On Apr 30, 2005, at 6:21 AM, Robert Seeberger wrote:
Warren Ockrassa wrote:They couldn't show everything partly because they added crap that did not need to be there.
From Wkipedia:
"The script we shot was very much based on the last draft that Douglas wrote....All the substantive new ideas in the movie...are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him....Douglas was always up for reinventing HHGG in each of its different incarnations and he knew that working harder on some character development and some of the key relationships was an integral part of turning HHGG into a movie."
A cite or URL would have been nice. There's no indication here who 'we' are and no link for following up.
The screenwriter himself (Karey Kirkpatrick) has a few things to say at
<http://hitchhikers.movies.go.com/hitchblog/interview.htm>
Capsule form was that he started with a final draft Adams had left behind, which was about 70 pages long, but then developed something that was 154 pages, or about that many minutes of movie. It had to be cut. Unfortunately it was cut by someone who frankly admitted that, until he'd started the project, he'd never read, heard or seen any of the source material.
Most of the gnashing of teeth over the movie has little or no substance. Douglas was involved in the film up to the time of his death and the resulting film *is* based on his last draft.
No, his last draft was used, then built up, then cut; that's not the same thing. One of the reasons Adams ran things up to the wire was his nearly obsessive way of revising. A screenplay *draft* would not represent a completed form, of course, and one of the comments made by Kirkpatrick was that he felt Adams had been too hard on himself in the things he had cut to that point.
I think that's probably a bad assessment. Adams' ideas were not all universally good and a lot of his early material evidently shows that somewhere in the process he did a lot of polishing. If he cut something from a screenplay and it got stuck back in, I think it's safe to assume it was cut because he'd decided it stank.
What no one seems to be hearing here is that the things that were cut -- the really clever dialogues, the interesting and bizarre explanations for things -- were what made the stories genuinely funny. Those got hacked mercilessly into oblivion. Ergo, the story is no longer genuinely funny.
And I simply refuse to accept as plausible the assertion that Adams' ideas were so "organic" he'd be willing to utterly sodomize two major elements of his story -- the way HoG's drive worked; and the reason the mice wanted Arthur's brain (as well as the entire Earth Mk II subplot). Those are two facets that remained rock-solid consistent in all prior incarnations, and were totally screwed up in the movie.
When one version is that substantially at variance from all others, reason leads to only one conclusion. The variant version was broken by someone with no f--king clue at all what he was doing.
And that would not have been Douglas Adams.
-- Warren Ockrassa, Publisher/Editor, nightwares Books http://books.nightwares.com/ Current work in progress "The Seven-Year Mirror" http://www.nightwares.com/books/ockrassa/Flat_Out.pdf
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