GALAXY QUEST IT'S BEEN A DECADES-LONG RIDE, BUT DOUGLAS ADAMS' SCI-FI SATIRE IS FINALLY IN ORBIT.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

Douglas Adams never set out to create a multimedia empire with ``The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.'' It just sort of happened that way.

A late-'70s BBC radio series was turned into a book (and then another book and then three more). A six-episode BBC television show followed in 1981. The first London stage version arrived before the books were even published, and since then there have been one-man shows, a musical, more radio episodes and, inevitably - if you're familiar with a running joke in ``Hitchhiker's'' - a line of bath towels.

Adams once described the sudden, all-encompassing success of ``Hitchhiker's'' as ``having an orgasm without foreplay.'' But when it came to the final piece of the ``Hitchhiker's'' universe - a feature film - Adams had another quip, and he rarely smiled when he said it. Describing the development hell he found in Hollywood, Adams said, ``It's like trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it.''

Adams died four years ago, felled by a heart attack while working out at a Santa Barbara gym. He was 49. The movie that he tried so hard to make for nearly two decades finally arrives in theaters today. Adams' friends and family believe that somewhere in this vast galaxy, the man they loved is smiling.

Ironically, Adams' death may have helped the movie finally come to fruition. Adams was notoriously bad with deadlines. (His favorite quote on the subject: ``I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by.'') And with the ``Hitchhiker's'' screenplay, he had a hard time cracking it and he found it virtually impossible to let go.

``The capacity to reinvent was one of Douglas' strengths,'' says long-time friend Robbie Stamp, who founded the encyclopedic Web site h2g2 with Adams in the mid-'90s (www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/). ``But maybe he tried new things when he didn't really need to.''

Douglas desperately wanted ``Hitchhiker's'' to be a movie and the project's delays disappointed him massively, Stamp continues. ``It overshadowed every single creative endeavor. At the end of his life, there were literally a couple of dozen brand-new ideas for feature films or projects that he could have been working on, but he kept at that screenplay. He didn't just want it to be the radio version with pictures.''

It isn't. In its final form, ``Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'' retains Adams' full-blown sense of the absurd, not to mention his very British sense of humor. (It's no accident he wrote with a couple of members of Monty Python. They shared a mission in satirizing the essential triviality of humanity's place in the scheme of things.) Despite what you see on the 30-second commercial spots (which make the movie seem like an action-packed sci-fi romp), ``Hitchhiker's'' is, in fact, about as far from ``Star Wars'' as the Earth is from the rings of Saturn.

A simple plot summary for ``Hitchhiker's'' is absurd (almost as silly, for some, as making a movie based on Adams' sprawling universe), but, essentially, it follows the adventures of Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered Englishman whisked away from Earth moments before an unpleasant race of frustrated poets called the Vogons destroy it to make way for an intergalactic freeway.

While trying to dodge those pesky (and ugly) Vogons, Dent meets Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed party animal President of the Imperial Galactic Universe as well as a depressed robot named Marvin and a lovely Earth girl named Trillian. (The Trillian-Arthur relationship gets more play in the movie.) There are fish that translate languages, whales that fall from the sky and the revelation of the answer to the Ultimate Question (i.e., the meaning of life, the universe and everything).

That the answer to that question isn't really an answer at all is just one of at least 42 reasons why ``Hitchhiker's'' is out of step with big-budget Hollywood moviemaking. While many fans kept their fingers crossed that Adams would realize his dream for a movie, there were just as many skeptics who believed ``Hitchhiker's'' was one of those books (like Hunter S. Thompson's ``Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas'') best left to the imagination.

``There is the assumption among many that any movie would ruin the book,'' says filmmaker Garth Jennings. ``I know because I felt the same way.''

Jennings, a Brit known in his home country for producing cool music videos for the likes of Fatboy Slim, Pulp and Blur, came recommended by ``Adaptation'' director Spike Jonze. Jay Roach had been set to direct, but then left to make ``Meet the Fockers.'' (In light of ``Fockers''-mania, not a bad decision. Roach remained involved as a producer.) Jonze decided to pass. Jennings received the screenplay and it gathered dust on his desk for two weeks before he finally was persuaded to read it.

``One of the beauties of 'Hitchhiker's' is that it ditches the three-act structure thing,'' Jennings says. ``When I saw that the screenplay kept that looseness intact, I became very excited. I thought, 'Maybe this can work.' ''

The finished screenplay is credited to Adams and Karey Kirkpatrick (``Chicken Run''). Kirkpatrick started with Adams' last draft (which included a few new inventions, such as a point-of-view gun that, when fired, breaks through the walls of misunderstanding), then re-read the book as well as other books and biographies. Since by Adams' own admission, ``Hitchhiker's'' was a story with a long beginning and then an ending, the new material - created mostly by Adams - comes in the middle.

``We ended up putting back many things that Douglas had taken out, including the falling whale sequence, which is one of my favorite bits,'' Jennings says. ``He had such a great brain and was given to such amazing howls of invention. It must have been difficult to know what to keep, what to throw away, when to stop.''

Because ``Hitchhiker's'' was such a dense, ever-evolving creation, the final film is bound to disappoint most of the True Believers on one level or another. (``I've been learning kung-fu,'' Jennings cracks. ``There are some hard-core people out there.'') Naturally, the filmmakers hope to please the long-time fans and broaden the base to include those who weren't around when Adams' universe was created.

``There's a level for kids where it's just plain fun ... that's how I discovered it,'' says the 32-year-old Jennings. ``Then, when you grow older, you encounter Vogons in real life, since plenty of them exist on planet Earth, draining the life out of everyone they meet. And you appreciate it on another level because you've seen enough of life to know just how absurd it is.''

Glenn Whipp, [phone]

glenn.whipp(at)dailynews.com

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3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) DON'T PANIC

We've got the inside word on `The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy'

(2) Mos Def, left, Martin Freeman and Sam Rockwell prepare for some interplanetary unpleasantness in the long-awaited movie adaption of ``The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.''

(3) Marvin the robot (voice of Alan Rickman) confides in Trillian (Zooey Deschanel) in ``Hitchhiker's,'' which incorporated much of late author Douglas Adams' final screenplay.