by Neil Gaiman
“I usually get very depressed when writing. It always seems to me that writing coincides with terrible crises breaking up my life. I used to think these crises had a terrible effect on my being able to write; these days I have a very strong suspicion that it’s the sitting down to write that precipitates the crises. So quite a lot of troubles tend to get worked out in the books. It’s usually below the surface. It doesn’t appear to tackle problems at a personal level, but it does, implicitly, even if not explicitly.
“I’m not a wit. A wit says something funny on the spot. A comedy writer says something very funny two minutes later. Or in my case, two weeks later.
“I don’t think I could do a serious book anyway. I’m sure that jokes would start to creep in. I actually do think that comedy is a serious business: when you are working on something you have to take it absolutely seriously; you have to be passionately committed to it. But you can’t maintain that if you are going to stay sane. So when I talk about it to other people I tend to be flippant about it. I’m always so glad to have got through it, I say ‘It’s just jokes.’ It’s a relief.
“What I do now on many occasions is have, say, an inconsequential idea for a throwaway line that seems quite neat, then I go to huge lengths to create the context in which to throw that line away and make it appear that it was just a throwaway line, when in fact you’ve constructed this huge edifice off which to chuck this line. It’s a really exhausting way of writing but when it works…
“Often the things that seem frivolous and whimsical are the hardest to get right. Take the opening section of Life, the Universe and Everything, which is something I’m quite pleased with. They are stuck on prehistoric Earth, and then suddenly they find themselves on Lord’s Cricket Ground, which comes about because they chased a sofa across a field. It all sounds inconsequential or illogical or whatever, but completely belies the fact that I tried over and over again, and rewrote that bit over and over, going absolutely crazy with it until I eventually found the right elements to create the air of whimsical inconsequence, if you like. So I could come right up at the end of that long section with, ‘They suddenly found themselves in the middle of the pitch at Lord’s Cricket Ground, St John’s Wood, London, with Australia leading and England needing so many runs to win’ (I forget the exact quote). Now, in order to chuck away a line like that at the end of the chapter, you needed all that stuff about Ford coming back and explaining what he has been doing in Africa, which was obviously very unpleasant, and then him trying to explain about the flotsam and jetsam, and eddies in the space-time continuum (which was really a very silly joke, but you are allowed the odd silly joke) and the sofa, and so on.
“It required all that just to be able to suddenly say ‘Bang! Here they were somewhere else,’ because if you do just say that without getting all the rhythm right, then it doesn’t work. It wouldn’t have been enough for them to just be magically transported without it suddenly being a tremendous surprise coming at that moment.
“It’s those kind of effects that take an awful lot of engineering, when you don’t necessarily know what the answer is going to be, you are just thrashing around in the dark trying to find something somewhere that’s going to help you get to that point. And when you are operating within a convention which says (or seems to say) ‘anything goes’, you have to be extremely careful how you use that. I think if I have a strength as a writer it is in recognising that and trying to deal with it, and if I have a weakness it’s that I don’t always deal with it as well as I would like to be able to.
“Anyway, the reason I liked that bit where they appeared at Lord’s so much was that I knew what a huge problem I had solved and the fact that it wouldn’t appear to the reader to be a transition from one bit to another. And the reader would feel, ‘Well, that was easy, wasn’t it? You say Here they are in one place, then Here they are in another?’ But for that to be easy you have to do an awful lot of engineering.”
— Douglas Adams, 1984.
When Life, the Universe and Everything was released the critical response was far less favourable than that for the first two books—and most of the critics said similar things:
The third time around I found Arthur Dent and his ridiculous dressing gown—why hasn’t he found a change of clothes somewhere along the line?—increasingly tedious*; never a very substantial hero, he is in danger of being shrivelled in the heat of his author’s imagination. Perhaps Adams should now look beyond SF; I feel that his cynicism and detachment are too strong for a genre which depends so much on naivety and trust…”—Kelvin Johnston, The Observer
…the humour depends on a limited repertoire of gimmicks, and this third volume, though by no means lacking in enthusiastic drive, does little to suggest that the idea could or should be taken much further from here…”—Richard Brown, Times Literary Supplement
“Fans will relish the mixture as before… but signs of padding and self-parody suggest that Adams would be wise to avoid a fourth”—Martin Hillman, Tribune
Even the interviewers, most of them obviously fans, were complaining to Douglas that Life, the Universe and Everything was less funny than the earlier books. And Douglas, hating the book, couldn’t have agreed with them more. In his defence, he pointed out how depressed he had been during the writing, how he felt he was no longer writing in his own voice, how writing a third Hitchhiker’s book had been a major mistake, and one he would not repeat.
“After I wrote the second Hitchhiker’s book, I swore on the souls of my ancestors that I would not write a third. Having written the third, I can swear on the souls of the souls of my ancestors there will not be another”, was a typical quote, and, “I utterly intend not to write another sequel”, was another.
What he wanted to do next, he told all the interviewers, would have nothing to do with the Hitchhiker’s characters.
He’d write a stage play, perhaps. Or a film on something else. Definitely, indubitably, unarguably, nothing else with Hitchhiker’s connections in any shape, colour or form. But it was not long before the souls of the souls of Douglas’s ancestors were revolving in the graves of their graves.
* As noted, Life, the Universe and Everything is the first place it is seen in print that Arthur is still wearing a dressing gown, something Douglas only discovered in the television series when the sequence that reclothed him on the Heart of Gold was cut.
17
MAKING MOVIES
“I went to Hollywood, and I kept thinking, ‘This is just like going to Hollywood.’ The experience of it conformed far more closely to the one that everyone said I’d have than the one I expected to have. I told people, ‘This is going to work! It’s going to be great!’ But I fell foul of all the clichés of Hollywood…”
— Douglas Adams, on his return from LA, November 1983.
In 1979 Douglas was approached with an offer he found almost irresistible: a Hitchhiker’s film. All he had to do was sign a piece of paper, and he would have $50,000 in his hand. The only trouble was that what the director seemed to have in mind was “Star Wars with jokes”.
“We seemed to be talking about different things, and one thing after another seemed not quite right, and I suddenly realised that the only reason I was going ahead with it was the money. And that, as the sole reason, was not good enough (although I had to get rather drunk in order to believe that). I was quite pleased with myself for not doing it, in the end. But I knew that we were doing it for TV anyway at that time.
“I’m sometimes accused of only being in it for the money. I always knew there was a lot of money to be made out of the film, but when that was the whole thing prompting me to do it, when the only benefit was the money, I didn’t want to do it. People should remember that.”
FORD: What is it you’re after?
ZAPHOD: Well, it’s partly the curiosity, partly a sense of adventure, but mostly I think it’s the fame and the money.
FORD: Money?
ZAPHOD: Yes, money in mind-mangling amounts.
ZAPHOD: Oh, I lost it all.
FORD: All of it? What did you do, gamble it away?
ZAPHOD: No, I left it in a taxi.
FORD: Stylish.
— Cut from first radio series script.
A couple of years later, Terry Jones (of Monty Python, and a scriptwriter and director in his own right) decided that he would like to make a Hitchhiker’s film. The concept was to do a story that was based solidly in the first radio series, but pretty soon Douglas began to have second thoughts. He had done it four times (radio, theatre, book, record) and had recently done it for a fifth time (television), so decided that, in order to avoid the problems of repetition that would occur if he wrote the same script again (“I didn’t want to drag it through another medium—I was in danger of becoming my own word processor”), they would create a new story that would be “totally consistent with what had gone before, for the sake of those people who were familiar with Hitchhiker’s, and totally self-contained for the sake of those who weren’t. And that began to be a terrible conundrum, and in the end Terry and I said, ‘It would be nice to do a film together… but let’s start from scratch, and not make it Hitchhiker’s.’ Also, Terry and I have been great friends for a long time, but have had no professional links*. And there’s a slight risk you take, when you go and do a professional job with a friend, that it might spoil things. So we didn’t do it.”
In 1982 Douglas went to California with John Lloyd to write The Meaning of Liff, and it was then that he was approached by two people with whom he got on extremely well, Michael Gross** and Joe Medjuck, about a Hitchhiker’s film.
At the time Douglas was excited by the possibilities of what could be done with computers, having seen some amazing special effects and technical work (imagine real computer graphics, done with computers!), and decided that he would write the film. He moved to Los Angeles, taking his girlfriend Jane Belson with him, bought a Rainbow word processor, and began to write.
Mike and Joe were producers working for Ivan Reitman, then known only for Animal House, now better known for 1984’s smash-hit Ghostbusters, and unfortunately there was not the same rapport between Adams and Reitman as there had been between Adams and the other two.
FRANKIE: Now, Earth creature. As you know, we’ve been at this Ultimate Question business for seventeen and a half million years.
BENJY: Oh, longer, surely.
FRANKIE: No, it just seems longer.
— White Mice dialogue, cut from first radio series.
Douglas later described 1983 as a ‘lost year’. He and Jane hated Los Angeles, missed London and their friends. He found it hard to work, spending much of his time learning how to work a computer, playing computer games, learning to scuba dive, and writing unsatisfactory screenplays.
Transforming Hitchhiker’s into a film hit two snags. The first was that of organising the material: “There are inherent problems with the material. It’s a hundred minute film, of which the first twenty-five minutes are concerned with the destruction of Earth; then you start a whole new story which has to be told in seventy-five minutes, and not overshadow what went before. It’s very, very tricky, and I’ve had endless problems getting the structure right. With radio and television you have three hours to play with.
“The material just doesn’t want to be organised. Hitchhiker’s by its very nature has always been twisty and turny, and going off in every direction. A film demands a certain shape and discipline that the material just isn’t inclined to fit into.”
The other problem was that Ivan Reitman and Douglas Adams did not see eye to eye on the various drafts of the screenplay. Again Douglas started using the phrase of “Star Wars with jokes”. Unfortunately this time he had already signed the contracts, was signed up as a co-producer, and had accepted amazingly large amounts of money to work on the film.
The versions of the script done in Los Angeles were attempts by Douglas Adams to meet Reitman half-way, of which he said, “They fell between two stools—they didn’t please me, and they didn’t please them.”
FRANKIE: We’ve got to have something that sounds good.
ARTHUR: Sounds good? An Ultimate Question that sounds good?
FRANKIE: Well, I mean, yes idealism, yes the dignity of pure research, yes the pursuit of truth in all its forms, but there comes a point I’m afraid where you begin to suspect that if there’s any real truth, it’s that the entire multi-dimensional infinity of the Universe is almost certainly being run by a bunch of maniacs. And if it comes to a choice between spending another ten million years finding that out, and on the other hand just taking the money and running, then I for one could do with the exercise.
— More White Mice dialogue, cut from TV series this time.
Los Angeles was getting Douglas more and more depressed. He began to feel he was losing touch with the very things that had made him write what he did anyway. Eventually he decided to leave.
“I didn’t realise how much I hated LA until I left. Then the floodgates opened, and everything came out. It wasn’t a good period for me, nor a productive period. I had a slight case of ‘Farnham’—that’s the feeling you get at four in the afternoon, when you haven’t got enough done. So there came a point when we all decided to disagree, and I’d come back to the UK where I felt more in touch, and try to get it right to my own satisfaction.”
TWO: What are you talking about, professional ethics?
VROOMFONDEL: Look, don’t you mess with me about ethics. Let me tell you that I have got three first class degrees in Moral Sciences, Ethics, and Further Ethics, a PhD in A Lot Further Ethics, and have written three bestselling books on Why Sex Is Ethical, Why More Sex Is Ethical and Five Hundred and Seventy Three More Totally Ethical Positions, so I know what I’m talking about when I say that ethically that machine is a write-off. Get rid of it.
— Cut from first radio series script.
Douglas returned to England, where he began to work once more on the screenplay of the film, in addition to beginning work on So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish and the Hitchhiker’s computer game.
At that time he told me, “What I’m trying to do with the film is use a completely different selection process to that which went into the TV series. We are trying to show the stuff you didn’t see in the TV series. So if you go back to the book, and find all the things not in the TV series… that’s the film!
“Also, a lot of the film comes to have a completely different rationale. I’ve just put the scene with Marvin and the Battletank into the film, from the second book.”
For some years after, things appeared to progress very slowly, if at all, with the film seemingly stuck forever in Development Hell. Then suddenly, in January 1998, it was announced that the film was back on track and would be made by Disney.
Disney?
Well, actually Hollywood Pictures, a division of the mighty Disney empire. (Anyone who believes that Disney only make cartoons about talking animals should bear in mind that Pulp Fiction was made by a division of the company.) The success of Men in Black had made comedy science fiction flavour of the month, and Douglas had signed a deal with Hollywood Pictures which his agent Ed Victor summed up as, “substantial and special”. Jay Roach, who had made such a success of Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery and its sequel, was signed to direct, and Douglas professed himself very happy with both deal and director.
However, three years later the film was no closer to production, even though Douglas had actually moved to California to write the script. Occasionally, frustrating snippets of information about what was happening surfaced in interviews with Adams or Roach. Then, finally, Douglas announced that he had finished a draft of the script which really worked and everybody seemed to be happy with it.
That was in the Spring of 2001…
* Terry Jones subsequently worked with Douglas twice: on a short story for The
Utterly Utterly Merry Comic Relief Christmas Book, and on Starship Titanic.
** Gross was originally an artist and designer for National Lampoon, and was the man responsible for the famous cover showing a dog with a pistol to its head, captioned “Buy this magazine or we shoot the dog!”
18
LIFF, AND OTHER PLACES
ZAPHOD: Soulianis and Rahm! Two ancient furnaces of light that have warmed this dead and barren planet through the countless millennia, guarding its priceless secrets. Just looking at it makes me feel I could really, you know really… write travelogues.
— Cut from first radio series script.
Douglas Adams and John Lloyd collaborated on a number of projects. Some have already been mentioned. One, Doctor Snuggles, was an animated television series for which two episodes were scripted by Adams and Lloyd. Doctor Snuggles was “a cross between Professor Branestawm and Dr Dolittle” and produced by a Dutch television company for the international market.
One of their episodes apparently won them an award, although neither of them ever saw either the award or the series.
Doctor Snuggles was essentially a children’s series, and while the Adams/Lloyd scripted episode I have seen (‘Doctor Snuggles and the Nervous River’) was superior to the run of scripts for the series, fans of Douglas Adams’s or John Lloyd’s work are missing nothing if they haven’t seen it. The plot, however, was science fiction: Doctor Snuggles meets a nervous river too scared to go down to the sea because huge chunks of the sea are disappearing. After a number of adventures, the Doctor goes off into space to discover that the water is being taken by aliens who thought we didn’t want our water because we kept throwing rubbish into it. They give the water back, Doctor Snuggles ties it to the back of his spaceship and returns to Earth.