Category: Cinema

Rejoice, Constant Readers.  At long last, Stephen King’s epic saga, The Dark Tower, is making the leap to the big screen, directed by Opie Cunningham himself, Ron Howard.  For those who don’t know, The Dark Tower is King’s magnum opus, the nexus of his entire body of work, with references to the Dark Tower sprinkled throughout the majority of his novels.  The task of adapting this behemoth to the screen (seven books clocking in at over a million words, not to mention several ancillary stories that may become part of the films) is going to make The Lord of the Rings look like a one-act play.

Many fans have heaped scorn upon the choice of Howard to direct (I guess they were hoping for Peter Jackson, Guillermo del Toro, or someone of that ilk).  I, for one, will withhold judgment until I see the final product.  Howard has made many solid films over the years, and for what it’s worth, he seems to have a deep passion for the project (he worked on it for a year before even presenting the idea to Stephen King)—and there is no way that King would let his baby go unless he was confident that Howard was going to do his books justice.  This is not Maximum Overdrive or Christine—The Dark Tower is the center of King’s entire literary universe, and he would not hand over the rights lightly.

The doubters claim that Howard’s body of work leaves no indication that he is capable of taking on a project like this, but was Peter Jackson in a much different position before he began work on Lord of the Rings?  And we all know how that turned out.  I’m intrigued by the way Howard has chosen to approach the material: a movie trilogy sandwiched around two television series that bridge the three films.  Such a concept is unprecedented in cinematic history; it will be interesting to see how it all shakes out.  It certainly gives the filmmakers latitude to flesh out more of the story than a strict film series would have provided.  I wonder, though, how much of the source material will need to be censored in the television series.  It would seem to be better suited for a premium channel, but then how many fans would follow it?  On the other hand, there have been a few network television miniseries over the years that have done a credible job with King’s work, so perhaps this can work as well.

The most important element of the production is going be the selection of the actor to play series protagonist Roland Deschain, a gunslinger in much the same vein as Clint Eastwood’s character from Sergio Leone’s classic series of spaghetti westerns, with a little bit of Arthurian regalness mixed in.  Howard has offered this critical part to Javier Bardem (I have to admit that I have trouble seeing him in this role, but he is an outstanding actor, so I will place my faith in Howard’s judgment).  At this point Bardem has yet to accept and there’s no guarantee that he will, for he would be required to commit a huge chunk of the next decade of his life to a single character on both the big and small screen—how many A-list actors would be willing to do that?  It could be that we end up with a relative unknown in the role, which might actually be preferable.

Regardless of the choices Howard makes as the project moves forward (and their inevitable dissection by the fan base), I look forward with great excitement to those first moments on the big screen when the Man in Black flees across the desert with the Gunslinger in hot pursuit.  And to borrow a phrase from the High Speech of Roland’s hometown of Gilead, I say thankee-sai.

Welcome, readers, to my inaugural post for Pop Cultural Capital.  Before we begin, introductions are in order—or, to borrow a quote from a certain thawed British spy, “Allow myself to introduce . . . myself.”  My name is Mike.  No, not that Mike, a different one.  I tend to go by Michael professionally, so to avoid confusion with the moderator of this blog, you can call me Michael.  When Mike (the other one) invited me to contribute to this blog, I wasn’t sure what my debut would be.  I thought about opening with some sort of list ranking my favorite films (as Mike can tell you, I’m quite fond of creating lists to rank different elements of pop culture; we’ve had many such discussions over the years—and I think we both saw a frightening amount of ourselves in the main character of High Fidelity).  But lists are easy, so I figured I would save that for a time when I can’t think of anything else to write.

Instead, I decided to begin my first contribution with a question that came to mind after seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1: should a work of fiction written as a single volume be split into two films for the purposes of including as much of the source material as possible?  This seems to be a growing trend in the film industry (Tolkien’s The Hobbit is getting the same treatment).  Some have argued that the decision to split the final Harry Potter (HP) book into two films was nothing more than a cynical cash grab by the studio.  While there is definitely some truth to this, let’s assume for the purpose of this piece that the filmmakers’ intentions were completely noble—to be as faithful as possible to the novel on which the films are based.

This raises another question: how important is it for a film to be completely faithful to its source material?  After all, the most critically acclaimed film in the HP series was Prisoner of Azkaban, which took several liberties with the novel, while the longest book in the series, Order of the Phoenix, was turned into the shortest film but still worked quite well in spite of all the source material that was excised.

Purists absolutely hate when a movie doesn’t follow a book to the letter.  Admittedly, I, too, have been annoyed on occasion when my favorite parts of books were not included in the film versions.  However, I recognize that movies are a different medium and have limitations that books don’t.  One prime example that comes to mind is Stanley Kubrick’s polarizing film version of Stephen King’s The Shining. On one side are fans of the novel who loathed Kubrick’s adaptation because of how badly it bastardized the original story.  On the opposite side are those of us who were able to look past the film’s glaring omissions and outright changes to appreciate it as one of the greatest horror movies ever made.  Years later, the fans who wanted a more faithful adaptation of The Shining got their wish when King endorsed a miniseries version that virtually followed the novel verbatim.  This version, however, paled in comparison to Kubrick’s masterpiece, proving that a faithful adaptation does not guarantee great cinema.

Does this mean that filmmakers should disregard the contents of the novel they are adapting?  Of course not.  The history of cinema is littered with the carcasses of awful films based on books (many of them, as it happens, from King’s oeuvre).  The trick is to find a happy balance between doing the book justice and making a compelling film—just because something works on the page does not mean it will translate to film.  Peter Jackson, for example, was smart enough to jettison the Tom Bombadil character from his film adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring.

Which brings me back to the latest HP flick.  I saw a good 30 minutes in Part 1 that probably could have been cut with no major loss to the story, particularly during the slow moving “camping” section of the film.  They also could have saved time by cutting the wedding scene (there was no point in introducing Bill Weasley at this stage of the series when he was completely omitted from the previous films).  This does not mean that it is a bad film (it’s well made and acted), but overall, as the first half of a single story, it is by necessity all buildup with no payoff (it basically plays as a 2.5-hour setup for the forthcoming Part II).  When paired with the final film, Part 1 will look much better, but as a standalone film, it doesn’t quite work.  Rather than ending with a compelling cliffhanger, the film basically just stops, as if you had closed a book after completing a chapter (with the knowledge that you can’t pick it up again for eight months).

“Who cares?” many HP fans say, “they’re not meant to be viewed as two separate films,” to which I would reply, “all the more reason why it should have been released as a single film.”  If all extraneous material had been excised from the novel, it’s certainly possible that The Deathly Hallows could have been presented as one long film clocking in at less than four hours, rather than an artificially split two-parter that will probably exceed five hours in combined length.

This brings us back to my original question: should a work of fiction written as a single volume be split into two films?  While splitting The Deathly Hallows did not quite work, this does not mean that it can’t be done.  I believe that a story structured with natural breaks (as in some King novels) might be adaptable to multiple films.  There’s also the option of altering a story’s structure, as Quentin Tarantino did with Kill Bill, which was originally scripted as one film but ultimately split into two volumes at the urging of the studio.  Tarantino’s talent for telling a story out of chronological order enabled each film to work both individually and as part of a whole.  Granted, Kill Bill was not a novel, but the concept is similar.

So, have I really provided a definitive answer to either of my questions?  No, but I hope you found the topic interesting nonetheless.  Anyway, I fear this post is getting rather long and in danger of devolving into a ramble (or perhaps I already crossed that line several paragraphs ago), so I’m going to end it here.  I suppose I should have taken my own advice and edited out some unnecessary material, or maybe [gulp] I should have split this post into two parts!

In closing, I’d like to thank Mike and Paul for inviting me to contribute to this cool blog, and hopefully, if I haven’t bored you to death by this point, you’ll stick around to read my future posts.  Until then, may the force be with you (sorry, I couldn’t discuss pop culture for this long without making at least one Star Wars reference).