On May 1, 2005, at 1:21 PM, Max Battcher wrote:
Warren Ockrassa 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.
There were definitely parts that couldn't translate to screen; I agree. But it's not those elisions that I found troubling. It was the removal of repartee and the strange additions of things that didn't belong that I objected to.
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.
The game ... I take it you mean the text version originally by Infocom. Yeah, that was fun.
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 was the unforeseeable way things fit together that really made the story so damned clever.
I thought a lot of that was well intact.
It's a well used literary device.
Um, check the sig sometime. I'm reasonably familiar with literary devices.
One of the aspects of the stories I liked was the way they often did not foreshadow. That's a reflection of how they were done, of course -- when you literally have no idea what you're going to be writing for the next week's installment, foreshadowing is hard to muster.
But it was the way that particular convention was *broken* that I thought made the storytelling just that much more neat. Getting all those weirdly disparate elements to cohere later in the arc was a mark of a genius storyteller.
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.
I am not "mocking" foreshadowing here any more than I was "whining" before about anything.
The foreshadowing that was introduced in the film wasn't necessary unless there was a desire to spoon-feed details to the audience. If the film is showing to a row of cabbages, certainly that's useful, but if one of the hallmarks of the narrative style has to be sacrificed, I say damn the cabbages.
Adams's universe *was* self-consistent. Introductions of totally bogus details such as a "romantic" subplot or the way Earth II's rationale got jacked around -- rendering the mice superfluous -- do not strike me as being anything he added, either.
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 understand that too; contrarily, rules can be successfully circumvented by a good director and dedicated crew. _Citizen Kane_ leaps to mind as an example of this.
Adams was also familiar with how to develop visual ideas; he did a stint as script editor for Doctor Who, during which time some of the better stories from that series came into being (Key to Time among them). The mark he left on the series was simply raising the bar, a legacy of higher standards for storytelling and plot development. In later years those standards were not consistently met by any means, but the caliber of writing absolutely improved during and after his tenure.
So it's not as though Adams was a neophyte in the area of screenwriting. Surely part of the problem was that he was too close to his work; not many authors can write decent screenplays of their books. But he would also have known what did and didn't work in terms of his story in general, and *some* of the insertions into the movie simply did not fit in that framework, which suggests to me (as an editor) that they were not his inclusions.
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.
I think you might think I'm objecting to something else then. There were fewer Guide entries, but for the most part I don't think the story suffered for that.
The film's frenetic pace can be attributed almost entirely to the inclusions that were digressions from the original threads of the story -- Humma Kavula, Arthur and Trillian, the entire diversion on Vogsphere. Now you *could* argue that Kavula needed to be there for the POV gun, but the Vogsphere scenes were superfluous, and the Arthur/Trillian "love" story just flat did not belong.
Some of that (Arthur and Trillian) is probably due to what happened to Zaphod, who in the other story versions was an ass, but basically a fun guy with (incredibly) a fairly good sense of personal ethics. He was a jerk but it was at least believable that Trillian would want to be with him. In the movie, though, he was amoral, selfish and outright mean in some places. That didn't do him justice.
Nor was Arthur well served by being cast as a coward. In the other story takes he was often bewildered and scared witless, but he wasn't a *coward*. It was his creative flash that nearly got him and Ford saved when Jeltz had his poetry reading, after all; and later his confrontation with Gargravarr showed that he had some real mettle. Yet with Kavula he suddenly becomes a simpering jellyfish?
And as for Ford -- he seemed to take a lot of things a little too seriously.
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.
That's almost certainly untrue. The screenwriter was clear on adding things of his own, and there's just no way Adams would have greenlighted the Arthur-Trillian story.
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.
But he *wasn't* writing for the Big Screen; he was stopped in the middle of that process. *Someone else* was writing it after that. The last draft of his work was 70 minutes, which got bulked up to over twice that and then cut by later efforts of others. The movie as filmed was *not* the final product he'd done, even if some of the larger ideas had been his.
What was shot was not Adams's screenplay.
-- 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
_______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
