Stephen King answers your questions in a not-very-satisfying way.
One of the commenters made a good point - who will Clint Howard play? I vote Sheemie.
All I know is that Zoe Saldana needs to play Susannah/Odetta/Detta Walker/Dean.
There’s no way she’s pulling off Detta. Too much of a lightweight.
What does that even mean? She has the acting chops to pull it off, and she’s the right age. Plus she can act through digital rigging crap, which she’d have to wear Gary Sinise-style for the digital leg removal.
At this point I’m just hoping Tom Hanks doesn’t play Roland.
Frost/Nixon? A Beautiful Mind? I definitely agree that he’s not even remotely the right director for this project, but I think it’s a bit extreme to say that he’s done nothing good in the past fifteen years. IMO, I guess.
Disclosure: I’m one of those people who thinks that the Gunslinger series took a headfirst dive into Crapsville (population: Stephen King!) around the time that Wizard and Glass came out (though there were signs of the rough road ahead in the book before that one). I stopped reading them after that, and after the awfulness that was the Black House, I stopped reading Stephen King entirely.
The first book is still my favorite thing that King has written, though. I’d love to see just that book, as directed by Guillermo del Toro.
I hated A Beautiful Mind. Frost/Nixon is hard to fully credit to Howard and his team given it was already an excellent stage play. Fact remains, I haven’t really truly liked a Ron Howard film since Apollo 13.
Release date for the first movie is apparently set:
Ron Howard’s Dark Tower adaptation will make history, as he and Universal are bringing together a movie trilogy and tv series based on Stephen King’s much loved novels/comics. And now wed have a release date. The first of the trilogy is set for release on Friday, May 17, 2013.
Just a little bit of a wait then! But it could really be worth it. Apparently the plan is to start with the first film in the trilogy and link the following films with a season of Tv episodes between them. This epic undertaking has drawn comparison to Peter Jackson’s work on LOTR, and Howard acknowledges and invites it…
May 17, 2013 = 5/17/2013 = 5 + 1 + 7 + 2 + 0 + 1 + 3 = 19. I’m just sayin’.
If that 19 reference is intentional on the part of Howard, I feel a little better about the project.
Time to start the armchair-quarterbacking on the casting. Roland needs to be played by someone who’s handsome but not pretty, a Viggo Mortensen type but younger. Andrew Lincoln from Walking Dead is the guy.
Why younger? I always got the impression that Roland is way older than he looks, but he isn’t exactly a spring chicken in the face either. As the series goes on he reads older and older as well. Roland is basically Clint Eastwood anyway, and that guy never looked young. My roomate is convinced that Mickey Roorke should do it, which I think is looney toons.
I like Casey Affleck for Eddie Dean though. Ed Harris could make a good Roland.
Fuck Ron Howard directing this thing. I just don’t think he has the balls for how grizzly the series is, and how goofy it can be right after. I mean, friggin’ Detta is just ridiculous, yet somehow King makes it work. I’ve been reading through it the last couple of months, and haven’t finished yet, but I just think he’s the wrong guy.
I’m sorry, but this calls for caps: [B]ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NO.
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I like Casey Affleck for Eddie Dean though.
You know, that’s a pretty good suggestion, for the way Eddie acts about 90% of the time. How intense can Casey be?
Ed Harris could make a good Roland.
I think he’d do better as Roland’s father in the flashback stuff.
Fuck Ron Howard directing this thing. I just don’t think he has the balls for how grizzly the series is, and how goofy it can be right after.
Yea, it’s a fine balance, and the source material goes from one extreme to the other pretty regularly. I would almost like to see two directors with distinctive styles collaborating on this thing, to help make sure the horror is horrible, the humor is dark and wretched, and the cheese kept to a minimum, in terms of screen cheese. Much of King’s horror work translates so poorly because what works in print starts to feel silly on screen when the horrors are put out in the daylight.
I mean, friggin’ Detta is just ridiculous, yet somehow King makes it work. I’ve been reading through it the last couple of months, and haven’t finished yet, but I just think he’s the wrong guy.
The problem with bringing Detta to screen may be trying to make her menacing, while at the same time portraying her as the poster child for blackspoitation caricatures that Eddie recognizes her to be sometime during the Drawing of the Three. Her dialogue is outright funny at times, but what might sound corny to modern ears (Eddie’s modern ears), are sincere accusations, insults and threats aimed at Roland and Eddie. Although she’s used for a dark comic effect quite frequently, the tension needs to remain constant, and taut.
She is actively trying to murder the both of them every moment she is resisting them, not just because she wants to be difficult, but because she wants them to fucking die. This needs to be played up to the point where potentially folksy words like ‘honkey’ aren’t getting in the way of the portrayal of her truly bloodthirsty intentions.
This shit isn’t like some buddy cop drama, where the good guy and bad guy happily team up to help thwart some bigger threat. She wants to shoot them in the balls and let the crabs rip their mutilated bodies apart.
RE: Casey Affleck
Have you seen the Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford? Any doubts as to his acting chops can be pretty safely de-railed by a viewing of that excellent excellent movie.
Come to think of it, Andrew Dominik would make a fine director for this surely ill-advised adaption.
I haven’t seen that movie yet. The title was so long it sounded like there would be too much dialogue in the movie and it turned me off (I was actually kinda sick of seeing Brad Pitt movies so frequently around that point in time). I’ll add it to my Netflix queue.
I’m warming up to Casey, he definitely has the look too.
Roland should be a Clive Owen-type. Requirements are thousand-yard stare, tall, thin/gaunt, ability to get really fucking angry some of the time while being dead cool and distant the rest.
Man, I should lose twenty pounds and try out for this.
H.
Andrew Lincoln is a realistic pick. None of the other names we’ve listed so far are, because whoever signs on for this will be signing away basically three to five years of his life (movie - television season - movie - television seasons - movie). I’m actually kind of afraid that the casting for this…thing that they’re doing is going to be constrained by the demands that they’ll be making of their actors. Marvel was having a hard enough time signing names to multi-film deals with gaps in between.
Timothy Olyphant might be able to pull it off… his look isn’t right though. Too bad Clint Eastwood is so old. I always sort of felt that Roland was kind of built out of an idea that started from him.
Roland was modeled after Eastwood’s Man-with-no-name, at least initially.
I think the role is going to require someone with a deeper voice than Olyphant’s, someone with a bit more gravitas.
Roland’s older than most of the actors being suggested. He appears to be in at least his late 40s or so according to the descriptions of him in the book.
I’ve got IT!!! Bruce Willis.