"Hitchhiker's Guide" Thumbs Its Way to Silver Screen

Stefan Lovgren in Los Angeles
for National Geographic News

April 29, 2005

It's a question that has been asked since the dawn of humankind: What is the meaning of life, the universe, everything? The answer, of course, is elementary: 42. At least according Douglas Adams, the author of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Part sci-fi comedy, part existential pondering, H2G2, as the book is also known, tells the whimsical story of an ordinary Earthling who finds himself traveling around space after our planet is destroyed.

As our hero learns from a great computer, which took seven and a half million years to calculate the answer, the meaning of life is 42.

It seems like it's taken almost that long for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to arrive on the silver screen. Twenty-seven years after it first appeared as a radio play, the H2G2 movie opens in U.S. theaters today.

Alas, Adams himself will not be around to see the film; he died of a sudden heart attack four years ago at the age of 49. But his imprint on the movie is unmistakable.

"Douglas always wanted there to be a movie," said Robbie Stamp, who was Adams's business partner and is an executive producer of the movie. "This is a chance to introduce a whole new generation to his world."

Pleasing the Fans

The story opens with the Earth being destroyed to make way for an intergalactic highway. The main character, Arthur Dent, escapes by hitching a ride on a passing spacecraft with the help of his friend, Ford Prefect.

Dent learns that the answer to everything anyone ever needed to know can be found in one book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

After it began life as a BBC radio series in 1978, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was quickly turned into a novel, which to date has sold some 16 million copies around the world.

The book was followed by four sequels, including The Restaurant at the End of the Universe and So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, as well as a TV series and a computer game.

The movie has been a stop-start project for years. Before his death, Adams was working on an oft-rewritten screenplay of the comic science fiction saga, which features such memorable characters as Zaphod Beeblebrox, the ruler of the universe, and Marvin the Paranoid Android.

The obvious challenge: pleasing the millions of devoted Hitchhiker's fans.

Douglas himself, however, wasn't overly concerned.

"He felt it was his story; he could do whatever he liked," Stamp said. "Douglas never saw his work as static. He thoroughly enjoyed the intellectual challenge of nursing his story through different media."

In fact, most of the scenes in the movie that were not featured in the books came from Adams himself. For instance, the character Humma Kavula, a cult leader, preaches to his people about the arrival of the Big Handkerchief. The scene reflects Adams's well-known mistrust of organized religion.

Meanwhile, most of the book's best moments have survived the jump to the silver screen. The villains are still the Vogons. Slaves to bureaucracy, they are notorious for their bad poetry.

Following Einstein

The impact of The Hitchhiker's Guide on pop culture is unquestionable. Rock bands named songs after characters in the series; artists like comic actor John Cleese and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney went on to collaborate with Adams on other projects.

The philosophical elements of the series were also debated in college courses. Though to say that Adams had a wide-reaching impact on science, as the filmmakers would have us believe, may be overreaching a bit.

"His questions—are we alone? is life just a cosmic accident?—have been with us for the duration of the human species," said Louis Friedman, the co-founder and executive director of the Planetary Society in Pasadena, California. "I think The Hitchhiker's Guide rides the public interest in these questions."

For sure, Adams draws heavily on real-life science. The Improbability Drive, which powers the spaceship that Dent travels on, borrows from quantum theory. First advanced by Albert Einstein, the theory states that physics cannot make definite predictions but can only predict the probability that things will turn out a certain way.

The Hitchhiker's Guide itself could be seen as what Einstein was striving for: a unified theory to explain the workings of the universe.

"Douglas was driven by great intellectual curiosity," Stamp said. "He was in awe of space and keenly interested in the workings of the universe. At the same time, he was fascinated by the 'why' questions."

Of course, Adams never pretended to have a final answer for those why questions. After he learns that the answer to the meaning of everything is 42, Dent, the Hitchhiker's protagonist, confronts another dilemma: What is the ultimate question?

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