Can Anyone Save the Dark Tower?

        The Dark Tower series by Stephen King is an epic quest for redemption: Roland Deschain, the gunslinger, travels through time and other worlds to save the Dark Tower, and his own soul in the process.  He is the ultimate anti-hero - his ka-tet (quest-mates, if you like) start the journey as hostages, but become much more than mere friends.  It is impossible not to hate him a lot of the time - he does unspeakable things, yet speaks of them with no emotion.  But he is actually a loving man with a fragile soul and a desperate need for forgiveness. This series, the crown jewel of Stephen King's extensive canon, incorporates elements of old western movies and stories, along with the magical fantasy of Tolkein's Lord of the Rings.  Pop culture allusions abound - from the 1960s ("Hey Jude" pours out of jukeboxes at various points throughout the series) to the 2000s (a golden snitch from the Harry Potter books saves the characters at one point).  The story plays with the ideas of meta-fiction along with various philosophical ideas, such as the concept of Eternal Return, resurrected in the western world by Friedrich Nietzsche.  In other words, it is a complete hodge-podge of awesomeness - to say that adapting these books for the screen would be a difficult undertaking is a gross under-exaggeration.  It would be damn near impossible to convey every wrinkle in the fabric of this masterpiece.  Which is why the films have never been made.  There wasn't much talk of it even, until the past few years.
        In 2009 I, along with millions of others, rejoiced to hear that J.J. Abrams (director of the hit show Lost and the recent Star Trek movie) had bought the rights to the series for nineteen dollars and was planning to adapt it into a television series.  Nineteen is a number of great importance to the story, so I thought that was really cool.  He had announced that he was planning on getting started after Lost was all wrapped up.  Alas, less than a year later he announced that he was scrapping the project.  Disappointment abounded among fans of the Dark Tower series everywhere.  Until the next year, when the venture got picked up by Ron Howard, Brian Grazer and Akiva Goldsman.  They have decided to turn the books into a combination movie and television series.  Something that has never been done before.  So the seven books would be adapted into 3 films which would be bridged by 2 television miniseries in between each.  An amazing concept, which has proven difficult to shop to studios.  

        Ron Howard's home studio, Universal Pictures, deemed the project too risky and expensive a while ago.  Yesterday afternoon it was announced that Warner Bros. also passed.  I was very sad to hear it, but placated by Howard's attitude toward continuing efforts to make the Dark Tower series into movies.  Entertainment Weekly's website reported that "Howard remains somewhat optimistic, invoking the Dark Tower's term for "destiny" and its philosophy that fate keeps leading one in similar directions until a lesson is learned.  As fans expressed sorrow that his project seemed to be coming to an end, the director tweeted, 'Don't give up on us yet.  Ka is a wheel.'"  That floored me, because it tells me that Ron Howard gets it.  These books are special - hard to explain, difficult to define, so far-reaching in plot and setting, but with characters that are so rich and textured that they remind you of people you know.  I have to see this story on screen before I die.  So an idea that has been touted by many fellow bloggers of late, is one that I have also adopted as the ultimate solution.  Three words: Home Box Office.  HBO has done a fantastic job with another literary masterpiece, Game of Thrones.  That series is only up to six books and has a cast of over a thousand characters; a sweeping epic like the Dark Tower would do very well as an HBO series, I think.  Well, it seems like the fate of the story is in good hands with Ron Howard, for now.  In the story, someone gives the gunslinger very good advice at one point: "Let the word and the legend go before you.  There are those who will carry both."  Hopefully Ron Howard is one of those.