Pajiba

Well I liked the ending Thankee very much, in fact i liked the whole damn thing. Maybe I'm just a fanboy, of The Dark Tower not the whole Stephen King library. I atuall think 95% of his novels are crap, but I adore his short stories. That being said, I'd still rather get Preacher on HBO or Showtime first.

I just hope they don't ruin it like they did with Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series. Those shows are fucking awful; and while Goodkind also kind of ruined his own book series toward the end, I still expected a LOT more out of the TV version.

I just hope they don't ruin it like they did with Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series.

Wizard of Earthsea, anyone? *sound of banging head against wall*

Hrmm...

I still like Abrams. "Lost" is great. I liked "Cloverfield" well enough and I think the previews for the new "Star Trek" movie make it look better than most other Star Trek movies. Granted, that bar is pretty low (save an exception or two), but I will withhold judgment until it's actually released.

As for the "Dark Tower" series. I started reading it when I was a freshman in highschool. I finished it when I was 30 years old or so. I carried those characters and those stories around with me for a long, long time. Roland, as a character, will always hold a special place in my heart.

Still, the last book was awful up until the actual last few pages. I thought that the way it ended, after Roland entered the Dark Tower was brilliant and spot on perfect for both the character and the series. Did people actually have a problem with how it ended? If so, they missed the point of Roland.

It was all the bullshit leading up to the final few pages that truly sucked. So much stupidness it hurt. I actually loved the "Song of Susanah". That was book 6, right? The one that took place over the course of one day? I liked that one.

I actually thought that, despite how horrible the idea of King being in the books himself sounded, it was actually executed better than I could have imagined.

The last few books didn't hold up well, but the true travesty was everything in Book 7 up until Roland entered the Tower. The ending for everyone BUT Roland was horrible, his ending was perfect.

As for a TV mini-series... Sure. I'd watch it out of interest. It would be cool to see, but it's not like it'd ruin the series or anything for me, the majortiy of the last book took care of that.

I also thought the ending was fine. Not perfect, yes, and I agree that the Scarlet King's demise was lame, but when you've been writing an epic like that for thirty years, sometimes the simple solutions become the only solutions.

Also, I'd totally watch the Dark Tower movie for the Blue Heaven section.

And Wolves of the Calla would make a pretty kick-ass stand-alone film.

I loved the Dark Tower series and in particular I thought that the last book and the meta-fiction were brilliant. I don't think the surface reading of "oh he wrote himself into the books" does it justice, and misses the larger point.

I cried twice during the seventh book (and if you've read it, you know where, I shan't spoil it since I know some are still reading them) and I haven't cried from a book since the dogs died in Where the Red Fern Grows when I was seven.

If J.J. Abrams ends up ruining Star Trek and follows it up by sodomizing The Dark Tower, I will build an atomic weapon in my garage.

The Dark Tower series was all over the place but I did like the ending. I normally find that kind of thing to be a cop-out, but it left me satisfied enough.
I will not be able to watch the adaptation because I always envisioned by Dad as the physical manifestation of Roland. Like the Gunslinger, he was a sun-worn badass who had a soft side when it came to kids and his loved ones.

I've seen the new Star Trek film and I have to say, Felicity never entered my mind at any point. If anything I would say it was more akin to Abrams' work on Alias.

As for Lost, Abrams no longer has any say on where the story goes from now on and how it ends. He is focusing on his films, so now he is just another viewer like the rest of us.

I pretty much just stuck with the last 3 books to see how it ended. The first 3 were the absolute best and I thought things just tanked from there. The circular ending was elegant, I thought, but once King put himself into the storyline, he jumped the shark. The last 2 books were almost painful to read with the realization that he was going to just hack out the ending when things began so beautifully.
I don't think they could possibly create an Oy as adorable and awesome as the one in my head and therefore any sort of film/tv adaptation should never ever be made.

Some things just weren't meant to be put on film, this is one of those things. Leave it alone!

Kelly, agreed with the third book being the best, but there's no way anyone's making that into a movie without ripping it apart. This project had better be a mini-series...

I've noticed that book quality and length have an inverse relationship. He needs a harsher editor.

Genny, not a fan of It and The Stand, I take it?

Abrams may be producing but it sounds like Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse (LOST showrunners) are going to be handling The Dark Tower, just as they are LOST. There is an interview up at Lostpedia where they say exactly that. I would argue comic book god and LOST head writer Brian K. Vaughan has had a hell of a big impact on LOST as well.

You are giving Abrams too much credit for either of those projects. He may get the ball rolling but I doubt he'll be directly involved unless they make the colossal mistake of going the movie route.

I liked Dark Tower's Coda (the erasing of the Crimson King and tie in to Insomnia was clumsy was simply awful). How many times did they say "Ka is a wheel."? It was a gut punch but made perfect sense. But I hope this version makes a point of showing that Roland has the horn so that we know this time may be different.

I couldn't agree more with what people are saying above. The actual ending ending (with circularity and all) was fucking brilliant. The author-self-insert-as-response/therapy-to-near-death-experience should never been published, RF deserved a more significant death than that, and inserting an extraneous spiderbaby (who dies of a fucking infection!) and artist into the plot was just stupid. But I'm pretty confident with Abrams - Lost was (from what I hear) an excellent series, and according to rottentomatoes he did an excellent job with that Star Trek movie thing.

While I would LOVE to see a film version of The Dark Tower series, I don't know that it's possible. Part of what makes the series so brilliant is how it touches, not only on almost all of King's own work, but in large part on all literature.

The meta-fiction element of writing himself in was a bit jarring, but if you remember he wrote it AFTER his accident, it becomes more about an aging writer confronting his own Dark Tower (i.e. himself) near the end of his journey, and it takes on much more weight. He did a similar thing in The Dark Half, with a lesser degree of success.

Ultimately the series is about growth and attrition. As the world winds down, as the beams break and the guardians die, new hope is being born in the form of the new gunslingers. As Roland loses love and fingers and friends, he gains understanding on how to fix things, how to right the failing Dark Tower. The cyclical nature of the ending is just another example of this, in that Roland comes to the end of his journey, but gets another chance to make things right with new elements involved. In death, there is rebirth.

Also, I would wager that the current graphic novel series would make a better movie/mini-series than the books. They're more straightforward in storytelling style.

Snath: The Talisman I would agree but Black House is too tied to The Dark Tower unless you severely alter the plot. You would end up with something like the barely coherent adaptation of "Low Men in Yellow Coats" for Hearts in Atlantis. Beautiful book but mediocre movie.

No no no no no no no. No.

a) there is no way any of the big cable movie networks is going to buy this.
b)there has never been an even close to decent TV-mini-series adaptation of a Stephen King book (The fucking Stand anyone?)
c) Fuck you Stephen King for being my favorite author in the whole wide world and then making me want to kill you for wrecking this entire series with your massive fucking ego. Who writes themselves into their novels? Narcissists. That's fucking who. What an asshole.
Sigh.

I humbly submit the idea to serialize the comic into a nice animated series on cartoon network...seems like something that would work on adult swim maybe?

I liked the ending, dammit. How else could it end? Though I hate him a little (a lot) for teasing us with that shit about the horn and--what? what's gonna happen now? FUCKING TELL ME YOU BASTARD. But noooo! the end! YEAH I COULD KILL HIM.

*ahem*

And I will never forgive him for killing Flagg like he did. Like he had been some minor villain instead of the most badass villain featuring in like 50 of his books. The hell, man?

And didn't he keep saying he would never like to see Dark Tower as a film or anything? Fucking liar.

You know what could work? Animated mini series. Something like Cowboy Bebop. The graphic novel looks kind of kickass. A high budget animated mini series could work wonders. Maybe. It's just that there's a lot of stuff in there that I think would look ridiculous as live action. They could go balls-out with something animated.

c) Fuck you Stephen King for being my favorite author in the whole wide world and then making me want to kill you for wrecking this entire series with your massive fucking ego. Who writes themselves into their novels? Narcissists. That's fucking who. What an asshole.

See, now that's what I was trying to get across in my earlier post! Thank you JenVegas.

Skitz I totally agree with you about a movie based on the Long Walk; that's probably my favourite King short story and it could easily (so easily!) be made into an excellent movie.

And a movie about the Eyes of the Dragon...fucking awesome!!

Speaking of The Eyes of the Dragon, were any other readers totally let down that Thomas and Peter never showed up in The Dark Tower?

Especially since Eyes ends with something like "Thomas did catch up to Flagg, but that is another tale for another day." The way King was tying everything together through all his books I was thinking characters were going to cross over and the end was going to be one huge battle royale. I was also convinced Pennywise was returning based on what was written on the statue in "Dreamcatcher". Instead we get an autistic kid with an eraser.

When I was in high school, I read nearly every Stephen King book, even reread The Stand on weekends. And I always thought that the Dark Tower series would be nearly impossible to film. The only possible way to do it, in my mind, was as some sort of animated miniseries. A lot more would be possible to create with ink (or pixels), and we wouldn't have to worry about building expensive sets or creating shitty SFX/CGI to take away from the story (from filmmaker's point of view).

As for the one King book I want to see made into a movie? Rage. Even though it's the only book he says he wished he never wrote, is no longer published, and is tenuously linked to disturbed teenagers shooting up their schools, I still think it would be great on celluloid. Speaking as a kid who repeatedly toyed with the idea of going postal in high school, I can say that reading Rage may have been the one thing that kept me from going off my rocker.
ME: (reads book) "Shit, I wouldn't want to go through any of that."

Someone really needs to remake The Stand. Do that book justice. And keep Molly Ringwald and Rob Lowe the hell away from it.

I disagree with you VEHEMENTLY about the ending. I thought it was perfect. The Dark Tower is easily in my top five favorite mythos.

As for the rest, I agree. It should be hard-R miniseries (or the equivalent, given that the MPAA does not rate television) or don't bother.

If it can be done, the guy who brought us "Lost" is on the short list.

The actual end I thought was perfect.

Bringing Stephen King in was (I think) a natural part of the story that was being told.

The WAY Stephen King was brought in was awful, awful, awful.

The incorporation of his injury was stupid beyond belief.

The death of Randall Flagg/The Man In Black was the worst thing he ever did. It's story malpractice. The series was dead in the water as soon as that happened.

Erasing the devil was terrible. What crap.

The condescending author's note before the ending should be excised.

The BS happy ending for the non-Roland portion of the ka-tet should also be excised.

The death of a certain former junkie broke my heart.

If they do it, they should change the parts that sucked so much, but they should not change the end. The end was about the only thing in Book 7 that wasn't tone-deaf.

My feelings re: Dark Tower are the same as Julius'. So, that's cool. I have a doppleganger.

@misterorange

There was no joy in Ray's running. He was terrified that someone was still walking. He ran because he was insane and was running towards death.

Frank Darabont has been attached as writer and director of a feature adaptation of The Long Walk for a while, incidentally. No telling if it ever will actually get made, but it's listed as "In Development."

Garraty is insane at the end.

And not just insane, rat trapped in a shithouse insane. The ending of that book horrified me into tears. Throughout the entire story I kept hoping and telling myself that it would not end badly; even though I had read enough King books to know it would.

Am I an idiot? Why is no one mentioning the 4th book being a stand alone movie? It is the only one that wouldn't require the backstory of the entire ka tet. It would also test to see how well the books could be adapted to film without delving into the entire story and risking poor editing thereby pissing everyone off.

i, too, loved the ending of the series. i guess "loved" is the wrong word, but to me it was the only ending that would have made any kind of sense in terms of the idea that king himself was implicated in the universe of the story. having said that, im horrified at the prospect of this series being turned into a movie/movies, by anyone. seeing the CGI version of oy (looking suspiciously look the raccoon from pocahontas) and tyler perry dressed up as odetta/detta/susannah while calling roland "honey chile" might kill me dead.

I am patiently waiting for Prisco to come back and say that he is kidding. Ha! Happy end-of-April fools! Please?

I was super pissed at the ending for a long time after I finished, but then I started to come around and realize that there was really no other way to do it. Having an unhappy ending after so many years would have been terrible. Having a good old "and they lived happily ever after" ending would have been a cop out. Hitchcocking it would have pissed off just as many, if not more, readers by leaving us hanging forever.

I eventually came to like the path King chose. Roland's life, journey, and purpose didn't all get wrapped up in a pretty little bow, but the potential for eventual redemption and happiness is there, even if it takes him a few more tries.

I started reading Stephen King's work because my mother liked it. I must have been 10 or 11, still young enough to think that my parents were cool. So I asked her what I could start with. She gave me Eyes of the Dragon. It's still my favorite book of his and on my list of all-time favorite books. The Dark Tower series is definitely my favorite series of all time, even over Lord of the Rings. I have a hard time viewing them as separate books - rather I see them as the main story in an overarching Lovecraftian mythology that reaches through many of King's works.

Strangely enough, the first book I read in the Dark Tower series was the third one. It was the only one of the series that my mother actually owned at the time - I think she checked the first two out from the library when I was too young to remember. I read that one and thought, "What the holy fuck?! This is awesome!" and went back and read the first two. After that I was hooked like Any Winehouse on cheap crack. As soon as the other came out, I bought them immediately.

As far the the books go, the fourth book is the weakest for me. I can't put my finger on it really. It's a better story than some of the other books and it fills in the gaps in the back story, but it just didn't speak to me. Maybe it's because not enough crazy shit went on.

Before I read the last book in the series, I went back and read all of them back to back. I tell you what, I got so into them that I occasionally would look up in the sky at the clouds and see which way the beam in our world ran. Yeah. I admitted that.

As for the ending of the last book, it pissed me off to no end but I liked it. Really, I can't see it ending any other way. If it did, it would seem like a nice pretty bow on an otherwise harrowing story. I was fucking gutted when Oy was killed, though. Fucking hell, I hate when the dog dies! If King could have found a way for Oy to walk through the door with Roland I would have been much happier.

Hmm, the more I think about the Dark Tower being turned into a mini-series or movie, the more I am ambivalent. If it's done really well, it could be fucking mind-blowing. If Abrams messes it up, I will fill Chris Pine with kerosene, put a rag in his mouth, light it, and throw him at Abrams.

DT is certainly erratic as a series, and I hated how King clumsily inserted himself in the story. But the ending's very satisfying; really the only way it could go. Roland's single-minded purpose was finding the Tower, didn't matter who he walked over or who died in the process. Dude was doomed to repeat history and there was going to be no redemption for him. I loved the ending, and would like to see a spinoff story about Patrick, who became a fascinating, powerful character by novel's end.

I do agree w/ the idea of putting this thing on HBO John Adams style if you're gonna do it at all. I'm Abrams's bitch, so I'm happy he's spearheading this project. Abrams even managed to make Mission Impossible palatable.

Take that BACK! The Stand was awesome!

stardust savant>> Your comment about the beam made me smile. I found myself saying "thankee sai" to people in situations of courtesy and finding them completely befuddled.

i actually just finished the dark tower series (i love you, books 4 less), and i've got to say how much i wish i hadn't bothered with the last book. i was doing all right, the underground escape from the many eyed monster was good, but then i was already more than half way through the book and we still hadn't dealt with mordred or the crimson king. seriously? mordred was a huge build up and a huge let down. the vampire thing, dandelo, with patrick in the basement was more exciting.
and erasing the crimson king felt... empty. i felt scammed. that book should have been 200 pages longer with an epic battle between roland and mordred, a fight to the death with the crimson king.
fuck
but
i do kind of like most stephen king movie adaptations. i would watch a 10-12 part mini series made for sci-fi.

latey, late, late as usual, but:

The author intrusion stuff was awkward I'll admit, but I think I mostly found it jarring because - who has the ability to break the fourth wall like that with an extremely topical event tearing open a modern romantic western epic thematic story arc? It was very, novel, for lack of a better word. I've been thinking about it off and on since I read it and I feel like it just might have some post-partum genius going on there. At least I doubt if I can come up with any other author with the talent, fan base and killer material to attempt such a thing. Took balls, I say.

I think he knew it was a massive risk that might not pay off, but also didn't care because it was HIS piece of Roland he was working with, his long journey, (his facing death when he knew he had to kill them all must have hit him pretty hard, don't you think?) and he didn't have a better way to honor Jake. Getting killed saving your god, your story, and your hope of salvation is pretty epic. This is why I just went 'meh' on Robert Jordan - he died before finishing, but the key elements are there to be taken up by a somewhat decent emulator. Not with King - you just didn't know what the f*ck he had in store for you, you know? Blaine the Mono, my friends, and an Oy in every heart. Not easy to do.

And Flagg? I thought it was pretty clear that Flagg, although deadly scary, was a bit of a straw man, like a native raven character - all pomp and malice aforethought but easily distracted and undercut if his ego was attacked by anyone willing to take a stand (I said it). I felt very 'Indiana Jones uses his gun' about it, and laughed my ass off. Also admired the dedication to trying to play the chess pieces he'd set up so long ago (although obviously he went too far past what was his first plan by then).

Oh well, obviously I will murdertank the asshole who tries to make anything out of this besides an animation, but I agree with Skitz...Talisman has a chance.

WOLF Right Here and Now!

Sorry, that's Frank Muller, not Mullen.

Fuck yeah. What Danny said.

Ka, kaka. It's all the same. Roland was ever a victim of it, and so, it appears was King. I didn't like it a first, but the whole metafiction aspect of inserting himself into the story made it so much more personal, and urgent. When I rack my brains, there was never, ever going to be another option. It just fits so... well. It's right, and decent story telling.

But I would like to one day hear of the story of when the brothers from Eye of The Dragon met up with Flagg.

Whoever called him a narcissistic straw man deserves free drinks for nailing it.

I loved the whole thing, start to finish, and if they ever try to movie-fy it I'll kill myself and hope to wake up in a waystation somewhere.

May it do ya fine.

Seconding that, Eyvi. Tim Curry's It gave me nightmares for a good year straight, but the book was actually fantastic... when I read it a good 10+ years later and had rid myself of the night terrors that is...

Take that BACK! The Stand was awesome!

Posted by: figgy at April 30, 2009 8:07 PM
---
No, it wasn't.

I'm not getting any bread now, am I?

I think desribing yourself as a 'journalist' is pushing it, and 'Lost' is absolute rubbish by the way.

Go watch The Wire...

I just saw Star trek and while that has given me much more faith in Abrams, it really doesn't matter. If he puts DT on the big screen in it's 7 book form it will BOMB. It can only be terrible. I think They should take the DT comics(which ARE awesome btw) and use that story arc for like 3 movies. It would be RAW and totally feasible. With 7 books capturing the story "right" the budget would be unreal.

Also, damn whats with the lack of love for book 4, that's easily my favorite book in the series. 4,1,3,5,2,7,6

I guess I'll just weigh in on everything since I'm way late on this discussion. I thought the ending was fantastic. Had trouble early on with him writing himself in but then I thought about it from his perspective and well i feel the same as someone said earlier the man has BALLS. He felt like writing HIS story the way that felt right and tossed his middle finger at everyone who didn't agree(I'm down with that).

Long Walk would be awesome as a movie(thought about that one for a long time).

Also I've always wanted to see A collection of his short stories made into short movies and sold as a best-of collection. the ones I would make would be: The Jaunt, Mute, N, Graduation(

RECENT KING NOVELS: Cell/ehh pretty run of the mill though it had some cool moments when everyone is going batsh*t crazy.
Lisey's Story/honestly if someone recommends it i'll try to read this story again, I just found it to be a meandering and uninteresting book for the first 200-300 pages so i put it down.
Duma Key/ This was the last King book I really enjoyed. I thought this book was very cool. Liked the characters and the scenarios, birds flying upside down=win(i know, I'm easily satisfied)
Under the Dome/ Looking forward to this The idea sounds very unique and interesting.

....and exhale