Quote :

"Okay, so, this is a whole new, very ambitious thing. NBC Universal and Universal Pictures are teaming up to adapt Stephen King's The Dark Tower series, about the mystical gunslinger Roland Deschain and his search for the aforementioned tower, into three movies and at least two full seasons of TV. Imagine if in between each installment of Lord of the Rings, NBC had aired a Lord of the Rings TV show, with entirely new, more nuanced material in it, linking the movies, and you’re there. Ron Howard is onboard to direct the first film and the first season of the show, Akiva Goldsmith to do the same on the writing end, and Brian Grazer will produce. The project, based on seven books, will kick off with a movie, which will quickly be followed by a TV season of undisclosed length that will lead up to a second movie. That film will be followed by a second TV season that will be more of a prequel, focusing on Deschain as a younger man, before the third film finishes up where the second film left off. If that sounds like a lot of The Dark Tower, it is. Sometime in the not-so-distant future, the series is going take over movie theaters and your television in what will either wind up being a genuinely new, much bigger way of telling and selling stories or a hugely expensive fiasco. "

http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/09/stephen_kings_the_dark_tower_w.html

friggin epic nerd splooge over here

9/9/2010 9:45:45 PM

Can't believe it took this long to post this on here. Meant to do it last night, even searched to make sure no recent Dark Tower threads were around, but got distracted and forgot.

Indeed, epic nerd splooge. Started reading the series this year, and am about to start Wizard & Glass. Series is def. FTMFW.

9/9/2010 9:50:01 PM

Wizard and Glass is great

9/9/2010 9:58:30 PM

HOLY CRAP YAY

9/9/2010 11:29:09 PM

This is almost too good to believe.

Also, I cannot stress how amazing the audio books are for this series. Even if you've already read them, listening to them and the narrators that King authorized is, well, amazing!

No Spoilers

but they better not fucking change the ending

and

the tv show being on NBC worries me. These books aren't PG-13.

Quote :

"Started reading the series this year, and am about to start Wizard & Glass. Series is def. FTMFW."

Imagine having to wait years between Wastelands and Wizard and Glass


[Edited on September 10, 2010 at 12:05 AM. Reason : just oral diarrhea here]

9/9/2010 11:52:48 PM

they are going to fucking ruin it.

9/10/2010 1:32:54 AM

^^The Ending or the coda?

9/10/2010 11:46:31 AM

I don't care if they ruin it I finally get to see a media adaptation of this.

I read this in class and it was all I could do to keep myself from giggling in a writing workshop.

Although most of us are a little messed up anyway so I don't think anyone would have thought the worse of me for it.

9/10/2010 12:19:17 PM

^^ coda?

9/10/2010 12:35:07 PM

The Dark Tower Series has a coda if memory serves.


[spoilers]







Roland enters the tower at the end of the quest, and the story "ends" with narrator saying something cute to the effect of, "you can shut the book now if you like and end the story with Roland achieving his goal, a happy ending, or you can read on. In the coda, Roland reaches the top and realizes his mistake, and the entire story starts over at the weigh station accept now he has the horn that he left behind originally."










[/spoiler]

9/10/2010 2:19:30 PM

oh i guess ive never heard the term coda.

I hope it ends exactly like the book ends, up to the very last written word.

9/10/2010 2:53:14 PM

Me too

9/10/2010 2:56:41 PM

This will turn out well

I'm AstralAdvent and i approved this message.

9/10/2010 3:03:37 PM

How many good Stephen King adaptations have there been? 3? 4? Stand by Me, Misery, The Shawshank Redemption, The Green Mile. Maybe It.

But still I'm having a tough time controlling my expectations.



(btw, Wizard and Glass is extraordinary.)

9/10/2010 11:29:14 PM

I guess we're not counting The Shining because it wasn't close enough to the actual book?

Carrie was still a good movie.

Kingdom Hospital was decent.

The several short-story special "series" were again decent.

But we're forgetting that this is actually being funded by people with money and reputations. Ron Howard isn't Orson Welles or anything, but he's a respectable filmmaker who should treat this right. And the writers are good.

9/11/2010 12:03:09 AM

I got 75% of the way through the first book and gave up.

9/11/2010 9:59:13 AM

I'll get excited about this if Roland is carrying the horn in the first episode. Book 7 was an epic fail, but it doesn't get much better than Books 1-4.

[Edited on September 11, 2010 at 10:59 AM. Reason : :]

9/11/2010 10:58:18 AM

*SPOILER*


























having the horn would make no sense unless they were making this a sequel or continuation of the story. If he had the horn there would be no reason to have his backstory explained and it would be worthless for new viewers to watch.
















*/SPOILER*

9/11/2010 2:28:49 PM

Quote :

"they are going to fucking ruin it."

truth



The movies need to be R rated at the very least. No way you can have an R rated movie and then come back on NBC with some PG shit and expect it to be good.


Also, no way they DONT change the ending after the fiasco from LOST.

9/11/2010 5:05:48 PM

le sigh. I have mixed feelings about this.

The Dark Tower was the first "adult" book I read around 1990 and it is my very favorite book series. Part of me doesn't want it to go into any other media aside from audiobooks because it might ruin it.
Another part of me revels in the idea of seeing it played out on a screen as I am looking at my signed copy of the first comic book adaptation *nerd snort*.

I'm afraid of how it's going to be cast. Chuck Norris as Roland? Robert Pattinson as Eddie? Beyonce as Susannah? Justin Bieber as Jake?

PS - Wizard and Glass is still my favorite book of the series and the book I've re-read the most.

9/12/2010 3:30:56 PM

what I would love is for them to continue with the animated novels and when they get to the 'and the gunslinger followed' portion they have him with the horn.

9/12/2010 3:34:41 PM

i mean roland was clearly clint eastwood and eastwood is now old enough to play old Roland, but he claims he doesnt want to act anymore

9/12/2010 4:15:35 PM

Clearly.
I'll make him act

9/12/2010 6:09:39 PM

the first thing i thought of when i read this

lobstrosities

9/12/2010 6:58:59 PM

Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum? Dad-a-cham?

9/12/2010 7:06:13 PM

^,^^ good posters in this thread.

9/12/2010 9:44:21 PM

I need point no further than the made for TV adaptation of The Stand to show how poorly King's works adapt to the screen.

9/12/2010 10:32:59 PM

Ha
M-O-O-N, that spells Coach :/

9/12/2010 10:54:04 PM

DAUBER

[Edited on September 13, 2010 at 12:00 AM. Reason : and look at Rob Lowe's dumb ass. that shit was awful.]

9/12/2010 11:59:32 PM

Because clearly

It was the topic material

that made the stand adaptation horrible

9/13/2010 9:10:17 AM

NBC will ruin this

Mark my words

9/14/2010 6:29:14 PM

The reason King's stuff doesn't transfer to TV is that so much of his writing is from the internal thoughts of the character. He builds suspence in the story by describing the fears and self doubts of the characters. This is very hard to depict on a TV show without having an annoying voiceover throughout the show. So, alot of the context of King's writing is lost on screen.

I hope this turns out well, but I bet they will butcher it.

BTW, if they wanted to to completely leave out the material of books 5,6, and the first 2/3 of 7 I would be completely fine with that.

9/14/2010 6:50:18 PM

Eh I don't think that works.

5 and 6 particularly deal with Jake and his path of becoming a true gunslinger. You can't really castrate that character like that because of his importance to Roland.

9/14/2010 9:24:15 PM

I enjoyed The Stand miniseries.

9/14/2010 9:35:02 PM

I haven't actually seen it nor have I read the book. I am hoping The Stand becomes available on Audible.com since there is no way I have time to actually read that monster.

9/14/2010 9:35:56 PM

^It's a good book to read - the miniseries comes off as kinda cheesy, unfortunately
I still have to watch it whenever it comes on TV though. It comes on SyFy a ,lot if you ever feel like DVR'ing it

augh this makes me want to start reading it over again from the beginning. Again.^

[Edited on September 14, 2010 at 10:21 PM. Reason : carrrrrrrrrrrot]

9/14/2010 10:20:55 PM

Like everyone else, I am overwhelmingly excited and at the same time very skeptical of how this project turns out. If done right, it has the potential to be phenomenal but in the wrong hands it could fail miserably. Remember, Ron Howard and Akiva Goldsman have already worked together on one fictional book series adaptation (The Da Vinci Code/Angels & Demons). I thought The Da Vinci Code was a terrible adaptation so I didn't bother to watch Angels and Demons (which I read first and liked better). What made the movie Da Vinci Code horrible to me was their exact replication of the story's events while at the same time cutting a lot of good details/filler/problem solving elements of the story. Obviously this has to be done when adapting a book to film/TV but you can do it in such a way that it keeps the same feel of the book such as LotR and most of the Harry Potter series. This isn't what happened in The Da Vinci Code because the problem solving and such details are what made the book for me. They were true to the book at the main plot checkpoints but the journey just wasn't fun.

Sorry I digress, this is a thread about The Dark Tower. What I hope happens is that the bulk of the series is composed of the first 4 books and graphic novels. Then please for the love of God and the Man Jesus, rewrite a good portion of the last 3 books. I could live with it though as long as they don't cast Stephen King as Stephen King. That was the biggest problem I had with the last 3 books, everything that stemmed from him writing himself into the books. Leave Callahan in there, that's fine. He was an integral part to the 5th book that I didn't mind at all. Actually I enjoyed reading about his travels and story post-Salem's Lot. But leave out the discovery of Calvin Tower's copy of Salem's Lot and the journey to go see Stephen King. Don't get me wrong, I understand that he was using it as a literary device to tie our world into the fictional world by including himself (a real person) and a real event (his near death experience) but it was unnecessary. There are already cultural references a-plenty throughout the books that do this, so including himself just came off to me as arrogant.

Anyway, that's my $0.02.

9/18/2010 8:36:59 PM

^ I really don't see how they can do that. How would they deal with Jake's demise?

9/18/2010 9:22:38 PM

i think dean koontz should play stephen king

9/18/2010 10:14:59 PM

^^good point and the answer is simple...rewrite! In the movie/TV series, would it make sense for the characters to meet Stephen King? Its likely that a good portion of the viewers won't even know about the books even if its called "Stephen King's Dark Tower". Also, since the story is changing mediums wouldn't it make more sense for the characters to meet Ron Howard and Co. since they're no longer in the book we've read or are reading? To me that doesn't translate as well and you lose the novelty of the experience. I have to admit though, as I'm thinking about this part of the story I am beginning to appreciate the complexity of having your characters meet their creator. Its possible that Stephen King sat there for days thinking about how to accomplish that. To give him the benefit of the doubt, it does work better for SK to include himself rather than invent another book series/author for the characters to interact with. Haha, he may have even said "Damn, people are going to think I'm arrogant as hell for this".

[Edited on September 19, 2010 at 7:28 AM. Reason : change to question and add]

[Edited on September 19, 2010 at 7:29 AM. Reason : asdf]

9/19/2010 7:18:04 AM

King is too arrogant to sign off on this project and NOT have himself written into the story




as such, it will be awful, as all King adaptations are wont to be

9/19/2010 10:59:14 AM

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/entertainment/movies/trailer-talk/os-sony-announces-the-dark-tower-film-20150806-post.html.

oh we back

8/7/2015 9:59:08 AM

Do the books get better after the first one? The first one sucked

8/7/2015 10:27:26 AM

If you didn't like the first one, then it only gets wierder from there. At one point in the series, Roland and his team of inter-dimensional asskickers meets up with a writer named Stephen King. It crosses quite a few of his other books in some way or another. Like it has the father from Salem's Lot, they pass through a dimension that has been struck by captain tripps, etc.

Having said that, I really enjoyed the series, but I'm one of those people who will read the phone book if it were written by King.

8/7/2015 12:42:59 PM

I would say they get better, yes the events may get a little weirder (and even that's debatable, first one is pretty weird too), but the first book is a mashup of a few short stories, so it comes off a little disjointed, The following books are a little more coherent

8/7/2015 12:52:57 PM

Also, the first book was written when King was like, 19 or something. Lots of maturity occurred between the first book and the next one in the series.

Wizard and Glass is definitely the best book of them all.

[Edited on August 7, 2015 at 7:51 PM. Reason : asd]

8/7/2015 7:51:25 PM

I always thought wizard and glass would make one of the best films out of the series. That being said I love these books to the point that I dont think a film adaptation can do them justice, and after the development hell I'm just hoping for decent movies at this point

8/7/2015 10:27:52 PM

do they ever cross over into maximum overdrive universe? because i'd want to see that.

8/9/2015 3:50:36 PM

Not that I can recall, but there might have easter eggs I missed.

I remember it tied in a little with Insomnia and Hearts of Atlantis as well, also strongly with Salem's Lot and The Stand as mentioned before.

8/10/2015 7:56:19 AM

Many more than that
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_King_works_related_to_The_Dark_Tower_series

8/10/2015 9:11:40 AM