Last night, a group of us went to see National Treasure as presented for free by The Warren Report. I shan't spoil the delicious badness because Faye is going to write it up as a special Bad Movie Monday review. Check back for that because I'm sure it will be well worth your time (much more so than seeing the actual film). But that's not important now. What I wanted to talk about it was the preview that came before the movie. We don't usually get previews with Warren Report films. Therefore, I was very surprised when I realised I was in the midst of the teaser for the upcoming Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy film. I've blogged about this film before and how excited I am because I really think there's a good chance it's going to be pretty damned good. I've also seen the teaser before on the very very small screen that is a Quicktime window on my computer. In that capacity, it seemed “cute”. On the big screen, however, when the Earth explodes in a great big ball of blue and bits of planet come flying toward you, it is a-effing-mazing! Seriously. I got chills and everything. So that made me pretty happy. Waiting till May will be tough.
This morning, I was reading The Salmon of Doubt which is a posthumously published collection of essays by and interviews with Douglas Adams. In it, there is an interview he did with the Onion in 1998. He was talking about how the rights to the film had just been purchased by Disney and how glad he was that it was finally being made. At that time, various parties had been trying to make this film for 15 years (by now it's 21 years). Adams said that the whole process had been rather frustrating for him because the project was something that meant a lot to him. I won't go into all the details. I'll just mention who has tried to make the film: Ivan Reitman, Michael Nesmith(!) and Jay Roach with Disney (I'm glad that last one didn't pan out. The guy who did Meet the Parents has no business directing this film). I don't know the whole story about what happened to the film after this interview and why Jay Roach isn't directing. (Instead it's Hammer and Tongs, who are best known, by me, as the guys who made Blur's “Coffee and TV” video). I do know that when Douglas Adams died in 2001, the only visual realization of his story that he witnessed was the fairly silly BBC version, which he admits was disappointing. In the interview, he sounded so excited that he would FINALLY see his work on film. He said that he was confident it would be something he could be proud of because special effects have come a long way since the film was first pitched. I'm sure that when he died, he was happy about a lot of things besides movies. But he never will get to see bits of Earth hurling toward him in a dark theatre. I'm sad that he didn't have the opportunity to get chills. Sure, many authors never get a chance to see their characters on film. (And for many of them, that's a good thing). Adams, however, was always “close” to seeing it get made and it just didn't happen in time.
Leave a comment
No comments yet.
Effed by the Wind 
Leave a Reply