The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the most successful book ever to come out of the great publishing megacorps of Ursa Minor, has this to say on the subject of movies:

Filmmaking, it says, is hard. Really hard. You may think it's no simple thing to get a chocolate soufflé to stay puffed up for longer than 10 seconds after you take it out of the oven, but that's just peanuts to movies. Listen...

And then it settles down and starts telling you useful things you really need to know in order to survive a trip to the googolplex, like why Twizzlers cost so much at the concession stand. But my point is this: I was reminded in a profound new way about how hard filmmaking is when I attended the press junket for The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy in New York a couple of weeks ago.

I'd never been invited to a big studio junket before, and that was just fine with me. I feel very strongly that a film -- or any work of art or even of mere entertainment -- should speak for itself, should not require the cast and crew to sit around telling us how wonderful it is. And the, well, not quite horror stories, but, shall we shall, tales of woe I've heard about the junket experience were enough to reassure me that I wasn't missing much.

And then came the Hitchhiker's invitation from Disney. And I thought: Why not give it a shot? It would be a chance to see the film earlier than I might otherwise have had. It would be a chance to meet Sam Rockwell and Zooey Deschanel, both of whom I worship and adore. It would be a chance to network and meet some other film journalists and pass around my business card and generally spread the FlickFilosopher word.

So I said yes, with the full knowledge that I would probably end up, after it was over, writing an article about the experience that would make sure I'd never get invited to another junket again.

We'll see.

Here's how junkets work, for those of you unfamiliar with the process: The studio brings the talent -- cast, crew, producers, could be anyone connected to the film that has something passably interesting to say -- into a fancy hotel. And then the studio brings in the press -- some of the big names, I'm sure, are flown in and put up by the studio; some of the smaller out-of-town outlets may send representatives at their own expense; I'm not sure how that breaks down. Me, I was local, so I just took the subway downtown, though I did have a couple of very pricey drinks in the lovely hotel bar for which it would have been nice to have an expense account.

Anyway, a whole buncha press folks, including myself, saw the film on a Friday night at a local multiplex, and then on Saturday morning were the roundtables. They go like this: All the journos not important or famous enough themselves to rate one-on-one interviews with the talent gather in groups of eight or ten or so and interview the talent as a group on a kind of rotation. My group stayed in one room -- there were five or six other rooms full of journalists, too-- and every half an hour some nice PR person from Disney would come and take away, say, Martin Freeman, and someone else would drop off, say, Sam Rockwell. And we'd have half an hour or so to shoot questions at the poor guy before the whole thing rotated again.

Here's whom we junketeers met and chatted with: Sam Rockwell, who plays Zaphod Beeblebrox; Zooey Deschanel, aka Trillian; Martin Freeman, who plays Arthur Dent; director Garth Jennings; screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick; and Robbie Stamp, a producer of the film and a longtime friend and business partner of Douglas Adams.

The roundtable idea is fine in principle and even works great early in the process, when everyone is fresh and alert, but it starts to deteriorate somewhat toward the end, when everyone is really tired of hearing the same old questions for the sixth time. And I don't just mean the talent. See, one of the reasons "entertainment journalism" all sounds the same -- and by that I mean the fluffy PR articles you see in the week or two before a film opens, the ones in which everyone talks about what a great time they had making the film and yes of course they'd be up for a sequel if they're asked and no they had no idea what a huge cult thing this was before they got involved -- is because most of it comes out of this process, from which everyone goes home and writes their pieces from interviews they've shared with a bunch of other journalists. And it's a process where there's no time to explore anything in-depth so journalists sometimes ask some pretty asinine things because it's quick and they think it's pithy but after about the fourth time that guy in my room asked the talent whether working on Hitchhiker's made him or her believe in UFOs and aliens, I had to physically restrain myself from smacking myself in the forehead, or, more appropriately, from smacking him in the forehead.

This is one reason why I'd been avoiding junkets: because if I'm gonna write about filmmaking (as opposed to reviewing the completed films) and actors and stuff, I wanna talk about the craft. I wanna go sit at the bar for hours and hours with people like Sam Rockwell and Zooey Deschanel and talk about acting and film and art and God and life, the universe, and everything, just plain find out what makes them tick and where all that delicious talent and insight and humor comes from. Of course, most of the creative people I've known -- including myself -- have little idea of what makes their own selves tick, so it'd probably be a waste a time, and if it wasn't, it'd all probably be so personal that I'd feel funny writing about it for public consumption.

There's a bit in Life, the Universe, and Everything where Arthur has a little crisis that goes like this:

He experienced one of those "self" moments, one of those moments when you suddenly turn around and look at yourself and think "Who am I? What am I up to? What have I achieved? Am I doing well?" He whimpered very slightly.

That's how I was feeling, thinking about these kinds of things while I sat there listening to everyone talk about how respectful they felt toward Douglas Adams's book and what an amazing time they had on the set and how they adore everyone involved in making the film. Maybe they were bullshitting about some stuff, just doing the little PR dance they're expected and probably contractually obliged to do, but they all sounded sincere enough, and they were all certainly extremely enthusiastic:

= Martin Freeman is totally sweet and adorable and very concerned about not being seen to ape Simon Jones's original Arthur Dent

= Garth Jennings is a manic but adorable lunatic and a bit of an Adams geek who is very concerned with pleasing fans with his film

= Karey Kirkpatrick, who as screenwriter is probably in the position that will be most attacked by rabid Adams fans, walks a tightrope on which he has to talk about honoring Adams's novel and screenplay of it while refusing -- and probably rightly so -- to delineate precisely what he added; I feel for the awkwardness of his situation

= Robbie Stamp, certainly the person who was closest to Adams, believes they've all done his friend justice

= Sam Rockwell is charming and funny and also a bit of a manic lunatic, and make us all laugh with his imitation of Phil Hartman doing Bill Clinton, which is what he says he based his Zaphod on

= Zooey Deschanel is exactly the snarky, cool girl I knew she'd be, rolling her eyes at the dumb questions

It was very disconcerting, because I had seen the film the night before, and been stunned with disappointment by it. I had known, coming out of the theater only hours earlier, that my review was gonna be harsh, but now I found myself wondering, Was I wrong? Did I miss something? I wanted to see the movie they were talking about, cuz it sounded fabulous.

And this was something I'd worried about resulting from attending a junket, too: Would I be so mesmerized by meeting people whose talent I really respected and whose work I had genuinely enjoyed that it would influence my review of the film? Cuz I asked Sam Rockwell something that seemed to surprise him and made him think, something he obviously had not heard a million times before that morning*, and that made me feel cool and important. And I'm afraid I fawned over Zooey Deschanel just a little, cuz I wanna be like her when I grow up. And it seemed like I might be on the verge of backpedaling a little on my reaction to the film, not out of anything consciously obsequious or deliberately deferential, but simply out of a fear that I missed something huge and vital and had simply better not look like a fool.

But no, the more I thought about it, the more confident I was that my opinion of the film -- and it is only my opinion, of course -- wasn't wrong, that the movie simply wasn't going to get any more fun for me no matter how much fun it was for everyone to make the movie or how much they adlibbed on the set.

I did come away from the junket experience with something I did not expect: a intense new appreciation for something I'd always known intellectually but had never really been confronted with before. There is a very real aspect of alchemy to filmmaking. You can have the finest script, the most talented director, a brilliant cast, and a dedicated production team, but no amount of good intentions and no amount of genius will do you a bit of good if the gods of movies don't smile on you and bring all the diverse elements together in a way that makes them live and breathe.

And if my reaction to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy on film changed at all, it's this way: I cannot simply dismiss the movie as I might have before. I still think it's a train wreck, but I'm now very curious to see the film again -- and probably again and again -- to try to figure out where such a seemingly sure thing could go so wrong.

--MaryAnn Johanson
04.28.05

*I asked Sam whether he saw any similarities between his Chuck Barris in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and his Zaphod Beeblebrox, and he said, "No, not really. Do you?" And I said sure, I mean, Chuck Barris is kind of an alien and sorta has two heads, doesn't he? And Sam went, "Huh, yeah, you're right." [back up]

See also:
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (the Hollywood flick)
Life, the Universe, and Douglas Adams and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1981 TV mini)
Novel Approach: How Douglas Adams Got Defanged by Hollywood [at The Internet Review of Science Fiction]