Don't Panic! (The Ghost of Writings Past: Vol. 1)

I've recently been revisiting some of my favorite articles and columns from my time as a newspaper reporter. Since it's been a long time--a very long time--since I've posted anything else here, it seems like a good idea to share those favorites with you. So here is my first installment. This is probably my all-time favorite column. It was published in Corvallis Gazette-Times/Albany Democrat Herald weekly magazine "The Entertainer" on May 13, 2005. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

DON’T PANIC!

When the movie crashes and burns, there’s always the book

It was, ironically, a Thursday morning. There were less than 36 hours until the long-awaited adaptation of Douglas Adam’s “Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” opened on the big screen.

I had been debating with myself for several weeks about whether I should refresh my memory with a quick read before seeing the movie, or wait until afterward too compare the book with the film. Since high school, I had read “The Guide” about once every six months. But life had been seriously busy of late, and almost a year had passed since I had last joined Arthur, Ford, Trillian, Zaphod and Marvin in their quest to find the meaning to life, the universe and everything.

“So, should I read it now or later‘?” I asked myself.

“42!”

Hmmm. Adams’ enigmatic answer to the ultimate question provided little insight, so I turned to my bookshelf for further inspiration.

Most of the books in my apartment are the decade-old hardcovers and paperbacks I inherited from my mother, but nestled on the second shelf, third space in, should have been a very well-used, black leather and gold-embossed, 800-pIus page omnibus edition containing every word of Adams' overgrown trilogy — novels, a short story, and his own “Guide to The Guide." There was a conspicuous emptiness on the second shelf.

“Don’t Panic! It’s probably in the bedroom somewhere,” I told myself. I left the bedroom 30 minutes later with empty boxes and drawers covering the bed and books strewn across the floor, but no “Guide."

“Didn’t you loan it to some,” my wife asked, desperately hoping that the sudden house wrecking monster her husband had become would stop after one room.

And then it happened. From some distant darkness, a memory gurgled. Like small bubbles of gas oozing up from the marshes of Sqornshellous Zeta, it broke on the surface of my consciousness, leaving me feeling ominously ill.

(Pop) “This...” (pop pop pop) “is my favorite..." (pop) “book!” (Pop) “Don’t” (POP POP) “LOSE IT!”

That was it; no name, no face, just eight fateful words.

I called my brother and my sister. I called all my friends. Then I called all my wife's friends. I even called my mother-in-law.

“Nope, it wasn’t me.”

“Huh-uh.”

“Sorry!”

“I have my own copy.”

“I don’t ever read! Why’d you call me?"

How many people do I have to gall before I my book? 42?

Hmmm. This was most unfortunate. I didn’t even have the dog-eared paperbacks I had carried around since high school, so I finally resigned myself to purchasing a new copy...but that would have to wait until after I saw the movie.

“Besides, movies are never as good as the book anyway, right?” I told myself. “I’ll probably enjoy the movie much more if I don’t read the books first anyway.”

Thursday afternoon, one week later. The fact that it was again a Thursday should have been an obvious warning, but, much like “The bumbling hero, Arthur Dent, I was pretty clueless. The weather was terrible, thick dark clouds blanketed the sky, and rain was drowning everything in sight. Was that thunder? Or maybe a fleet ofVogon demolition ships rumbling just above the clouds, gleefully waiting to destroy what remaining faith I had in Hollywood’s ability to successfully adapt a favorite book to film.

I didn’t want to develop any preconceived notions, so I read only two reviews prior to seeing the movie. One review was fairly complimentary, although Roger Ebert only gave the two stars. But hey, he’s given poor reviews to films I liked before, so don’t panic, right?

The movie began with what would have been, if I were reading the book, Chapter 23. A chorus of acrobatic dolphins introduced the audience to Earth’s impending doom with a fully orchestrated, Broadway-style musical number, “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish."

“That wasn’t so bad,” I thought to myself, “a little unusual maybe, but not entirely un-Monty­Python­esque."

Visually, the film was quite successful. The Vogons were green and ugly, Zaphod’s second head was imaginatively designed, and the animated renditions of entries from “The Guide" were fantastically kitschy. Sadly, little else was bearable during the rest of the nearly two-hour-long film.

The movie is Garth Jennings’ debut as a director and it shows. The pacing was horrible, and the acting was generally uninspired. I had seen bad “Saturday Night Live” skits that were better than this.

Adams received credit for the screenplay along with writer Karey Kirkpatrick. However, the resulting script is a jumble of poorly executed moments from the original novel, a few excerpts from the other novels, and an extremely dull additional story line allegedly created by Adams especially for movie. Many of the most memorable elements of the books seem to have been discarded in favor of mind-numbing one-liners.

If you had never read the books, the significance of many elements will probably be lost. Take towels, for instance. According to “The Guide," a towel is “the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Yet in the movie, while Ford is seen carrying a towel through must of the film—even sometimes waving it frantically in an effort to ward off a horde of Vogon soldiers, the reason for this seemingly bizarre behavior is never explained.

By the end of the film, I found myself wishing that, due to a terrible miscalculation of scale, the whole production had been swallowed by small dog prior to release. I would rather have endured two hours of Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz’s horrible poetry rather than this abysmal rendering of Adams’ classic tale.

I walked out of the theater thinking of the last line from “So Long and Thanks for All the Fish,” the fourth novel in the series. Adams wrote, “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler`s mind.” It seemed unfortunately appropriate in this circumstance.

“But don’t panic,” I said to myself, “Borders is just down the road. There`s nothing like the book!”