by Bev Vincent
A: He loves it. He just loves the world. And with good reason. It’s fascinating. He feels so comfortable when he’s working with those characters in that world, for some reason. And that’s why he keeps going back there. There is something very human and relatable to the attitudes of those characters. And it’s also kind of comprehensive. You can delve into almost every corner of the human psyche or every emotion of the human heart through what those characters are going through, past and present.
Q: Is there room in your concept to go all the way back to the Mejis days?
A: We haven’t talked about that. We certainly hope to suggest that in some way. But, no, that we haven’t done. We have hopes that, if we’re good enough, down the road, there’s great material there. We could go even further. We really didn’t go beyond Roland and the ka-tet. The first ka-tet is part of what we would be dealing with, but we even hope that would all be an origin story television series. Our Smallville.
Q: Has anybody ever tried to tie TV and the big screen together like this before?
A: I don’t believe anybody really has in a planned way. I think that some version of Star Wars has existed in all the mediums. I’m sure that Star Trek’s that way now, too. I’m not really a gamer, so I don’t know what the Star Trek games are, but I’m sure they’ve got them. But to really say, look, here’s an epic saga that exists. We don’t have to invent, stretch, extrapolate to try to create material for these other mediums. All we’re doing is trying to say: where would this best live? It’s thrilling and it’s also satisfying. And, by the way, we still won’t get it all in. It’s fascinating and sprawling, and Stephen is the first one to give us license to make creative choices, although, clearly, he has his pets. If we do get down to making it, there are some things that he really wants to see, but he doesn’t have to argue—they’re all the ideas that we really want to pack into the films.
Q: There’s been a lot of chatter this past week about Warner Bros. Is that all hype, or is there something behind it?
A: There’s been something going on for a while, but I’m afraid it was premature to declare it a done deal. There’ve been serious conversations. I think there are very real intentions, but still some steps to take before we have a start date. The media is so interested in the subject, along with the fans. Every time it gets mentioned, it seems like somebody wants to put a start date on it—or, hell, they want a release date. We got caught with that before a little bit. I think in all our minds we want to do it, but we want to do it the right way, with the right partners. I think we’re moving in a really positive direction. All along I’ve just felt it would happen. My sense is that I think we’re onto something that’s too rich and interesting to not ultimately find its way to the audience. I believe that the support will ultimately be there for it.
The project means a lot to Akiva and myself, and a handful of people who put in close to a year focusing on it. I really hope we get to do it, and I have a very good feeling about it.
Q: When you go to a new studio, do you start from the revised script or do you go back to an earlier version before the rewrites you did for Universal?
A: It continues to evolve. He’s just beginning to write, so it’s hard for me to comment on it much right now. It’s not just a matter of reverting. There are some new ideas that we’re going to be exploring.
Q: Is Javier Bardem still under consideration? A lot of people were concerned about the color of his eyes and his accent.
A: That was pretty controversial, I know. Now, with scheduling and so forth, it will be starting over. Javier wanted to wear contacts. He’s a great actor, and I actually thought the accent was fine because who knows quite what Roland sounds like? What is the accent?
Q: I think King is angling to do the voice of Blaine the Mono.
A: He has mentioned that, and I said I think you’d be a helluva Blaine. I don’t think we’ll have to audition him. I think we know he’d be a good Blaine.
AN INTERVIEW WITH AKIVA GOLDSMAN
The following interview was conducted by phone in late March 2012.
Q: What’s your history with the Dark Tower series?
A: 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: When did you say, “This should be a movie”?
A: I—as anybody who reads King and writes for the screen—always 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 people—a lot of them smarter than me—to 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: Do you have the whole thing mapped out?
A: 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. I
t’s really material from the first two books.
Q: Do you go all the way back to Mejis?
A: 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 work—some 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 alive—just 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 discovered—through Callahan or other characters—very interesting things about New York, which we can now bring back into the beginning of the narrative.
Q: Are you including material from the Marvel comics?
A: 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 do—let’s just call it The Dark Tower. Close out the series as a stand-alone feature. Then go back and continue on post–Wizard and Glass into the Marvel material.
Q: Do you still plan to use some of the unused material for video games?
A: 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 clever—maybe 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: You also worked on a possible Black House adaptation, which has Dark Tower connections.
A: 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 now—and 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 pleasure—is 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: Would you consider doing Dark Tower strictly as a cable series?
A: We really want to tell this story, so the answer is: certainly, but the ambitions of the series—visually in scope and scale—one 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 organized—and sort of does naturally organize itself—in a way that is scale-specific. There are things that feel movielike. Then there are things—if 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.
THE ARTWORK OF THE DARK TOWER
Not 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 artist—all 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:
THE GUNSLINGER
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.
For the first edition of The Gunslinger, Whelan produced several pen-and-ink spot illustrations,
along with six acrylic or watercolor board paintings.
1. Silence Came Back in, Filling Jagged Spaces…—Roland after the battle of Tull
2. They Paused…Looking up at the Dangling, Twisting Body.—Roland and Cuthbert at Hax’s hanging
3. The Way Station—Roland and Jake leaving the Way Station
4. He Could See His Own Reflection…—Roland looking in the spring near the Speaking Circle
5. The Boy Shrieked Aloud…—Roland and Jake fending off the slow mutants (also used for the cover)
6. There the Gunslinger Sat, his face turned up into the fading light—Roland on the beach with the Dark Tower on the horizon
He also drew black-and-white illustrations, which appeared at the beginning of each chapter:
1. The Gunslinger—Brown with Zoltan on his shoulder
2. The Way Station—Jake sitting in the shadow of the Way Station
3. The Oracle and the Mountain—Roland using the jawbone to fend off the demon in the Speaking Circle to save Jake
4. The Slow Mutants—young Roland with his hawk, David
5. The Gunslinger and the Dark Man—the man in black’s skeleton after the palaver at the golgotha
The third Donald M. Grant printing of The Gunslinger features a new cover, based on the battle of Tull painting. Whelan produced another painting of Roland for the cover of the Plume trade paperback of The Gunslinger (based, presciently, on a profile shot of Stephen King). The final artwork used for that cover is an amalgam of the new painting coupled with the sky extracted from another of his works. He illustrated Grant’s book that combines the revised and expanded version of The Gunslinger with “The Little Sisters of Eluria,” and he profusely illustrated The Dark Tower, the final book in the series (see below). He also contributed the definitive depictions of the main characters for the character orbs in the Discordia interactive game at King’s official Web site. Because King’s description of Roland and the Dark Tower evolved over the two decades between the times Whelan worked on The Gunslinger and when he illustrated The Dark Tower, Whelan thought of himself as something of a weathervane, responding to these changes.