An exclusive US DIRK post mortem by Scot Burklin

Scot Burklin played Dirk Gently in the US premiere of DIRK which was staged in Los Angeles last autumn. As you certainly know, the production was a big success. Scot and his friends got a great review from Variety and a "thumbs up" from Arvind Ethan David, one of the authors of this well known stage adaptation of the first Dirk Gently book.

Scot kindly wrote for us a post mortem about this US production where he shares his feelings about the whole adventure.

To read the post mortem, please go in the Dirk section of this website and click on extras.

Douglas Adams related stuff on archive.org

Archive.org is an incredible website where you can get some rare audio, video and text stuff free to download.

Here are some good stuff I found about Douglas :

- Interview. Shockwave Radio Theater November 9, 1993 with guest Douglas Adams

- A TV documentary from 1988 about computer games. Douglas Adams is interviewed about Bureaucracy

Archive.net also features "wayback machine" which allows you to browse through 85 billion web pages archived from 1996 to a few months ago. Very handy if you want to find some internet websites which are not online anymore like MJ Simpson's Planet Magrathea,

Son Of Rambow scheduled at Sundance

Hammer & Tongs new movie "Son of Rambow" will be screened at the famous Sundance Festival the 22, 23 and 24 January.

More details on Sundance website here

"A nostalgic trip back to the 1980s, Son of Rambow is an inventive valentine to an era where, for the first time in history, young minds had access to technology that allowed them to create their own stories while paying homage to their larger-than-life heroes from the movies that inspired them.

Will, who isn't allowed to watch TV or go to the movies, expresses himself through his drawings and illustrations until he finds himself caught up in the extraordinary world of Lee Carter, the school terror and crafter of bizarre home movies. Carter exposes Will to a pirated copy of the first Rambo film, First Blood, which blows his mind wide open. Against his family's orders, his imaginative little brain begins to flower in the world of filmmaking. Will and Lee become popular at school through their films, but when a French exchange student, Didier Revol, arrives on the scene, their unique friendship and precious film are pushed to the breaking point.

Garth Jennings and Nick Goldsmith, aka Hammer & Tongs, the creative visionaries behind The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, utilize a vast array of visual techniques to perfectly capture the moment in time when anything was possible and dreams could be recreated with a home video camera, a few props, and a ton of imagination.— Trevor Groth"

H2G2 on Blu-Ray disc the 23th January

he Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy is one of the first Disney Buena Vista movies to be released on the new video format, Blu Ray, 50GB and dual-layer discs. It will be realeased on the 23th January 2007 along with other BVI titles like Chicago, The Guardian and Casanova. It will be released in US and Japan (I'm not sure about other countries).

Commenting on the announcement, an official from Buena Vista stated, "BVWHE is thrilled to kick off 2007 with this 50GB slate of Blu-ray releases. We're movingforward into an exciting future with these dual-layer discs, which offer the maximum capacity for bonus materials and expanded content. We continue to forge new frontiers with our Blu-ray discs and to further explore the seemingly limitless boundaries of creativity the format allows. We've just begun to cultivate the future growth of our industry with Blu-ray."

It is quite ironic because it seems that the Blu-Ray H2G2 disc will include no new material not even the "Don't crash" documentary which is still avalaible only on the UK 2 DVD set.

Some links :

More details CDJapan (with japanese cover) Amazon.com

Fifth Douglas Adams Memorial lecture on 15th March 2007

Gareth Suddes, from the excellent "Another chance to see" blog, had the new first.

"Details have been announced for the Fifth Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture. The presentation will be made by Dr Richard Leakey and is entitled "Wildlife management in East Africa – Is there a future?".

"Richard Leakey is a paleontologist, archaeologist, conservationist an author of several books including the acclaimed wildlife management book Wildlife Wars: My Battle to Save Kenya's Elephants. In this talk Dr Leakey will draw on his own experiences in Kenya as founder and Director of the Kenya Wildlife Service and as the Head of Kenya's Civil Service to reflect on the successes, current problems and future challenges facing wildlife management in East Africa. "

The lecture will take place at 7.30pm on Thursday 15 March 2007 at the Royal Geographic Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7. Tickets will be £12, with a pay bar before and after the Lecture, and they are available now from www.savetherhino.org or Zoe at Save the Rhino, Email: zoe_AT_savetherhino.org."

Full details here

Out of the trees in London the 2nd December !

A long-thought-lost comedy will be on show at National Film Theatre's (London, UK) : "Out of the Trees" (BBC 1976), Graham Chapman (from Monty Python's fame) and Douglas Adams' comedy pilot which features Maria Aitken and cast members from Adams' Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy (Simon Jones and Mark Wing-Davey).

According the guys at Some of the corpses are amusing : "So what was Out Of The Trees? It was a comedy sketch show starring Graham Chapman and a team of semi-unknowns including Simon Jones and Mark Wing-Davey (later to play Arthur Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox in Hitch Hiker's ) along with Roger Brierly, Tim Preece, Maggie Henderson, Jennifer Guy, Maria Aitkin and Marjie Lawrence. Sub-titled 'The End of the Road Show' , it was recorded in October 1975 and broadcast only once, at 10pm on January 1976. And if the show itself lives up to the script then we have a lost classic here, guys".

more infos about Out of the trees here

For more infos about the event, check right here

William (new voice of the guide) Franklyn has died aged 81

I'm deeply sorry I missed the info, but William Franklyn has passed away at the end of october from a prostate cancer. As the BBC says "His 50-year career encompassed TV, radio, film and stage, appearing in episodes of The Avengers and The Scarlet Pimpernel among many others. He also appeared in television shows such as Top Secret, Splitting Heirs and Ooh, You Are Awful".

He will be best remembered by us of couse for his work on the new Hitchhiker's radio series. He was the voice of the book in the Tertiary, Quandary and Quintessential phases. He replaced his old friend Peter Jones who was of course the legendary voice of the book in the original radio series and in the BBC TV series.