Stephen King’s Dark Tower on Big and Small Screen
The news set all Stephen King’s books lovers on fire. Arrangements have been made for the team who will turn author’s Dark Tower into a trilogy, however the cast is still unknown. The project is going to be made available by Universal Pictures and NBC Universal Television Entertainment who have acquired the rights to produce a trilogy made of both movies and TV series based on the epic novels, short stories and comic books entitled The Dark Tower of novelist Stephen King.
The team who will work on the project, writing the script and producing it is made of three Oscar winning people. Ron Howard, Akiva Goldsman and Brian Grazer will stand behind the scenes and will write and produce both the movies and the TV series. Ron Howard will direct the initial film and the first season of the TV series, while Akiva Goldsman will write these two starting parts of the trilogy. Brian Grazer will be the producer of the project. The trilogy is intended to go deep into the story and the character’s evolution, thus the need of making TV series bridges between the movies. In order to create the intimacy brought by the books, between every epic movie there are going to be TV series in which more details from the books are going to be made available to the public.
For those who have not read Stephen King‘s The Dark Tower, I am not going to present the whole volumes here, but I will try to shed some light on them. There are seven novels written in the series of The Dark Tower and they are: The Gunslinger , The Drawing of the Three, The Waste Lands, Wizard and Glass, Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower. The novels were written between 1982 and 2004 and they follow the quest of Roland Deschain, the last living member of a knightly order named gunslingers, towards the Dark Tower, a building considered to be the nexus off all universes. The books were inspired mainly by Robert Browning‘s poem Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came, but we could also see influences of the Arthurian Legends; The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and identifications with JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings can be made. The character of Roland Deschain was inspired by Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name.
But the novels are not the only source of inspiration for the trilogy that is going to be produced on screen. Some of the short stories of Stephen King’s feature characters and events that are closely related to the novels, while comic books are also shedding light on the characters and the events. The comic books series include: The Gunslinger Born, The Long Road Home, Treachery, The Sorcerer, The Fall of Gilead, The Battle of Jericho Hill and The Gunslinger as the sixth series of the comics. The Sorcerer is a prelude for the fourth series of these comic books.
In 2009 Stephen King said in an interview that he is thinking of a sequel of the novels, entitled The Wind through the Keyhole, as he believes the story is not finished yet and he wants to write a ueber-novel. I wonder whether he will finish the book before the movies and the TV series are done and this will be incorporated in the trilogy as well.
But until this question is answered, there others that need an answer: Who is going to play Roland Deschain? Who is going to play the other characters? Are there going to be famous actors or still unknown actors? Is there any one from the famous actors who would like to play for three or four years in this trilogy? These are questions that people are asking but they are not given an answer yet. After all, the project is just at the beginning and hopefully it will come to an end with success.11
