h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

So will there be a new movie version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? The h2g2 Editors asked Robbie Stamp, one of the founders of h2g2 and a close friend of Douglas, to give us his perspective.

Read his exclusive initial comments (A1094663) on this exciting project.

As the line-up was aanounced in the papers last week, I'd say it was looking likely!

So will there be a movie?

Forgive my cynicism, but it doesn't actually say anywhere in those comments that there will or will not be, and any film in production for seven years sounds like it's grinding to a halt to me.

B

New directorial line-up and stuff announced last week to be finally moving ahead.

do us mere hootooers get to go the premiere?

I should imagine that would be up to the film company Vicki.

I think we mere mortals hould be included automatically as regular contributors!

I accidently started a thread ' movie' responding to this announcement.I think Barry Sonnofield should direct ( men in black, the addam`s family series, more)~

Lady Neugen, I misunderstood the caption
on your thread about Barry Sonnenfeld.
I thought you were calling it a B- movie,
i.e. worse than a B movie.

As for the project taking seven years,
Aesop said that slow but steady wins the race.
Then there's the infinite improbability factor:
the less likely a movie seems, the more we should expect it,
otherwise the Heart of Gold won't work properly.

I won't mention how long Orson Welles and Stanley
Kubrick had to work on some of their movies
before finishing themj.

Schindler's List was a project for Steven Spielberg for more than ten years before it was finally made. This is in no way unusual.

and didn't Gangs of New York take an immense amount of time.

Actually, Schindler's List was a project for Scorsese, and Spielberg was due to do Cape Fear. Then they cleverly worked out that they could swap projects. Gangs of New York is a good example of how some of these things take. Scorsese bought the rights to the book in the 1970s but wasn't in a position to make the film until the 1990s. He eventually started 'proper' production work on it four years before it's eventual release.

Mirrors the way Douglas had given the option to others to make film adaptations and each one sadly fell through. This certainly looks like it's closer than ever before to finally making it to cinemas though.

Happens all the time. All I would say is I wouldn't trust any newspapers' speculation about possible casting just yet. You only have to look at who they're touting to be the next Doctor Who (Shane Ritchie?!) to see how wide of the mark they are on that score.

I just hope the final HHGTTG film is consistent with the other versions of the story... by making sure it's not at all consistent to the radio, novel, TV or any other version

Also,not to mention Selma Hayak, but didn`t she do a film on the life of Freida Ka_lov????(Diego Garcia`s wife)that took over 10 yrs to produce????
IL & M needed the time to get up-to-speed for the special effects needed. Rick Baker would be + as the consultant on say,Breezelbob(sp)!

"Actually, Schindler's List was a project for Scorsese, and Spielberg was due to do Cape Fear. Then they cleverly worked out that they could swap projects."

That's weird. I thought that, initially, Schindler's List was Spielberg's project. Then, when he didn't feel he could do it justice, he offered it to Scorsese. It was only much later that they swapped projects.

That's my recollection, based on the reporting at the time. I only remember it because there was much amusement over the fact that the original title of the book is 'Schindler's Ark' and the implication was that, because Spielberg was taking the project, they changed it to List to avoid confusion with Spielberg's most recent (at the time) project - Raiders of the Lost Ark (after all, they both feature Nazis). I'm pretty sure this would have been around the time that Raiders came out.

But I could very easily be wrong, and my old copies of Starburst are probably hidden under several layers of sediment.

Well I'm prepared to wait as long as someone decent gets to play me

Good grief Jim, I thought I was the only one who subscribed to Starburst I know just where my old copies are, just can't get to them

Well, I've been waiting for the movie since I heard that Ivan Reitman of Ghostbusters fame was going to do it. I hope that this incarnation is successful.