by Bev Vincent
The development team is quoted as saying we honor the face of our fathers, but we also look at the Dark Tower series as part of an übernovel the same way that Steve does. It’s not even close to done. Discordia is just another piece. Everything that we’re doing is based on the first seven books, but we don’t hold anything that sacred. We’re not afraid to get nasty and do crazy things. That freedom allows us to come up with some very cool ideas. Discordia does not honor the Dark Tower series in such a deep sense that we’re afraid to do things, which I think was one of the things that we struggled with all the way up to the part where we pitched Arina Yokova, this Mafia character, and all the things that go along with it. Steve said he really liked it.
The game itself is that you arrive at the Fedic Dogan and have to investigate. You’re going to have a gunfight. All the principles of the first game will be there, only probably modified and different technology by the time it comes out later this year. Sayre’s setting up shop to do the extractions. Arina is fighting with them trying to use the rotunda. For the most part, Arina and her thugs are controlling the whole area. She’s living in the castle. She controls the tunnel. She controls the rotunda, and Sayre’s low men hold down parts of the Fedic Dogan. That sets the stage for that three-man kind of trifecta, which I always love, when there are three opposing sides. The cool factor about Discordia is that, yeah, it’s this game, and that’s definitely its primary thing, but it also details this very cool character Arina, who is obsessed with the Dark Tower, and not only the Dark Tower, but Steve King, too.
While working for Sombra, Arina reads the final Dark Tower book. For several reasons, she is outraged and perplexed by the open ending. Perhaps most important, Arina believes that the Tower is malfunctioning and should not restart its time line at the year that it does, trapping Roland in the time loop. By the mid-2000s, Arina is completely obsessed with Roland’s cycle and begins to formulate a plan to liberate her hero.
Q: There are people on the message boards who aren’t fond of the way the series ends.
A: That’s the thing. I’ve read essays about how people hate the way that the series ended. Personally, I’m okay with most of it. I think there should have been some kind of crazy epic battle, which is one of the things that I want Discordia to satisfy. But for the most part, I’m reasonably satisfied. I think a lot of people don’t like that open-ended thing, and for somebody like Arina, it became a serious problem. She just didn’t like it, but she also then is dead set on ending it and bringing peace to the cycle.
This is why she killed everybody and took over in the rotunda and the tunnels—to use this recently discovered ancient device that North Central Positronics engineered. It’s the “offer you can’t refuse” thing that they show her when they got her to work for them. It’s called a snapper. It allowed maintenance crews to test the functionality of doors. They could go through any door, one-way or not, and return at the click of a button. The base of the snapper is a brasslike disc about the size of a large pizza. It stands about four inches tall and hovers above the ground, with dim green light emanating beneath it. The base houses a removable device similar to a pocket watch and chain named a clicker. This has the button that returns the user to the base, as well as basic controls for the snapper’s cloaking features.
Once Arina figures out how to use the snapper, she realizes that she can pretty much do anything that she wants. She travels through time and space to countless “wheres and whens” while performing dangerous interdimensional field research and espionage, all in an effort to gain as much knowledge about the Tower as she can. She can travel to the farthest reaches of time and space and always return to Mid-World at the same time as when she left.
She’s used the money from the heist to fund this effort, to lure men to work for her as protection, or people to go through doors using the snapper to test it and see where it goes. She’s funding a rather extensive venture. The ghost town of Fedic is being held by Arina’s thugs and mercenaries. That’s where a lot of that money goes. At the end of it, we learn through journal entries and some clue that 1) Arina has been going through the doors for what is technically hundreds of years; and 2) that she is dead set on ending Roland’s perpetual journey and she has figured out how to do it. She is basically on the loose somewhere in time, is the way we leave it.
A FEW WORDS WITH ROBIN FURTH
When Stephen King was preparing to work on the final three books in the Dark Tower series, he hired Robin Furth to be his research assistant. He wanted her to index the first four books and make notes of the major characters, places and events so he could refer back to them for continuity. That project led to her book Stephen King’s The Dark Tower: A Concordance. As an acknowledged expert in the Dark Tower, she went on to write the scripts for the Marvel graphic novel adaptations (see interview later in this book), which was her first step in expanding the Dark Tower universe beyond what King had written.
She became the director of the Discordia project for King’s official Web site, writing the text content associated with found items and making sure the details in this interactive experience remained consistent with the overall mythos. The following interview was conducted by e-mail in March 2012, prior to the launch of Phase II of Discordia.
Q: Brian Stark mentioned a dinner at a vegan restaurant in New York on a very hot summer day, where the basic concepts of Discordia were hashed out. What are your memories of that day?
A: I remember that dinner very well! Marsha [DeFilippo] and I met Brian, Judy [Hahn], and Judy’s son, Jordan, at a vegan restaurant. At that point Brian and Judy were still trying to decide the best approach for Discordia. Brian really wanted to make his espionage tale work within the context of the novels so that he could stay true to the Dark Tower universe. Inevitably, the conversation drifted to “Tet versus Sombra,” since that is such a big part of the final Dark Tower novel. After that, the project really grew wings. In retrospect, I attribute that dinner to ka.
Q: Did the fact that you were already involved with the Marvel adaptation make the decision to move into an expanded world experience easier?
A: The fact that I was already involved with the Marvel adaptation really made a difference when it came to working with Discordia. For that first thirty-issue comic book run, I had to fill out Roland’s backstory (the “lost years” between the end of Roland’s Hambry adventure and the battle of Jericho Hill), so I’d already been involved with adding detail to the Dark Tower universe. (As you know, for any Dark Tower fan, that is an incredibly exciting but incredibly daunting prospect.) Hence, when we started talking about Arina’s tale, it felt like we were doing something very similar, but in a different time stream, if that makes sense! In both cases, we had the backing of Steve, which is always the most important thing.
Brian is always really modest and makes sure that credit for Discordia is evenly distributed, but he is really the brains behind this operation. He and Judy have put untold hours into the project. It’s amazing.
Q: What is your role as director?
A: I make sure the details are right, and I write the journal entries and item descriptions. Brian and I went over the floor plan for the Dixie Pig, the mind-trap tunnel, and for the rotunda many times, making certain that all the details were right on the money. We even swapped sketches, just to make sure. Writing the journal entries was an amazing experience, because on one level, I actually became Op19. I wandered through the Pig as if I were actually journeying there. It even affected my dream life. I’m not great with technology (you should see my dinosaur of a computer), but Brian was incredibly patient and has really educated me about computer games. It’s been great.
Q: Listening to Brian talk about Arina, it was like he knew this woman. Like she was real.
A: In the Dark Tower universe, Arina is real!
THE DARK TOWER: THE MOVIE
As long as there’s been an Internet—even back in the days when people communicated on bulletin boards using dial-up modems—t
here have been ongoing discussions about who should be cast in a movie version of the Dark Tower. Series fans seem to assume that it will happen eventually, especially after the highly successful adaptation of The Lord of the Rings. If that complex fantasy series could be turned into a movie, then why not the Dark Tower?
Clint Eastwood was an early favorite to play Roland, but as the decades passed, it was clear that the actor on whom Roland was modeled had become too old to play the thousand-year-old gunslinger. These discussions continue, however, with each new generation of reader suggesting the latest and greatest actors to fill this fantasy cast.
At New York Comic Con in February 2007, King sat on a panel with many of the creative people involved with the Marvel Dark Tower graphic novels. King told the audience that he’d refused offers for the film rights to the series because he didn’t think much of the chances of it being a good movie. Though he usually doesn’t care much about what happens with many of the movies made from his works—beyond hoping they’re good because he is a fan of movies—the Dark Tower is important to him. He regards it as his life’s work.
He saw the Marvel graphic novels as the best of all possibilities. They would adapt the series visually the way it was supposed to look, in his opinion. However, they also rekindled interest in a film adaptation. Frank Darabont approached King, but King thought Darabont already had too many other works optioned (including The Mist, which hadn’t yet been filmed). Darabont underscored his enthusiasm for the Dark Tower by turning David Drayton in The Mist into an artist working on a poster for a Dark Tower film. Real-life movie poster artist Drew Struzan created the painting as a prop for the film. It eventually ended up in Stephen King’s office.
The first proposal King considered seriously came from J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof, who had come to his attention through the TV series Lost. The series creators were King fans, using many references to his work during the show’s six-year run. They said that The Stand was a major influence on how the series was structured. The Others read Carrie at their book club. A lab rabbit with the number eight on its back was drawn from On Writing. After King wrote about his admiration for the show, they flew up to Maine to meet with him.
Damon Lindelof, in particular, was a huge fan of the Dark Tower. For nineteen dollars, King gave them a period of exclusivity to see what they could come up with. By late 2009, though, the team had decided they wouldn’t be doing an adaptation. In interviews, Abrams said he thought the series was tricky and Lindelof admitted to being intimidated. He was such a big fan of King and the series that he was terrified of screwing the movie up. His reverence for the author got in the way of taking creative license to change things in the series.
It didn’t take long for someone else to snap up the film rights. Ron Howard’s Imagine Entertainment and Akiva Goldsman’s Weed Road presented a novel idea for how to adapt the series. Their plan consisted of a trilogy of movies with TV miniseries bridging the films, all featuring the same cast. The TV series would focus on characterization and the films would be action and adventure. They also talked about using elements of the story that wouldn’t appear in either the film or the TV series in narrative video games, drawing from both King’s books and the graphic novels.
Akiva Goldsman secured the rights and brought the package to Ron Howard and Brian Grazer at Imagine Entertainment. Howard plans to direct. Grazer, King and Goldsman will produce. Their first studio of choice was Universal, where Imagine is based, although Warner Bros. also vied for the project.
King said that he’d never considered this multimedia format for an adaptation before, but he liked it. He was also complimentary of Howard as director, saying that he told honest stories with style and substance without showing off.
The first movie was optimistically scheduled to launch on May 17, 2013. Then came the announcement that Javier Bardem was their pick to play Roland. Bardem didn’t accept the role for a while, but indicated that he was favorably inclined to do so. Howard spent a lot of time with him and reported that Bardem was fascinated by the character and had great instincts for Roland.
Filming was tentatively set to begin in September 2011. However, the deal with Universal started to unravel once the studio reviewed the script. They asked Goldsman for a rewrite to lower the projected budget. Filming was pushed back to February 2012. Howard said in an interview that Goldsman’s cuts weren’t deep or radical. Producer Brian Grazer was quoted as saying that the revised budget dropped from approximately $140 million to something in the vicinity of $100 million.
In July 2011, Universal decided the project was too costly and risky for them to go forward. This was a blow to the adaptation, but not a fatal one, as Universal’s decision allowed Howard and his partners to seek alternate financing.
In March 2012, Warner Bros. confirmed that they were in ongoing discussions to revive the project. The studio bought Goldsman’s script and hired him to polish it. In August 2012, they decided not to move forward with the adaptation; however, the very next day reports emerged that Media Rights Capital was in talks to take on the series. There has been no news of any developments since then.
AN INTERVIEW WITH RON HOWARD
The following interview was conducted by phone in March 2012.
Q: When did you first discover the Dark Tower series?
A: Akiva Goldsman began talking to me about the gunslinger as a character—he didn’t call him Roland in those days—and the Dark Tower series when we were doing A Beautiful Mind. At that point, he said that he had always dreamed of these books becoming movies. I was working hard on A Beautiful Mind. I didn’t have a chance to pick up the books, but when I eventually did, J.J. [Abrams] was already engaged in developing the project. I continued reading. I read the first three. I really enjoyed them and was kicking myself the entire time that I’d let it get away.
So then, J.J. got so busy and he moved on, and Akiva came back to me and said, “I think there’s a possibility of meeting with Stephen King and talking about doing it again.” I said, “Well, I can’t be glib about this or fake it. I’ve got to go ahead and read the other four.” I was in the middle of something, so it took some time. I revisited the first three, went ahead and read the other four, and I was enthralled and challenged, but also a little frustrated by what I could immediately see we were going to have to leave out. Particularly in the backstory of Eddie and Odetta, that period of her life.
I knew that one of the challenges was going to be making movies for the big screen that would be great broad-appeal action movies that would deal with the journey with the kind of momentum that movies on the big-screen cinema need. I was worried that we would lose the intensity, the coolness, the texture and the humanity of much of the backstory.
One day, I literally was on an elliptical trainer, and I was now reviewing the books by listening to them on audio. It just struck me that so much of that would be great TV. I love what has happened with TV in the last six, seven, eight years. The notion struck me that we could do the biggest ideas in the series on the big screen and we could bundle the more intimate ideas and do that for television. Not only was I excited about the world, the universe and what it had to offer for audiences and for me as a filmmaker, but I also felt that this was a really interesting opportunity to use both mediums to their fullest.
And then it went further. We also began to explore—we were still realizing how much we were going to have to leave out. I said, instead of creating games that just sort of piggyback on or sort of regurgitate whatever the movie or TV show was, why don’t we devise games that actually deal with the narrative threads and some of the twists and turns that we know we’re never going to be able to get to, even in three movies and a miniseries. That got to be an exciting idea. It really ultimately is this sort of attempt to try to take advantage of as much of what Stephen created as possible and for fans to know that we love and respect the entire universe. We’re going to do everything we can to dramatize that using all the mediums at our disposal.
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That’s what we presented to Stephen eighteen months ago. Nearly two years. That was the eureka moment for Akiva Goldsman and I when, one day, at Akiva’s house, we sat down with all the key narrative points in all the books and even the graphic novels. We put them all out in index cards on the floor and started moving things around and bundling certain ideas into what we thought could be used for television. Certain ideas which could be collected into movies. We began to believe that it was cohesive and compelling and an interesting approach—and sort of an unexpected approach, but very true to the spirit of the characters and the narrative. When Stephen agreed with that, it was thrilling. It was a great creative day when we landed on the approach and really gratifying that Stephen concurred a hundred percent. And whenever we talk to fans who know the books and we sit and explain our approach, they are across the board excited about it, and very, very supportive of it, even though it departs in certain ways from what you’d call a rigid adaptation. They’re novels, and novels are not movies. They’re great novels. And, again, Stephen has been fantastic in acknowledging that and being excited about empowering us with his belief that we could go out there and make strong adaptations. Movies, television and even games.
Q: King said he thought the way the script integrated Mid-World with New York City was brilliant.
A: We looked at all of the novels and we’re working with it as one giant narrative. We’re moving certain ideas from novel six and seven up into the first movie. Ultimately, over the course of what we hope is three or four movies and a miniseries—and possibly an ongoing series as well—and the games, to navigate our way around and delve into as many of these areas as we possibly can. He understands—and is thrilled by the fact—that we’re not really necessarily dealing with it all chronologically.
Q: Plus he keeps writing more. The eighth book will be coming out in April.