Road To The Dark Tower Turns Toward HBO

Speaking with MTV News at the "Tower Heist", Brian Grazer revealed that "The Dark Tower" is still very much on track.  In fact, HBO has come on board. 

This is from the MTV Movie Blog. 

Labels: , , ,

9 comments:

  1. lazlo azavaarOctober 25, 2011 at 2:20 PM

    I do hope they "do it right". I'm pulling for them to do it right.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Bryant BurnetteOctober 25, 2011 at 8:58 PM

    I suspect that somewhere in all this, everyone is going to come to their senses and realize that the ENTIRE THING needs to be done as an HBO series. The movies would need to be massively rated R, and as expensive as they'll be, I'm not sure ANY studio is going to bankroll them.

    HBO, now ... they love their gore, and they love their naughty words, and they love their boobies. There was lots of all of that on display in this past Sunday's episode of "Boardwalk Empire," for example. There was a scalping; a SCALPING, for Gan's sake!

    ReplyDelete
  3. AnonymousOctober 25, 2011 at 10:09 PM

    I thought STARZ did a good job with Pillars of the Earth. But honestly, it would have been much closer to the book if HBO had done it. I do hope dark tower sticks close to the original story. No combining of characters, that gets annoying.

    I wonder if they might start with scenes from books 2, then do black flashes, since a lot of not actually accomplished in terms of the story in the first book.

    david

    ReplyDelete
  4. Bryant BurnetteOctober 25, 2011 at 10:31 PM

    Not a lot is accomplished in the first book? I can't agree with that even a little bit; plenty happens in "The Gunslinger":

    (1) Roland has to kill an entire town due to the fact that the Man In Black has poisoned their minds against him
    (2) Roland meets Jake; the two of them survive a nightmarish brush with slow mutants, and then later Roland consciously allows Jake to fall to his death
    (3) Roland sexes up a demon, an act which has MAJOR consequences in books 5-7
    (4) in flashback, Roland wins his guns by besting Cort using David the hawk
    (5) Roland finally catches the Man In Black and gets from him the information he needs ... sort of.

    Without "The Gunslinger" as its beginning point, "The Dark Tower" doesn't work; or, at least, it would be GREATLY changed. If you don't know how big a bastard Roland is, how capable he is of utter ruthlessness when it comes to anything standing between him and the Tower, then the events of "The Drawing of the Three" have nowhere near as much meaning.

    Ugh; no way can you give "The Gunslinger" short shrift. You could lose about 500 pages out of "Wolves of the Calla" and not miss a lot of it, but when it comes to "The Gunslinger" -- which establishes the universe, the main character, the stakes for the story overall, and the tone for the rest of the series -- it would be a MASSIVE mistake to stray too far from the source material.

    I suspect this is a big part of the reason why the movies have had trouble getting financed, by the way. I can picture the executive at Universal trying to wrap their minds around a big-budget summer tentpole film in which the "hero" gives a preacher woman an abortion with a gunbarrel, then fucks a demons, and then purposefully kills a child, with the movie's big climax being a thirty-minute scene in which the villain talks to the hero about the nature of the universe.

    That ain't gonna sell much popcorn.

    And that's why HBO would be eminently better-suited to this sort of thing.

    ReplyDelete
  5. AnonymousOctober 25, 2011 at 11:19 PM

    A lot of Gunslinger is . . . strange. It is a short work, with a lot of flashbacks. yes, the stuff with Jake is important. But the things that happen in gunslinger are chracter development. Even TUll is more about character than it drives the story forward.

    I never did completely understand the ending. it ends with. . . a chat.

    Now, Wolves was AWESOME! One of my favorites. But I had to battle my way through the Gunslinger. Glad I did, but it is not an easy read.

    I do agree with you,Bryant; it would be a huge mistake for the movies to get too far away from the source matereal.

    David

    ReplyDelete
  6. Bryant BurnetteOctober 26, 2011 at 1:23 PM

    I like "Wolves of the Calla" a lot, but it doesn't do a whole heck of a lot to move the overall story along. It's kinda of like this fun little interlude in the pursuit of the Tower, but unless I'm just forgetting some things, nothing of massive consequence happens until Susannah abandons the ka-tet.

    Personally, I won't mind changes to the books as long as the ending -- the VERY end, I mean -- of the seventh book is retained. The movies, or series, can and should be their own thing. I'll just do what I'm currently doing with the comics: reading them as if they are sequels rather than adaptations.

    I'll also be curious to see to what extent both "The Little Sisters of Eluria" and "The Wind Through the Keyhole" -- and, for that matter, the comics -- get utilized in all of this. It would probably be very doable to combine "The Little Sisters of Eluria" and "The Gunslinger" into one story somehow.

    ReplyDelete
  7. AnonymousOctober 26, 2011 at 1:27 PM

    So . . . you liked the VERY end ? Wow, I must differ. But can't loudly here, because it is a giant spoiler. david

    ReplyDelete
  8. Bryant BurnetteOctober 26, 2011 at 1:40 PM

    It's a perfect ending. I literally got the shivers from it and had to sit there thinking about it for a few minutes.

    I'm less fond of the ultimate confrontation with the Crimson King. That was ... saying it was anticlimactic is maybe being a bit too generous. So if they decide to make some changes to that, I'd be okay with it. All the Patrick Danville stuff is going to be awfully difficult to do anyways, especially without having "Insomnia" to provide context. They will run into similar problems with the notion of breakers without having "Hearts In Atlantis" or "Black House" or "Everything's Eventual" there for context.

    Bottom line is, everything after Book 3 is going to present massive difficulty in adaptation. It can be done, I think; but it's not going to be easy.

    ReplyDelete
  9. William MalmborgOctober 26, 2011 at 2:46 PM

    I would love to see this on HBO as well. I've always been impressed with their mini-series and loved what they did with A Game of Thrones. There were times when watching that where I could follow along in the book, which doesn't happen too often with written works put on screen.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)