Given Stephen Kings history of screen adaptations of his work it should really come as no surprise that The Dark Tower is up for a screen adaptation - but somehow it does.
Before I even heard that this was in the works (which was actually some time last year) I had considered the practicalities of bringing this work to screen. First off there's scale - Seven books of varying length. The Gunslinger, the first novel is rather short but even it could easily make a 90-120 minute film, although I think it could - with harsh edits - be brought down to a 30-45 minute section of a longer film. If they decided to go with a faithful adaptation of the books they'd probably need a bare minimum of seven films, however if they decided to cut out certain parts of the story or even alter the core story significantly then they could conceivably bring it down to as few as a single film. I think this is pretty unlikely for the simple reason that King would never agree to let Rolands story be butchered in such a fashion - not after he spent 30 years of his life on it.
So I'm thinking this is going to have to be a fairly faithful rendition - which means long. That to me almost excludes film as a medium. The Dark Tower was successful, but less so at its conclusion than it's height around The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands, which I think would make any prospective film studio wary of committing the massive budget an ambitious project such as a full Dark Tower film adaptation would require.
So if not Film what about TV? A TV adaptation with the quality of the modern Battlestar Galactica re-imagining would probably be a good fit for The Dark Tower. Now we hit upon the issue of time scale. There's a 12 year old character who appears in the story from start to finish. If you're going to make a reasonably long running TV series then your kid is going to grow up and that can be kind of an issue. Perhaps less so for The Dark Tower whose 12 year old - Jake- is portrayed as maturing before his time, so they might be able to get away with having a 15 year old kid playing a 12 year old by the end of the story.
I thought realistically if they wanted to bring The Dark Tower to the screen it'd have to be a high quality animated piece - I thought something along the stylistic and quality levels of Afro Samurai:
Well, that's what made sense to me. But it looks like that isn't what's going to happen. It turns out that J.J. Abrams, director of TV series Lost is attached to direct The Dark Tower in whatever form it eventually turns up in. Given Abrams extensive filmography in both film and TV it could swing either way. I think I'd prefer a TV series - I think that would work best for this particular series of books. It carries less risk of hacking the story to pieces to maintain some sort of misguided attempt at turning this into a pure action movie, stringing along the various action sequences from the books while cutting out all the character and story development in between. Given Abrams work on Lost we know he's not afraid to temper the pace for the good of the story so in that respect I see him as a good choice for director.
Finally, there is one more question that burns in my mind: Who will play Roland Deschain, The Last Gunslinger of Gilead?
From the books it's clear that Roland was heavily based on the character "The Man With No Name" as portrayed by Clint Eastwood in the "Dollars" Western movies and Eastwood would probably have made a perfect Roland 30 or 40 years ago, however as he stands today at 78 years old he's unfortunately not suitable to play the part of the slim-hipped middle-aged Gunslinger portrayed in the novels.
While watching X-Men Origins: Wolverine last weekend there was one particular moment where Hugh Jackman sort of looks up and left over his shoulder with his face creased in a sort of half-frown which bore startling similarity (in my mind) to the expression Eastwood often bore in the Dollars films and I thought "Holy shit! Hugh Jackman could play Roland!". The more I thought about it the more I thought it made sense, he's the right age - in his 40's, he has the right build - muscular but not monstrously built, still quite slim in the hips - a feature highlighted in Roland physique and he can produce that sort of quietly confident gravelly voice. The only physical feature Jackman lacks is those Blue Bombardier Eyes of Roland, this can be pretty easily overcome via contacts though.
The Dark Tower wikipedia entry currently lists Christian Bale as the "top contender" for the role - something I'm not opposed to given Bale's dedication to his work. Considering Bale is a major movie actor throwing his name into the mix veers the slider further over to the "film" slot than TV, although I doubt Bale would object to filming for TV if the pay was right.
Everything about this is speculation right now, the wikipedia entry suggests work won't even start until Abrams finishes with lost next year in 2010, but speculating is fun.
Maybe one day the studio behind Afro Samurai will make my deepest Dark Tower wishes come true and maybe not.
Only time will tell.
freedoms_stain, out.
Given Stephen Kings history of screen adaptations of his work it should really come as no surprise that The Dark Tower is up for a screen adaptation - but somehow it does.
Before I even heard that this was in the works (which was actually some time last year) I had considered the practicalities of bringing this work to screen. First off there's scale - Seven books of varying length. The Gunslinger, the first novel is rather short but even it could easily make a 90-120 minute film, although I think it could - with harsh edits - be brought down to a 30-45 minute section of a longer film. If they decided to go with a faithful adaptation of the books they'd probably need a bare minimum of seven films, however if they decided to cut out certain parts of the story or even alter the core story significantly then they could conceivably bring it down to as few as a single film. I think this is pretty unlikely for the simple reason that King would never agree to let Rolands story be butchered in such a fashion - not after he spent 30 years of his life on it.
So I'm thinking this is going to have to be a fairly faithful rendition - which means long. That to me almost excludes film as a medium. The Dark Tower was successful, but less so at its conclusion than it's height around The Drawing of the Three and The Wastelands, which I think would make any prospective film studio wary of committing the massive budget an ambitious project such as a full Dark Tower film adaptation would require.
So if not Film what about TV? A TV adaptation with the quality of the modern Battlestar Galactica re-imagining would probably be a good fit for The Dark Tower. Now we hit upon the issue of time scale. There's a 12 year old character who appears in the story from start to finish. If you're going to make a reasonably long running TV series then your kid is going to grow up and that can be kind of an issue. Perhaps less so for The Dark Tower whose 12 year old - Jake- is portrayed as maturing before his time, so they might be able to get away with having a 15 year old kid playing a 12 year old by the end of the story.
I thought realistically if they wanted to bring The Dark Tower to the screen it'd have to be a high quality animated piece - I thought something along the stylistic and quality levels of Afro Samurai:
Everything about this is speculation right now, the wikipedia entry suggests work won't even start until Abrams finishes with lost next year in 2010, but speculating is fun.
Maybe one day the studio behind Afro Samurai will make my deepest Dark Tower wishes come true and maybe not.
Only time will tell.
freedoms_stain, out.
No comments:
Post a Comment