After the dismal failure of the Matthew McConaughey and Idris Elba-led 2017 film adaptation of Stephen King’s famed fantasy series “The Dark Tower,” things looked up when it was announced Amazon was developing a TV series based on the books.
In addition, they hired former “The Walking Dead” producer Glen Mazzara to serve as showrunner. Sadly though, just a few months ago, Amazon passed on picking up the pilot and the project has languished ever since.
Recently, Mazarra sat down with the The Kingcast podcast to discuss the series and why the story of young Roland in the fourth book “Wizard and Glass” was to be initially used for the adaptation:
“When we realized that the [film] franchise was not viable, or not going to continue, we decided we could now lay out the entire epic. Now we had a choice: do we go back and start with The Gunslinger? Do you start and tell the story in a linear way and then interrupt that narrative and have this large cutaway in your season 4 or season 5 to Wizard and Glass? That’s a viable option.
In terms of adapting the work, Mazzara says he feels it was important not to mess with the key moments from the novels:
“I had a rule with the writers that if something was really, really important that we were going to try to make canon work. There was never going to be a version where Roland did not shoot his mom. There was never going to be a version in which Susan lives. There was never going to a version in which Roland doesn’t drop Jake.”
Mazzara also goes into great detail about the pilot which had former British soap star Sam Strike as a young Roland Deschain and would show how he got his guns, his first conflict with the man in black (Jasper Paakkonen), his first love and his first mission as a gunslinger:
The story of the pilot is basically Roland in the desert. The man in black fled across the desert and the gunslinger followed. In this version he’s chasing Marten because Marten was with Gabrielle (Roland’s mother) and he’s vowed his revenge.
In the books, (Roland) gets his guns to kill Marten and then Marten sort of disappears from the narrative. So (Roland) chases Marten across the desert and ended up in Hambry. He meets Susan. In the pilot it’s the Feast of the Kissing Moon and she’s being presented to the mayor and she meets Roland on the road.
Roland goes into Traveler’s Rest. He has the scene where the Big Coffin Hunters trip Sheemie and Roland gets into a classic western stand-off. The ka-tet catches up and we have Cuthbert use the slingshot and he takes out one of the Big Coffin Hunters.
They go into the square and as they’re arguing, Roland explaining he’s there to find and kill Marten, Susan grabs him and they dance. They actually dance to a Flogging Molly tune, which I love. The Big Coffin Hunters come in and are chasing him through the square, but Roland sees Marten, so everything all collides in the end.”
Michael Rooker, Jerome Flynn and Joana Ribeiro also starred in the project which Amazon produced but felt was not on the level of the other large-scale elevated genre series also in the works at the streamer right now including adaptations of “The Lord of the Rings” and “Wheel of Time” series.
