Stephen Kings "Dark Tower" Film/TV Series

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by rontoon, Apr 10, 2015.

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  1. rontoon

    rontoon Animaniac Thread Starter

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    Adaptation is the key word. The books and movies/series are two independent animals. Anyone expecting a literal translation of the books is bound to be disappointed. I'm a bit surprised by the choice of Idris as Roland but I'm willing to keep an open mind about it.
     
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  2. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

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    And the latest word today is that they've cast Idris Elba as the gunslinger and Matthew McConaughey as the Man in Black:

    [​IMG]

    Stephen King Confirms Casting for 'The Dark Tower' »

    I personally would rather they had stick with the character as described in the book, which was basically a 35-year-old drifter who looks like Clint Eastwood from The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly, but it's an interesting idea. I do think it's not a bad idea to have the gunslinger as a Brit, because I got the impression from the book that he was basically a knight of the round table from his civilization.
     
  3. alexpop

    alexpop Power pop + other bad habits....

    Idris another clothes horse. Going to get a Afro American ( perhaps old ) but Wesley Snipes is a much better actor.Hate all this revision stuff, Nick Fury not with standing. If your going to go with a British actor Chiwetel Ejiofor is a brilliant actor and can perform martial arts.
     
  4. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    I had the same experience with Dark Tower as many other Stephen King readers way back when. I saw The Gunslinger listed in the credits page before Pet Semetary and spent a fair amount of time trying to get my hands on a copy (impossible in the pre-Internet days.)

    When King finally decided to continue the story, I got the first two volumes (Gunslinger and Drawing) on unabridged audio cassettes recorded by King (he's pretty good) and listened to them on several long business trips.

    I waited impatiently for Wastelands and devoured it immediately when it finally came out and then endured the interminable wait for Wizard. (I still have a little promotional booklet that contains the first chapter or two. It was a giveaway with the bundle of Desperation and Regulators.)

    I thought ( and think) Wizard one of King's finest novels. I enjoyed Wolves for the literary spaghetti western it was, and raced through the last two volumes to get to what I thought was the only logical conclusion.

    But....

    I read them as a King reader, not as a habitual reader of fantasy. My only real experience with multi-volume fantasy was Lord of the Rings and the Thomas Covenant series. It was only many years later, after the pre-HBO series publicity for Game of Thrones piqued my interest in modern fantasy that I read George Martin and then all the series by Robin Hobb and Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss and JV Jones and understood how painstakingly diligent real fantasy writers are with their imaginary worlds.

    They make Dark Tower look like the sloppy mess it turned out to be. I don't even think King would disagree -he's admitted that the final volumes were the only thing he's ever written that were published unedited and he's said that he would love to go back and finish them properly.

    So I'm not holding my breath over the film version. Good luck to everyone involved. Maybe they can invest more time on the script than King did on the final volumes. Maybe they can give real weight to the villains and make some better sense of the whole Northern Positronics, meta-Stephen King stuff.

    I'm going to explore Daniel Abraham and a few other real fantasy writers and hope that King is working on something as beautiful and unexpected as 11/22/63.
     
  5. ohnothimagen

    ohnothimagen "Live music is better!"

    Location:
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    Unedited? Really? Well, that certainly explains a thing or two about the final two books in the series...
     
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  6. Daniel Plainview

    Daniel Plainview God's Lonely Man

    Those last three books....gah. I liked book 7 but you could see the gears slowly grinding to a halt as thing proceeded. Like Bukowski said, "As the spirit wanes, the form appears", which is precisely the case here. He was just rushing to the finish line by the end. That last book is a hot mess. Desperately needs to be tightened up.

    "Wizard and Glass" blows. I read it now and just shake my head. Maybe it would have been better if he stopped after The Waste Lands" and just let us use our imaginations to fill in the rest.

    I don't want to come off as an insensitive racist or something but was it really necessary to cast someone so far removed from the image provided by the book? I mean, should they cast Ron Howard as Dracula just because they can? Should they remake Huckleberry Finn with Jennifer Love Hewitt playing Jim, just to shake things up? Maybe Peter Dinklage as Paul Bunyon? I guess it shouldn't matter, if the film is done right (which rest assured it won't be for us literary scholars), but I must admit it is going to bug me, because the character in the book clearly had a specific old west high plains drifter look to him. Hell, there are goddamn illustrations included! I'll try to get over it. I apologize for feeling this way. I am ashamed.
     
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  7. ad180

    ad180 Forum Resident

    Location:
    USA
    It doesn't matter one bit to me if Roland's skin is white, black, brown or green. they could cast a woman to play that character, as long as she's a badass and is believable.

    Frankly, I don't like the idea of a Dark Tower movie, but if they could make it great, I don't care how they do it.
     
  8. tommy-thewho

    tommy-thewho Senior Member

    Location:
    detroit, mi
    Strange choice for Roland..
     
  9. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
  10. Thwacko

    Thwacko Forum Resident

    Location:
    Peacham, Vermont
    I could have sworn "The Waste Lands" and "Wizard and Glass" were "unedited", too, along with about half of King's other works. Has anyone said no to this guy in the last 30 years?
     
  11. Squealy

    Squealy Forum Hall Of Fame

    Location:
    Vancouver
    It never occurred to me that Idris might do the role in his real accent. I would have expected something closer to Stringer Bell than Luther.

    I can't imagine audiences watching the Dark Tower story with its weird mish-mash of Western, fantasy, post-apocalyptic and Arthurian motifs and thinking anything but "what the hell is this?" Without King's familiar storytelling voice tying it together I have to think it could be a tonal car crash. But we'll see.
     
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  12. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    It's a good question - the quote about the last two books not being edited was from a recent King interview, but the question of whether and to what degree King is edited at all has been posed many times. King claims that he's edited like most authors and makes changes accordingly, but I think it's more likely that there's editing, as in "Hey, Steve, there's a grammatical error here and a dangling participle there." and there's editing, as in "Hey, Steve, this Lisey's Story manuscript is just a mashup of Secret Garden and Rose Madder and the baby-talk private language is really nauseating."

    Just guessing that the editing is pretty rare.
     
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  13. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

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    I think McConaughey might actually be a little old for that part (46). Clint Eastwood was 34 in Fistful of Dollars, and that's what I always saw in my mind's eye for this part. It's a tough role to cast, kind of like trying to find the next James Bond: you need somebody tough, who could be violent yet thoughtful, tough but world-weary, a trained killer but very well-educated. My pick would be somebody like Charle Hunnam, who just wrapped Sons of Anarchy.
     
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  14. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    This reminds me of the discussions about the Reacher movie when Tom Cruise grabbed a role where the character as written was a huge ex-Marine. People who hadn't read the book wondered what all the fuss was about, but non-readers will never understand the investment readers make in their favorite stories.

    Many of us have been following Dark Tower for thirty years and the character was clearly modeled on the younger Clint Eastwood. Now we're looking at an actor who is no reader's mental image of Roland, which shouldn't really matter much, except....

    The heart of this story, what kept us going through decades and thousands of pages, is less the plot ( which was increasingly slapdash) but the characters and their relationships with each other and with us. King wrote believably and movingly about Roland and Eddie and Jake and Detta/Odetta/Susannah and Oy. It is impossible to reconcile the casting of Elba with the Odetta character in any way that makes sense, since the racial tension at the heart of the character has to be defused if Roland isn't Caucasian.

    "Oh, well" say the producers. " We got Idris Elba"

    One of the most profound artistic commentaries I ever encountered occurred, of all places, in an episode of Friends. The plot revolved around Chandler's inability to cry. The other characters were trying to summon up teary moments and someone mentioned the death of Bambi's mother. Chandler looked at them incredulously and asked "You mean when the guy stopped drawing the deer?"

    He's right, of course, but we don't care. We don't want Stephen King to stop writing our favorite characters, but, if he does, we insist that he do so with proper care and concern for the emotion and energy we've invested in them. He really failed at this in the concluding chapters of the Dark Tower and this casting news leads one to suspect that the movie producers have even less concern for the integrity of the story.

     
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  15. Great post. Personally I think the Detta character was very poorly written and borderline racist and perhaps the producers decided it was best to just bypass that character. My guess is there will be no Detta. Personally I would have been fine with just Susannah for the books. I have never really understood why King felt the need to split her in three. They usually have to condense/combine characters when they adapt a book. That's the first one I would eliminate if I was making this. And then Flagg and the Crimson King and any other very evil characters that died ludicrous deaths in book 7. And then most of everything else in the final book. . .
     
  16. Thwacko

    Thwacko Forum Resident

    Location:
    Peacham, Vermont
    Reading some of these posts makes me glad I stopped after Wizard and Glass.
     
  17. tiger roach

    tiger roach Forum Resident

    Well then it's high time for another point of view. :winkgrin:

    I love every book in the Tower series. I can't imagine reading the first few and then passing on the rest.

    I can understand a little why some people might have a problem with the metafiction aspect to the later books. If you haven't read them you should. Form your own opinion. At least find out what happens. ;)
     
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  18. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    Agree about Detta. King used to be criticized for his female characters and he responded with the Gerald/Dolores/Rose trilogy to prove, I guess, that he was a feminist at heart. The books weren't bad, but they had more than a whiff of academic exercise about them and the Detta character takes the same approach to racism. She never seems real, the way Eddie and Jake (and Oy) do, but it's impossible to imagine the story without her... Except

    There's an interesting article on the aintitcool website today (and there's a line I haven't written in several years) where one of the few remaining reliable correspondents talks about having read the script last year and makes some assumptions about the upcoming movie. He says the story will primarily revolve around the relationship between Jake and Roland and that Eddie and Detta will not make an appearance until the planned second movie.

    So we'll all stay tuned and continue to gossip, but it really beats talking about the next Marvel movie.
     
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  19. Ghostworld

    Ghostworld Senior Member

    Location:
    US
    The first book is the best. I'd just like to see a real film of that done by Aronofsky or Iñárritu. It could end the same way.
     
  20. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

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    I agree with a lot of what you say (and that's good writing, BTW), but I never got the sense that there was racial tension between Roland and Odetta. I think if anything, there was tension because she was legless and in a wheelchair and had a bad temper; it wasn't so much a black thing, just a wide cultural gap.

    I'm kind of baffled as to why Stephen King is authorizing films & TV shows that veer so wildly away from what he originally wrote, particularly given his outspokenness about Kubrick changing the storyline in The Shining and King's anger at the Children of the Corn films. I mean, Under the Dome was just out of control, 90% invented by TV idiots, stuff not even remotely in the book (particularly the ending).

    I enjoyed the Dark Tower stories, but I don't so much agree that King didn't have concern for his readers in the last few books or chapters or that it was slapdash. I think he threw a whole bunch of stuff at the wall just to see what stuck, and maybe he was flailing or maybe he was just a little out of control, but it had some good moments and there were some significant payoffs (particularly to the ultimate fate of the characters). I think the unevenness of the material will make it tough to film, depending on how closely the producers stick to the novels. Wizard and Glass will be incredibly expensive, because the characters basically go to Oz, and several of the stories bounce back and forth between different times and places, particularly as the time-travel/doorway elements start ramping up.

    I'm not sure if King is just accepting a big paycheck or simply believes that the TV promotion will ultimately sell more books. The word over the last 10 years is that King does maintain very tight approval when his stories are optioned for TV & film, but he gets very little up front, an executive producer credit, and then a big percentage of the profits. How they figure that out with TV, I dunno.
     
  21. Vidiot

    Vidiot Now in 4K HDR!

    Location:
    Hollywood, USA
    Oh, I'm telling you right now, the book that followed -- Wolves of the Calla -- knocked my socks off. That's a damned good book with a very interesting, emotional story, and it reveals some pivotal plot elements. I'm convinced that elements of this book were borrowed for Lost (which, not coincidentally, came out about a year after this book), particularly the idea of hidden installations, secret cameras, evil scientific experiments, and mysterious creatures that are not quite what they seem to be.

    BTW, here's a link to a fascinating article on Ain't It Cool News about a script for the show that got out:

    Quint breaks down the Akiva Goldsman/Jeff Pinkner draft of DARK TOWER: THE GUNSLINGER! »

    There are some surprising reveals as to what's in the first movie and how scattered the stories are -- assuming this is, in fact, the actual script that's going to be shot starting in the next couple of months.
     
    Last edited: Mar 4, 2016
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  22. tiger roach

    tiger roach Forum Resident

    Somethimes I think doing just one of the books would be the best way to go also. The first one would be a great choice. Wolves or Wizard and Glass would also be good candidates IMO.
     
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  23. Chris from Chicago

    Chris from Chicago Experience is simply the name we give our mistakes

    I can't believe they are finally moving forward with this. I never thought it would see the light of day.

    I'm really thrilled with this. I think. I am probably really thrilled. Because I know it'll be as great as I enjoyed the books. Mayhap.
     
  24. rontoon

    rontoon Animaniac Thread Starter

    Location:
    Highland Park, USA
  25. P(orF)

    P(orF) Forum Resident

    A few more thoughts after digesting the various theories/leaks that have surfaced over the last few days -

    - it looks like the project will rise or fall based on the success of the (first) movie. If they've really decided to focus on the Jake/Roland relationship they have eliminated or kicked down the road a lot of the issues related to the enormously complicated plot and the casting of Idris Elba

    - it's still pretty hard to figure out where Detta/Odetta/Susannah will fit in. I'm not sure how anyone can read Drawing and not see that Detta is wholly defined by her racial hatred (seems like every sentence contains some version of "honky mf") which extends to both Roland and Eddie. It's really the only interesting character trait of the triumvirate. Odetta is simply Detta without the hatred and Susannah (IMHO of course) is a cardboard combination of the two who serves as little more than an evil baby carrier.

    -substantial editing of all the various plot threads will probably make for a better story.

    There's a wealth of great material surrounded by a sea of crap. King blew through the final chapters like he had a checklist beside him of each character who needed to be dealt with and a fifty word budget for each one. Let's hope the producers have the same respect for the project as the people who,did the comics (which are excellent.)
     
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