors.

They are all that remains of the greatest experiment ever conducted—to find the Ultimate Question and the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe and Everything.

Nina proclaimed that she got that. We had a broad narrative shape: start with the destruction of Earth, and tell the story of the journey to Magrathea, the fabled planet-building planet. Much of the new material that is now in the movie is about the difficulty of getting to Magrathea and it is here that Douglas invented new plot devices and characters such as the fabulous “point of view” gun and Humma Kavula, the crazed missionary, who preaches about “the coming of the great white handkerchief.” The other key decision was that the movie would have Arthur as the central character and we would experience the galaxy from his point of view. It sounds very simple, but over the years various drafts had tried placing Zaphod or even the Vogons at the centre of the story; but perhaps feeling less of a creative need to reinvent than Douglas, Karey worked his way towards a narrative structure that worked. He has a very good ear for English humour—its irony and its wariness of sentiment—but also a very good grip on the Hollywood structural sensibility.

Finally there was a sense that we were on the right track. But then barely had it sputtered into life again than the movie nearly faltered again. In the weeks following the “fireside pitch,” Disney, which had already spent considerable sums on rights acquisition and various drafts, balked at paying Karey’s rewrite fee and the whole thing looked like it might fall apart. But Roger Birnbaum and his partner Gary Barber saved the project: Spyglass demonstrated their absolute commitment to making the movie by paying for the rewrite themselves. Jon Glickman of Spyglass describes this crucial episode.

“We had this meeting with Disney at which Nina Jacobson—who’s a big supporter of the movie now, but at the time still felt the thing was just too weird—said, ‘I’m not going to pay for Karey.’ Now Karey’s an expensive writer: he’d just had a big hit movie in Chicken Run and had written James and the Giant Peach and we were all in danger of the Hitchhiker movie just slipping away, yet again. I don’t know what got into Spyglass at that moment except that we loved the material so much. We’d lived with this for six years and I think a little bit of it for us was the emotional connection to Douglas. It was completely out of synch with how we normally do business. But we picked up the tab for Karey’s rewrite. This was extremely risky … we were just paying for the draft basically and thinking, ‘Hopefully Karey will figure this out.’ That’s just what Karey, working with Jay directing the rewrite, set out to achieve.”

Bob Bookman, one of Hollywood’s most experienced agents, comments on the phenomenal commitment of so many people to Hitchhiker’s: “Movies are a collaborative medium, both getting them to the starting block and actually making them. There were so many people involved over so many years, you, Ed, Jay, Roger, several people you could look at and say ‘if they weren’t involved this wouldn’t have happened’ and yet the magic of it is that all these people hung in there to the point where we could launch it.”

And the result was that in the late spring of 2002, Karey, continuing to work with Jay and with input from Spyglass and me, started to write. Whenever Karey hit a problem he went back to the radio series, to the books, to The Salmon of Doubt^*, to the bits of Douglas’s hard drive that I had made available, for an insight into Douglas’s mind. He delivered his script just before Christmas that year. I came home late one evening and it was sitting in my e-mail. I sat and read it in one go with the hairs rising on the back of my neck. Here was a script that was utterly Hitchhiker in its sensibility but had now made the leap and felt like a movie, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

Ed Victor recalls a conversation with Michael Nesmith about the critical importance to a movie of getting the right script. “Michael said, ‘If you are a producer of a film, you have a property, and what you are doing is bringing the studio head to the mouth of a dark cave and saying, “Inside that cave is a golden statue. Just give me 100 million dollars.^† You will have that statue. Go in and get that statue.” Well, the studio chief doesn’t want to give you 100 million dollars so that he can go into the dark.’ And then Nesmith pauses and says, ‘The screenplay is a flashlight and with it you can point into the dark cave and just see the glint, the outlines of a statue. Then he gives you the 100 million dollars and goes in and sees if he can grab the statue …’ I thought that was a very clever metaphor. You had to see someone doing a script of Hitchhiker’s before you could get it as a movie, for all that it had proved its success in book or radio form.” Now we had a flashlight.

In the new year, Jay could see that the project was accelerating, and with other movie commitments bearing down on him, decided that he should step aside as director for the last time although he remained on board as producer. So we needed to find a new director. Disappointing as this was, for the first time we did have a script. In all the long years of trying to make the movie it had always been the other way round— interested directors, but no script. Now there was a currency Hollywood understood and the script was biked around town. Jay knew Spike Jonze, director of Being John Malkovich and Adaptation, who had once been a leading music-video director, and sent the script to him. There was a general feeling that Spike, who had shown his touch with unusual material, would be a good choice to direct. He was a fan, read the script and liked it but was also committed to other projects. He did, however, play a crucial role in moving us on. He suggested Hammer and Tongs, Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, a very creative and respected music video and commercials partnership, whose collaborations have included work for bands and performers such as REM, Blur, Fat Boy Slim and Ali G.

Initially Hammer and Tongs told their agent Frank Wuliger not to bother even sending them the script. They were working on a movie project of their own and they feared that a Hitchhiker script emerging from Hollywood with no Douglas around to fight his corner would be likely to ruin something about which they both cared a great deal. But Frank played another small but vital part in keeping the momentum going: he sent the script anyway. It sat on a desk unread for a fortnight until Nick took it home. The next day, with customary understatement, he quietly suggested to Garth that he should take a look. Garth took it home and read almost all of it on the loo, emerging to tell his wife that it actually “wasn’t bad at all.” They could see what a great job Karey had done in letting Douglas’s genius breathe.

As Nick and Garth were on my patch in London I was the first to meet them in person. On a fine spring morning, almost a year on from the log fire in Beverly Hills, I found them on their converted canal boat, ironically just ten minutes’ walk from Douglas’s house in Islington. After all those air miles and moving his family out to California to try and get the movie made, it was about to be “brought home” by a team who lived in England on Douglas’s doorstep. There were chocolate biscuits, a very friendly black dog called Mack and best of all the boat was a homage to the Apple computer. Douglas, as all of his fans know, was a huge Apple devotee—indeed he became an “Apple Master”—and somehow if Nick and Garth had worked in PC city I would probably have had to make my excuses and leave. But they didn’t and I didn’t. From the very first meeting it was clear to me that Nick and Garth had the awareness, the vision and the sense of fun to finally take the helm of the Hitchhiker’s movie.

There was one early meeting that sums up that sense of fun and the phenomenal attention to detail that characterizes Nick and Garth. We had a video conference call with Jay, Spyglass and the team at Disney headed by Nina Jacobson. This was boardroom in LA to boardroom in London but Nick and Garth at our end had arranged for a little theatrical curtain, classic red with gold brocade, to be rigged up in front of the camera. When the team in LA arrived for the conference, there on their screen, instead of the normal view of a big desk in a nondescript room, were the closed curtains. When we were ready to begin, Garth, who had attached the curtain pull to his chair, gradually shifted backwards, and the curtains opened and the words “Don’t Panic” rose up on a little board. Nothing sums up Nick and Garth’s sense of playfulness, the line they have trod between freshness and fidelity, and their love of gadgets better than those curtains.

It was also at this meeting that Nina made it clear that if we were going to make this movie, we were going to do it right. She was not going to go down in history as the executive who screwed up Hitchhiker’s. It had to be rooted in Douglas’s world-view but to work for Disney it had to reach out to a new audience too.

Through the summer of 2003, Hammer and Tongs worked on the design, story and budget. A crucial part of finally moving into production was finding an approach which could be made to work at a budget level with which Disney were going to be comfortable. This was a challenge Nick and Garth relished. For them invention and problem-solving are worn as a badge of honour. In the autumn Roger Birnbaum decided that the pieces were now lined up. “We had a script, a director, a vision and a budget. Now was the time to find out if Disney were ready to play.” Under the terms of the agreement concluded when Spyglass had picked up Karey’s fee, Roger and Gary were now in control of the project and Disney had first right of refusal to be their financial or distribution partner. Nick and Garth flew out to LA and made their pitch to Nina. It was still by no means certain that Disney would go for it and Jay remembers calling Nina from his car on the Pacific Coast Highway and sensing that there was still some way to go before she was convinced.

On 17 September Nina took the meeting and, as Jay had promised, was bowled over by the energy and vision that Nick and Garth had. The final step was a meeting with Nina’s immediate boss, Dick Cook, chairman of Walt Disney Studios. A kind and highly respected executive, Dick was the final person who needed convincing, and after an agonizing wait of several days Nick and Garth, the Spyglass team, Jay and Nina gathered in his office on Thursday 25 September 2003 at 4:00 P.M. LA time. Garth, who in a wonderful Hollywood phrase is “very good in the room,” launched into his pitch. Dick heard him out and quietly asked if he could have the movie ready for next summer. Garth heard this to mean was it “technically” feasible to have it ready for summer 2005 and simply said that that was possible. Dick and Nina had a few whispered words with each other. As everybody was leaving the meeting and Garth was gathering up the designs and story boards he had used during his pitch, Dick said to Garth that if there was anything he needed he should just be in touch. It took Nina following everybody out to the lift to point out that the movie had just been green-lit. Even for experienced Hollywood players such as Roger and Gary and Jay, a greenlit movie with no caveats on cast was unusual and as the doors closed on the lift the whole team literally screamed for joy. I received a call at about 1:00 A.M. my time in London from Nick, who simply said, “We’re making a movie.” Jay came on the phone and was almost in tears. For all those who had worked with Douglas all those years it was truly a bittersweet moment; he had longed to hear those words, longed to be in a meeting just like that where a senior Hollywood executive said, “Yes, let’s make the Hitchhiker’s movie.”

Having greenlit the movie, Disney made two very important decisions. The first was to bring the project back in-house. Nina Jacobson’s faith in Nick and Garth and her excitement about the material in their hands made her determined to bring it centre stage at Disney in preparation for a major “live action” summer release. The second was perhaps even more important; having made a very bold creative choice in letting a first-time director and producer loose on a big-budget movie, Nina now also allowed Garth and Nick to hire the core creative team with whom they had worked in their music video and commercial career. The director of photography, Igor Jadue-Lillo, the production designer, Joel Collins, the second unit director, Dominic Leung, and the costume designer, Sammy Sheldon, were all key members of the Hammer and Tongs family. Indeed it was precisely because Garth and Nick had gathered around them a group of highly creative people with whom they had worked for many years that Nina felt confident in allowing them to simply “get on with it.” Spyglass remained as the movie’s producers and in late autumn 2003 we went into “pre-production,” the period in which the film is cast, scheduled and budgeted and the shooting script is prepared.

The story of how the key cast was gathered together is best told in their own words in the interviews that follow, but one theme occurs again and again as they reflect on the experience of working with Garth and Nick—the enormous attention to detail that lies at the heart of their approach. From the outset Garth and Nick were determined that Hitchhiker’s should not be a totally “computer-generated” galaxy. Even the most cursory of looks at their body of work shows their love of puppetry, of props that work “in camera,” of real sets. Of course in a movie like Hitchhiker’s there were always going to be some spectacular computer graphics, but in the end the actors spent very little of their time acting opposite a tennis ball on a stick on a sound stage covered in blue or green cloth. Henson’s Creature Shop in Camden, London, was hired to create the Vogons and dozens of “real” creatures with whom the actors could interact. Over the sixteen-week shooting period at Elstree, Frogmore and Shepperton Studios, and on location in North Hertfordshire, Wales and central London, the production design team created a series of lovingly realized “real worlds” for the cast to inhabit.

Probably the “holy of holies” for fans and cast alike was the Heart of Gold set. On the famous George Lucas sound stage at Elstree was built a fully realized interior for the ship. It was truly a thing of beauty: gleaming white curves, a magnificent control panel with the Improbability Drive button in the middle, a kitchen and even a bar area for the serving of Pan Galactic Gargle Blasters. And fittingly, on 11 May 2004, the third anniversary of Douglas’s death, it was on the set of the Heart of Gold that the whole cast and crew gathered for a minute’s silence to say thank you to Douglas. Jay Roach, who had his own moment’s silence in LA later that day, reflects: “It all started with Douglas and for all of us it has been about serving what was amazing about the radio plays and the books. The spirit of Douglas united all of us and none of us ever wanted to do anything that did not take it down a path that we hope he would have loved and that his fans will love. It needed to morph itself into this new channel but it didn’t need to be essentially anything other than it always was, this amazing prism that you could look at the world through and be inspired and uplifted by, and all of us knew that it would not work without that essence, and when we found Garth and Nick I genuinely thought that they would do a better job at letting that essence breathe than I would have done.”

Roger Birnbaum too considers that “this has been one of those great adventures in my career. When it takes a long time to get a film off the ground, and then it works, it makes it so much more satisfying … everybody has been passionate about this project and has gone the extra mile. We’ve done it for Douglas’s spirit.”

Over the long period of making a film there are many moments that stick in your mind. One such moment for me was when we were filming just outside Tredegar, South Wales, in a disused quarry (keeping alive a long and honourable tradition of British science fiction and quarries), and all day we had been jumping in and out of vans as the rain came in squalls, horizontally down the quarry. The producer from Henson’s Creature Shop was wrapped head to toe in Arctic-exploration gear she had borrowed from a friend, whilst in a splendid display of ruggedness some of the film crew remained in their shorts and Timberlands, no matter how cold it got. The rare periods of sunshine necessary for filming had been all too brief. But now in the gentle evening light I could see a very small man, standing all by himself in the middle of the quarry floor, trying to hold a large white head in place against the wind. I could also see the director, with his inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm, testing out a gadget that three of the lead actors were going to have to use the next day. By pushing a little button a paddle flicked up in front of him with alarming speed and stopped just short of his nose. Meanwhile a man in pyjamas and dressing gown, clutching a towel, passed the time of day with the president of the Galaxy. In the distance a Ferrari-red spacecraft, which had gouged out a fifty-metre trench when it had crash-landed, caught the sun on its tail fin.

The date was 1 July 2004. We were filming the exterior shots for the planet Vogsphere and not for the first time I felt a surge of pride and excitement that after so many years we were actually making “the movie” of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It was something that Douglas had wanted so badly and as usual that pride was mixed straightaway with deep sadness that he was not there to share it with everybody.

Many dozens of times during the pre-production and filming of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy I was asked things like, “Do you think Douglas would have approved of the design for the box for the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal?” or “Would he have enjoyed the use of a thirty-foot-high sculpt of his nose as the entrance to Humma Kavula’s temple?” My answer was pretty much the same each time: it’s hard to say on the specifics of the box or the nose (though I can hazard a guess that in both those cases the answer would have been yes), but what I do know is that he would have been delighted by the passion, attention to detail and sheer creative exuberance that everybody involved in the production has brought to making the movie. And there in that tableau in the quarry—with Warwick Davis’s stand-in, Gerald Staddon,^* helping to line up Marvin the Paranoid Android’s next shot; Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell, as Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox respectively, making the most of some pretty trying conditions; Garth Jennings putting a prop through its paces; and the crew doggedly climbing in and out of cramped cars—was everything that I hope would have made Douglas proud.

Robbie Stamp
London, December 2004