I’d say your writer friend is absolutely right, not least because trying to figure out what any particular fandom really regards as important about a series of books is a sure route to madness. The only sane course of action is to do what you think works, then deal with what the fans think about it later. (Of course, sometimes even putting your own take on the material on screen is just going to get you abuse: just ask Paul Verhoeven if he’s met any Heinlein fans lately.)

As you say, no two fans are going to agree completely as to what made Adams’ work tick and what’s essential. No doubt over the next few weeks there’ll be no shortage of articles in the mainstream press and online arguing both sides of the case: I’m sure the filmmakers will be very happy if every fan follows your suggestion and sees the film a couple of times, just to figure out exactly where they stand.

I was also chatting to a writer friend of mine who had taken a class specifically about adaptations, and she said that the only real way to do an adaptation is to do your best to evoke whatever the original does, for you. The LoTR films, for example, were mostly accepted by the fans not because they were “faithful” (there was a ton of stuff they left out, after all) but because they successfully reproduced what LoTR “meant” to the majority of fans.

As I’ve been scanning the multitude of online postings from Hitchhiker’s fans, there’s been a common type of posting which goes along the lines of: “What I care most about is whether they’ve captured the most important aspect of h2g2(sic)/Adams’s work, which is X” – where X is always different. For some it’s the dialogue, for some it’s the ideas, for some it’s the hipness, whatever. The latest issue of Sight and Sound (site’s not updated yet) has a critique in which the reviewer says the core philosophy of Hitchhiker’s is nihilistic, which I somewhat agree with, though Sean and Tim didn’t. So I think that the main reason the film will split the fans – and despite the positive reviews to which I pointed, there’ll also be a substantial slice of negative ones – is that there are too many different targets the film has to hit in order to be satisfying to everyone. That said, I bet that most of those people who are disappointed by it will enjoy it more on second viewing, as they’ll already know what not to expect, and will be able to enjoy what’s actually there.

I agree with you that there are severe difficulties in translating an episodic story that took up several half-hour episodes on TV into a three-act structure. Sometimes (as with the Star Trek films) you can treat the film as a double-length TV episode with a bigger budget, but that clearly won’t work for a serial like HHGTTG, so if you’re going to do a feature-length adaptation you do have to try to evoke the spirit of the piece rather than try to compress the entire plot into half the screen time. That isn’t what I was driving at.

My view is that a filmmaker adapting material which has already appeared in a visual medium has a much, much harder time than someone adapting, say, a novel or a radio play. I love Arthur C Clarke’s work, but if Morgan Freeman’s adaptation of, say, Rendezvous With Rama ever shows up then I’ll find it quite easy to put up with them making changes to the appearance of the characters and the specifics of particular scenes so long as they retain the main thrust of the storyline: I have a mental image of the major characters, but it’s not so strong as to derail my ability to enjoy a film adaptation, and in any case my mental picture of the characters and particular scenes probably doesn’t match that of the next reader very closely. By contrast, having seen Kubrick’s 2001 I’d find it much more difficult to accept a remake of the material which made big changes to the characters or story, because (like anyone else who’s seen the Best Science Fiction Film Ever Made) I’ve already got a very solid mental picture of the story, based on Kubrick’s work. It’s like the way that some readers of The Lord of the Rings will have great difficulty in reading the books in future without imagining Viggo Mortensen and Elijah Wood and Sir Ian McKellen and John Rhys-Davies in their respective roles.

In short, if all we’d had was a radio production of HHGTTG and the books, it’d be easier for weak-minded types like me to accept a radically different film adaptation.

Second, I apologise that your first attempt at a comment ended up being the first false positive to be auto-deleted since I started using WordPress. I’ve tweaked the settings so that it shouldn’t happen again.

Third, I do want to respond to your points about the film and the problems of adapting episodic TV, but I have to go to work now and I won’t have access to the site again until this evening, so I’ll have to ask you to tune in again later today for the next exciting instalment.

(I do believe this has turned into an episodic comment…!)

John – cheers for the link. A couple of points:

Firstly, I didn’t provide a proper review, merely a short summary of most of my negative opinions (along with a couple of very loudly positive ones). I’m still trying to process my feelings about the film and while I’m this caught up in the middle of the promotion (as I mentioned in the post – I’m not going to pretend to be completely objective here) then it’s hard to judge properly. Despite the casual dismissiveness of my post I do have several negative opinions and regrets about the film that I can elaborate on properly, but I know that the majority of my opinion is positive, and that the dedicated Hitchhiker’s fan in me is mostly satisfied. I do want to have a proper crack at a review soon, though.

Secondly, I don’t think that the medium of the TV series is nearly as comparable as you do. Yes, they have a lot of obvious similarities, but there are also huge differences – with four half-hour chunks in serial format the story gets structured completely differently to a 100-minute film. So no, we can’t call them on it. The TV series had 60 minutes in which to get all the main characters together; the film has half that, because it all needs to happen before the middle section. Films need a three-act structure, and if that sounds terribly staid, unadventurous and typical then I look forward to you throwing out most of your favourite films.

The BBC was also trying to do a much more faithful translation of the radio series, whereas one of the reasons Douglas’s interest in a movie version was revived in the ’90s was that he’d come up with several new things he wanted to put into the story – because he didn’t just want to tell the same story in the same way again. What’s the point? We have the TV and radio series, we have the books, they have all our favourite lines in. They’re not going away. For every old line missing from the film there’s a fantastic new idea that’s entirely in the spirit of the original, most of those done in a way that would have been unthinkable in the earlier versions. And that’s why I’m happy with it.