From: conrad@actrix.gen.nz (Conrad Bullock)
Newsgroups: alt.fan.douglas-adams
Subject: Douglas Adams Interview
Date: 7 Jan 93 04:08:27 GMT
Organization: Actrix Information Exchange

An interview with Douglas Adams, by Gilbert Wong, published in the New
Zealand Herald, Sat 2nd Jan.

Mostly Harmless Fun

   The word was that Douglas Adams was tired and emotional after an
arduous book tour. He had been too long in interview hell.
   So, yes, he would talk, but with a stopwatch close by. Fifteen
minutes and he would hang up. By now Adams can demand this. A decade
ago, the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shot him from obscurity.
   The series became that odd phenomenon, the cross-Atlantic cult
best-seller. The four previous titles sold more than 14 million
copies.
   Mostly Harmless, the fifth comes seven years after the last. In the
publishing world they call this an event. Promotional hype sent to
retailers promises, among other things, "ridiculously garish
point-of-sale [posters, etc] that will suck customers in like a black
hole."
   From his Islington home Adams is diffident, polite but distant,
metaphorically and literally.
   From the window of his study it is one of those cloudy, dim English
days. "Rather standard for the winter," he says. After the business
Adams hopes to spend the rest of the day out, Christmas shopping.
   He explains the hiatus, "I'd done Hitchhiker for a number of years
in different versions for radio and television and I'd just had it up
to here. I decided that I had to do something different."
   Part of the motivation for that must have come from Adams'
Hollywood experience, which sounds not unlike that depicted in Robert
Altman's biting film The Player.
   In 1982 he sold the film rights to the Hitchhiker characters to
director Ivan Reitman and Columbia Studios. For the best part of a
year he and Reitman struggled in developmental hell, disagreeing over
how to turn the books into film.
   "The Player is very accurate. A great film because it's made partly
by the sort of people who do these things to each other."
   Adams' fear was that Reitman would not translate the comedy to
films as he wanted. "There is nothing worse than comedy that's not
quite right."
   Unlike the embittered writer in The Player, Adams got out with his
life and returned to Islington. He soon discovered that film rights
tie up other rights. So no television, no computer games, no
merchandising.
   All Adams can do with his characters is continue to write books
about them.
   "I could get Hitchhiker back but to do so I would have to pay back
what they paid me, plus a huge amount of interest that's accrued over
the last 10 years. It's a vast sum and it's not something I'd want to
hand over to buy back something I thought of in the first place."
   For a period, Adams won't say how long, the experience was the bane
of his life. He decided eventually to get on with other projects.
   So Adams occupied himself with Dirk Gently of the Holistic
Detective Agency fame and what he calls his favourite book, Last
Chance to See, about endangered animals.
   Effectively he put the characters out of his mind. But 18 months
ago he re-read some of the books. "I realised I was fond of Ford
[Prefect] and Arthur [Dent] and decided to put them together again."
   Adams chuckles. Until he revisited the books, he hadn't appreciated
how much of a double act Ford and Arthur had become.
   "The bits I enjoy the most are those where Ford relentlessly tries
to explain something to Arthur who relentlessly cannot understand. It
reminds me of me at school when people tried to explain things and I
just became more and more dumb."
   Mostly Harmless took Adams 18 months to write. Usually a year is
enough. "Well, I got married, which is a time consuming business." His
wife is an Australian barrister practicing in London, Jane Belson.
   At odd times Adams toys with the fantasy of living in Australia.
The couple honeymooned in northern Queensland, diving off Great
Barrier, venturing into Kakadu National Park.
   The truth is that Adams continues to detest writing. "I wish I
could avoid sitting in a room by myself, fretting about things,
thinking, 'O God, I'm not going to be able to do it.' But the point is
that you have to go through that to get there."
   Like most writers he has contrived displacement techniques to avoid
being in the room waiting to write. "I used to sharpen pencils, go out
and buy notebooks and so on. Now writers can spend time reconfiguring
the operating system on their computers. This can take ages."
   Adams has become so computer adept that he is now invited to talk
on the subject at computer conferences. "Which is really only more and
more displacement activity."
   He remains bemused by the Hitchhiker phenomenon, well aware that
British humour often has a rouge passage across the Atlantic. "I
suspect it is one of those things where you can either do it, or know
how to do it, but you can't do both."
   This sounds like a passage from one of his books and one senses
that Adams may not want to probe the process too closely for fear of
inserting more doubt into his writing than he already contends with.
   For now, Mostly Harmless is is. "Every time I write one I think,
'Right, that's it,' and then I write another one and think 'Right,
that's it'. I've stopped making predictions. Who can say whether the
series ends now or not. I certainly can't."
   He pauses, says he must go. It has been 18 minutes. It seems unfair
to ask whether he has got a stopwatch.
Newsgroups: alt.fan.douglas-adams