If there were an entry in the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” for “painfully disappointed,” a picture of M.J. Simpson would pop up.
The longtime fan of the book was so upset after an early screening of the summer’s first big offering that he posted a 10,000-word Internet screed calling it “vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad.”
He said the movie – a satirical tale of a bathrobe-clad human, Arthur Dent, who escapes Earth just before it’s destroyed to make way for an interstellar highway by the villainous Vogons – lacked the book’s humor and energy.
Disney, which sank $50 million into the film, must have been horrified. The studio, which is distributing “Hitchhiker’s,” has been heavily courting Simpson, even inviting him to the set last year.
Producers are shocked, tool, since much of the other Internet buzz from early screenings has been pretty good.
“Most of the e-mails we’ve gotten have been pretty enthusiastic,” says Eric Vespe, one of the editors at the early-review Web site Ain’t It Cool News, who adds that he has seen the movie and found that “about 85 percent is what I hoped it would be.”
But no one should be surprised by Simpson’s passion.
Ever since British comedy writer Douglas Adams wrote his wacky, good-natured sci-fi novel in 1979, “Hitchhiker’s” has rivaled “Star Trek” and “Star Wars” in its ability to inspire obsessive devotion.
Disney knows it will have a tough time drawing a huge audience if this core group of devotees trashes the film – a fate that helped sink “The Avengers” and “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”
Yet the studio faces a tough audience. Fans of the “Hitchhiker’s” novel and its four sequels have been waiting 25 years for the movie, and in the run-up to its opening date this Friday, they’re excited and extremely nervous about what Hollywood will do to their precious book – especially since the movie will stand as a tribute to Adams, who died tragically in 2001 at the age of 49.
LOST IN TRANSLATION
“If I was a fan, I’d be worried too,” admits “Hitchhiker’s” producer Robbie Stamp, who worked on the project with Adams for nine years before the writer died.
“I mean, here comes this big Hollywood studio, and Douglas isn’t here to fight his corner any more.”
Even Garth Jennings, the movie’s first-time director, admits that he wasn’t sure about the idea at first.
“I grew up with ‘Hitchhiker’s’ and loved it,” says Jennings, who cut his teeth as a music-video director for Blur and R.E.M.
“When my agent sent me the script, I sent it right back. I thought Hollywood was the wrong direction for it to be coming from.”
Like many fans, Jennings couldn’t see how to make a mainstream movie that would capture “Hitchhiker’s” distinctively British, Monty Python-esque sense of humor.
The novel has the barest plot, following the shaggy-dog story of Dent, an Everyman schlub who basically wanders from planet to planet with his best friend, Ford Prefect, who writes for the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” the essential reference for any interplanetary traveler.
There’s also Marvin the Paranoid Android (a self-loathing robot), Zaphod Beeblebrox (the arrogant and dim-witted president of the Galaxy) and Trillian (Zaphod’s girlfriend and the only other Earthling to escape the disaster).
Much of the charm of the book is its digressions, including numerous entries from the Guide that most “Hitchhiker’s” fans can now repeat from memory and a long description of the smartest computer ever made, which figured out that the answer to “life, the universe and everything” was … 42.
Obviously, that doesn’t sound like the plot of the latest Vin Diesel movie, which is a big reason the fans were worried about it.
“You feel like it’s your baby, and you’re worried they’re going to mess it up,” Vespe says.
“I’ve often thought it would be better if it wasn’t adapted into a film.”
HOPES AND FEARS
Despite their fears, many fans were encouraged when the cast of the film was announced last year, and it was filled with quirky unknowns such as Martin Freeman, who played the lovable schlub Tim on BBC’s “The Office.”
“Part of me was expecting that Disney would bring in someone like Ashton Kutcher to play Arthur Dent,” Vespe says.
“When I heard it was Martin, it gave me hope.”
The cast also includes Sam Rockwell as Zaphod, Zooey Deschanel as Trillian and Mos Def as Ford – all of whom have serious indie cred, although they’re also all American, which sparked some fears that Disney was squeezing the Britishness out of the movie.
“It’s actually a well-founded fear,” says Freeman, who’s one of the only Brits in the cast.
“In the U.K., we know all about American comedy, but the respect is not a two-way street. Americans know f–k-all about British comedy.”
Director Jennings, who’s British, admits that some of his friends warned him that Disney would ruin “Hitchhiker’s” – “they were like, ‘Oh, man, Disney will eat your soul,'” he says – but he’s quick to add that it didn’t happen.
And anyway, Douglas Adams never wanted to be just a British phenomenon. He dreamed about a mainstream “Hitchhiker’s” movie, and even moved his family from England to L.A. to make it happen.
At first, he met nothing but resistance in Hollywood.
“It was so painful for him,” recalls Adams’s longtime friend and business partner Robbie Stamp, who produced the movie.
“At the time of Douglas’ death, the movie was in a really bad place.
“We would have these agonized conversations, and Douglas would say, ‘Why can’t they see? Why can’t this happen?'”
Hollywood couldn’t see it for the same reason many fans couldn’t: The book was just too weird to work as a mainstream movie.
“Douglas wrote script after script, and he couldn’t crack it,” Stamp says.
It wasn’t a question of Adams being too faithful to his original work. Indeed, over the years Adams reworked the material many times. “Hitchhiker’s” actually started as a BBC radio series. After the novel, Adams made it into a TV series, a play, a comic book and a video game.
When Adams died, he left behind a treasure trove of notes and new ideas that Stamp turned over to Karey Kirkpatrick, the screenwriter on “Chicken Run.”
Several of those ideas wound up in the new movie, including a new character Adams was working on before he died – Humma Kavula (John Malkovich), “a crazed missionary,” as Stamp puts it, “who believes we were all sneezed into existence.”
Kirkpatrick also added a love triangle among Trillian, Arthur and Zaphod, and a long rescue sequence in which Trillian is captured by Vogons and the rest of the team has to save her.
He admits that Adams might not have stuck so much romance and action into the movie if he were still around.
“It was tricky,” he says. “You don’t want it to really be about that, but you need it, so there would be some sort of plot.”
BATTLES ONLINE
Super-fan Simpson didn’t mind the romance part of the movie. His beef was more with the way that Kirkpatrick changed his favorite lines. On his Web site, Simpson lists 34 details from the book that he was unhappy not to see in the film.
But all this is “nitpicking,” Vespe says.
“M.J. is too close. He can’t see the forest for the trees.”
Perhaps, but Simpson, who cut a memorable figure during his visit to the “Hitchhiker’s” set last year in a “Hitchhiker’s” hat and a “Star Wars” tie, has been working hard to bring the movie down, even implying on his site that any positive reviews in cyberspace are plants by Disney’s marketing department.
“Maybe I’m just being paranoid,” he says, “but I don’t trust them.”
Vespe admits that studios often try to plant positive reviews on Ain’t It Cool News and other sites, but he insists that none of the “Hitchhiker’s” reviews are among them.
“I’ve got a pretty good bulls–t detector,” he says.
Of course, all this is subjective opinion, made before the movie even comes out. But pre-movie buzz is vitally important to Disney, as it is to Stamp.
“I feel the responsibility to these fans very keenly,” he says. “I get online and read this stuff, and I know how much ‘Hitchhiker’s’ means to people.”
He was especially worried about the reaction of a particular group of fans – the computer programmers with whom he and Adams worked on the “Hitchhiker’s Guide” video game.
“They’re huge fans, and Douglas was very fond of them,” Stamp says.
“If they hadn’t enjoyed the movie, I would be looking for a cabin in western Alaska somewhere.
“But they came to a screening last week and left with tears in their eyes because they loved it so much.”