The Dark Tower Companion: A Guide to Stephen King’s Epic Fantasy (25 page)
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Authors: Bev Vincent
Q:Â Â Â What's your history with the Dark Tower series?
A:Â Â Â I was in Boston when
The Gunslinger
came out. There was a specialty bookstore where I got that first edition. Just fell in love, as everybody who's a fan of the series has. Then I read them as they came out. I'm an old King fan. I was lucky enough to meet him a couple of times in this process, and he remains the only person I'm speechless around. It's because he's really one of the great writers of our time. He's today's Charles Dickens. For those of us who read him when we were younger, he was a “genre writer” who finally proved that genre writing was actually literature. The Dark Tower, from a more scholarly standpoint, is unique in that it is trans-genre, which is extraordinary and remarkable. For me, it's just wildly
inviting and always has been. Stephen seems to have an ability to replicate or access what I think of as the child's imagination in all of us. There's an intuitive correctness to the worlds that he paints. Dark Tower has evolved obviously into a nexus of all those worlds. Whether one is a fan of
The Stand
or
'Salem's Lot
or
Hearts in Atlantis
and comes to the Dark Tower that way or directly on through
The Gunslinger
, it allows you a really remarkable path to travel throughout King's universe or multiverse.
Q:Â Â Â When did you say, “This should be a movie”?
A:Â Â Â Iâas anybody who reads King and writes for the screenâalways hoped for some version of the Dark Tower on the screen. When J.J. and Damon bought it, I felt both thrilled and envious because I love those guys, and I think they're super-talented. Very early on, J.J., who's an old friend of mind, invited me, along with a bunch of really smart peopleâa lot of them smarter than meâto sit in a room with him and Damon and Jeff Pinkner and Drew Goddard. A bunch of folks. They were putting
Lost
together. It was a brainstorming session about mythology. Damon was very clear about his admiration for the Dark Tower, and we ended up talking a lot about it. It was definitely part of the fabric of the ideas that inspired the more super-ordinary parts of
Lost
. You can see the influences in it, and Damon has always been very open about that. At the end of that brainstorming session, which was the beginning and end of my involvement with that TV show, Damon sent me a framed print of the cover of
The Gunslinger
as a thank-you. I knew of his admiration for the work and I had my own. When he and J.J. decided that this was not something they were going to end up undertaking, I grabbed hold of the idea and called Ron [Howard]. I had been pitching Ron the Dark Tower in various forms since we were making
A Beautiful Mind
together. I think he confessed, too, to some envy when J.J. and Damon and Stephen had agreed to do it. So when it became free, Ron and I started conspiring to figure out how it could be ours.
I started rereading the books and realized that it is tricky. The access points are harder if you're not familiar with the mythology. At the same time, the tone of
The Gunslinger
is not necessarily the tone of the rest of the books.
Wolves of the Calla
is action-adventure
Western,
Wizard and Glass
is almost
Romeo and Juliet
, but
The Gunslinger
is surrealist. It's literary musing and is probably the least muscular when it comes to plot, which is typically required for access to movie. I was wrestling with the order of the material, and I thought, What if you come in around the third book. At which point, Ron looked at me and said, “Why don't we mix it up? Why don't we start with the third book, and then we can go backward, but let's do it on TV.” And so began this construct of movie-TV-movie-TV, etc., which is our fantasy. Whether it comes to pass, who knows? It was born of trying to find an access point for the uninitiated while also being inclusive of all the material that the initiates want and love.
Q:Â Â Â Do you have the whole thing mapped out?
A:Â Â Â We have the whole thing mapped out in the grossest possible sense, and I have a script for the first movie, which I'm currently revising, and a script for the pilot of what would be an interstitial component, which is actually material that in literary continuity would predate the third book. It's really material from the first two books.
Q:Â Â Â Do you go all the way back to Mejis?
A:Â Â Â We go all the way back and we go all the way forward. Without tipping too much, our Roland begins this turn of the wheel with the Horn of Eld. It is the next iteration of the cyclical journey, which affords us the opportunity to maintain fidelity to what Stephen has done and also to what Stephen has spoken of in his own introductions to the more recent editions, which is a little bit of retcon workâsome retroactive continuity in order to stitch backward that which came later. One thing we did try to do was play with the idea of what it would be like to be Jake and to be aliveâjust as Stephen was dealing with a contemporary New York when he was writing, we moved that into today. That makes for a lot of fun. As the books have gone on, we've discoveredâthrough Callahan or other charactersâvery interesting things about New York, which we can now bring back into the beginning of the narrative.
Q:Â Â Â Are you including material from the Marvel comics?
A:Â Â Â The original plan was to go with the first movie, then do interstitial material, six or seven episodes that were flashbacks to the material
of the first two books. Then two episodes that were flashbacks to Roland and the young gang, which would be precursors to
Wizard and Glass
. Then go do
Wolves of the Calla
as a stand-alone feature. Then do
Wizard and Glass
as a season. Then doâlet's just call it
The Dark Tower
. Close out the series as a stand-alone feature. Then go back and continue on postâ
Wizard and Glass
into the Marvel material.
Q:Â Â Â Do you still plan to use some of the unused material for video games?
A:Â Â Â What we were going to do is use video game material to link movies one and two because there would be a section of narrative where the character results were going to be the same but things could have happened differently. We really did have the whole thing mapped out. It was cleverâmaybe too clever by half. Even then we couldn't get all of it in. You look at that Father Callahan material from
Wolves of the Calla
and you want that to be a stand-alone movie. You want to go back and redo
Hearts in Atlantis
using the Dark Tower connectivity rather than excising it. If you resource television, movies and gaming, it seems like you could do a lot of the material.
Q:Â Â Â You also worked on a possible
Black House
adaptation, which has Dark Tower connections.
A:Â Â Â
Black House
becomes complicated because it is inexorably linked with
The Talisman
. Those two objects have been trying for a long time to find their own way independently. Ultimately, I hope somebody bundles the two. I think that's its best chance for success.
Part of what's happening nowâand I do think
Lost
was a precursor to this and I think people are doing it much more commonly, and I say that with some pleasureâis that people are attending to serialized storytelling. The idea that you can use filmed entertainment to continue stories rather than sticking strictly to episodes. Sticking strictly to that old “they can't know anything when they come in and they have to not need to know anything when they go out,” which was the model for such a long time. And still is. That was based on the idea of syndication. Things shouldn't really live in a world of “to be continued⦔ The conventional model for syndication doesn't exist anymore. Now anybody can watch anything at any point, mostly. The idea of
serialized storytelling is getting a real shot in the arm. As such, something like Dark Tower, despite our ambitions to jump back and forth between features and TV, is a perfect candidate for a long serialized arc, as is
Talisman
/
Black House
. You could easily see that stretching on HBO beautifully for several seasons.
Game of Thrones
has shown us that really rich cinematic storytelling is available on television and is available in a way that asks the audience to bring to it a knowledge base. If that's true of
Game of Thrones,
it can certainly be true of Dark Tower or
The Talisman
or any of King's other longer works.
Q:Â Â Â Would you consider doing Dark Tower strictly as a cable series?
A:Â Â Â We really want to tell this story, so the answer is: certainly, but the ambitions of the seriesâvisually in scope and scaleâone would think of them as being better suited to the kind of funds available to features. Now, having said that, you sit there and watch
Game of Thrones
and you can't do anything but admire the production value. It feels like a movie. More and more, the scope that is required for Dark Tower is available on television, but our initial ambition is still our ambition, which is to bring it out in feature form and then cross over to television and cross back over to features. What's interesting about Dark Tower is that the material can be organizedâand sort of does naturally organize itselfâin a way that is scale-specific. There are things that feel movielike. Then there are thingsâif you think about Eddie and his brother, that stuff almost feels like it wants to be gritty television. It speaks to both platforms in a way that we found unique.
HE
A
RTWORK OF THE
D
ARK
T
OWER
N
ot all fantasy series are illustrated and certainly not all of Stephen King's novels come with artwork inside and out. The fact that the Dark Tower novels are all illustrated can be traced back to Donald M. Grant. When
The Gunslinger
was published in 1982, it was intended only as a limited edition. Grant was well known and respected for his lavish books, all of which featured artwork from some of the best in the business.
The Gunslinger
wasn't King's first limited edition. Phantasia Press published a limited edition of
Firestarter
in 1980 with wraparound cover art by Michael Whelan. Even before
The Gunslinger
was published, volume 5 of
Whispers
magazine (August 1982) featured artwork by John Stewart inspired by the book. The cover illustration was called
Old Nort the Weedeater
and five other Dark Tower illustrations appear in the magazine featuring a zombielike gunslinger, Brown at his cabin, the man in black, Sylvia Pittston and Zoltan plucking out the eyes of Roland's mule.
Michael Whelan, who illustrated
The Gunslinger
, wasn't available when it came time to publish
The Drawing of the Three
. This started a trend whereby each subsequent book featured the work of a different artistâall the way up to the final book, where Whelan was once again called into action, forming a kind of bookend to the series.
The first mass-market publications of the Dark Tower books were trade paperbacks, oversized volumes like the one you are now holding. Publishing at this size meant that the interior artwork from the Grant editions could be reproduced without shrinking it down to a point where detail would be lost. In a few cases over the years, some of the art from the Grant books has been omitted from the trade publication.
With the final three books in the series, the publication paradigm changed.
Scribner became a copublisher with Grant. However, the interior artwork continued to be shared between the publishers. In addition to the signed/limited edition, Grant published a new state of these books, the artist's edition, which was limited but unnumbered and signed by only the artist and had a slightly different dust jacket design.
The Wind Through the Keyhole
is the only Dark Tower book where the Scribner edition doesn't contain any of the artwork.
The styles of the various artists are radically different from book to book, ranging from Whelan's naturalistic depictions to Dave McKean's abstract works to Jae Lee's illustrations, which are reminiscent of the work he did in the Marvel graphic novel adaptations of the series.
Here is a summary of the interior art produced for the Grant editions of the eight Dark Tower novels:
T
HE
G
UNSLINGER
Artist: Michael Whelan
Michael Whelan was the first person to illustrate Stephen King for the small press. King thought of Whelan when considering who should illustrate
The Gunslinger
based on his work for
Firestarter
. Though Whelan generally does only cover art, he made an exception for the Dark Tower books. He found
The Gunslinger
bleak and depressing, but he got into the project once he started doing some sketches. In retrospect, he chides himself for not watching any of the Clint Eastwood spaghetti Westerns, but his depictions of Roland and the Tower are legendary.