On Apr 29, 2005, at 8:13 PM, Max Battcher wrote:
The problem with the pacing was that it *did not have to be cut*. All the screenwriter had to do was start from the original material -- as I mentioned before the first installment in radio form was only 2 hours long to begin with -- remove the stuff that simply could *not* be filmed, and then apply a little spackle to cover the holes that would have emerged as a result.
Presto, a 90-minute movie that didn't have to be cut, absolutely did not have to have anything added, and still had a plot that worked. And, as much as possible, the words that are what *really* makes HHGttG the funny adventure it is.
The first episode of the radio show would not in any way make a good movie, and I say that having liked the radio show. So much of the core of the first season is scattered.
Then there's the fact that Douglas Adams himself was never really happy with the pacing. Adams was constantly rearranging the shape of this material, particularly this earlier introduction stuff of the Guide. My favorite incarnation over both the book and radio play for the early portions of the Guide is the Computer Game, which is actually the inter-mediary incarnation between the movie version and the book version. Perhaps that is why I had an easier time with some of the early changes.
It was the unforeseeable way things fit together that really made the story so damned clever.
I thought a lot of that was well intact.
You did? You mean that, to you, Arthur's early and unnecessary flashback to the party at Islington represented keeping the unpredictability of his meeting Trillian later "intact"? It's impossible for a later meeting, foreshadowed in the opening minutes of a movie, to be described as unexpected, isn't it?
It's a well used literary device. Mock foreshadowing all you want, but the foreshadowing, IMNSHO, did enhance that later scene (and I often stated that the book and radio play needeed it)... it also makes the universe seem all that more congruent and self-consistent. The radio play was written off the seat of the cuff, and it shows. Again, not that I don't enjoy it, but in this particular the case, the "better" story device _is_ foreshadowing.
> (Well, that and Adams's careful honing of
language, most of which was changed in the script by someone with the same notions of subtlety as a hammer-wielding three-year-old.)
That would be good old Douglas Adams himself. I've heard that he was often his harshest critic of his own prose when writing the script than any stereo-typical Vogon that some of you may believe was actually to blame.
Yes. You might not have seen my point, which was that Adams *really understood* humor in language and really knew how to make it work. By extracting much of his finely-crafted prose, the screenwriter essentially destroyed the humor value of the words Adams spent so much time agonizing over.
I guess this is one of our biggest points of disagreement. Radio, the Books, and even the Computer Game are all inherently linguistic in nature. I love good linguistic humor. However, the Big Screen is primarily visual. Douglas Adams realized this. I've heard that in one draft Douglas Adams entirely eliminated the Guide entries. The rule of thumb in movie script writing is "show don't tell" and "voiceovers are bad".
I thought the movie did a fair job of balancing the linguistic guide entries with the visual effects at the cost of turning the movie almost literally into a "roller coaster" that felt out of control and going at too huge speeds.
Even the totally needless Malkovich intervention? That served no purpose whatsoever; the Point of View Gun, while clever, wasn't necessary to making the story work, Humma Kavula himself was not in any way necessary to the story, and the idea that the HoG needed "coordinates" to locate Magrathea was asinine.
The damned ship uses *improbability* to get where it's going. It doesn't *need* coordinates to locate a planet as vastly unlikely as Magrathea is; you just basically have to calculate the odds against Magrathea existing, feed the data into Eddy, and push the "Make spaceship go now" button. (But explaining that to many theatergoing audiences would probably be difficult; these are people who, in the main, probably have a hard time balancing their checkbooks.)
Absolutely, I loved the Malkovich sideline. It was great Douglas Adams visual satire that very visually gave the content from several good guide entries, and even managed to strengthen the "conspiracy" feel of Gag Halfrunt and the Psychologists' attack on Earth, which as much as I liked Gag Halfrunt as a character I never really felt convinced that much of a conspiracy was going on.
The POV gun was classic Adams, and a fun visually linguistic (heh) tool. It made the trailer escape at Magrathea much more "realistic" (insofar as H2G2 is realistic).
As for the coords thing, I thought it was fine. Not great, but it worked. It did remove some of the "improv" feel of the story, and give it the appearance of a prepared mythos.
They couldn't show everything, but I think they got the essential core of the story in there...
They couldn't show everything partly because they added crap that did not need to be there.
Everything added was Douglas Adams' idea. Again, I thought it was nifty, and it made a story that I've now been introduced in three media new again. I think that Douglas Adams had a pretty good idea what he was doing when he was writing to the media of the Big Screen.
-- --Max Battcher-- http://www.worldmaker.net/ The WorldMaker.Network: Now more Caffeinated! _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
