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That's even sillier. Stephen King wrote The Dark Tower by himself, every word, every line of dialogue. Comparing that to the gargantuan undertaking that is the creation of a major motion picture (and after watching that new EIII documentary, it's clear that the shooting script is about 5% of the storytelling process in a Star Wars film, for good or ill) is incredibly reductive and quite silly. If Stephen King doesn't end up writing these additional stories in The Dark Tower saga, to me personally, they aren't canon. The Star Wars novels (to modify your original comparison into a less silly form) are obviously not canon. If Lucas decided to show Han on Kashyyk, he easily could have, and totally demolish a whole bunch of EU continuity.
Dark Tower is obviously a slippier slope. Who came up with the story's detail? How much did King have to do with it? If he ends up not writing the final dialogue, it will probably be a bit like my experience reading Ultimate X-Men as drawn by the Kuberts. At that time, Millar was also putting out The Authority as drawn by Quitely. So I tended to imagine the UXM stories as if he was drawing them as well (for example, that splash page where Magneto chucks a train at the X-Men). If anyone else ends up writing the dialogue (and no, I can't think of anyone who'd do a decent job, mainly because King doesn't really have a concrete style as far as dialogue goes. The King Style mostly manifests itself in the prose; the one sentence paragraph at the end of a section, to name one effective example. Chances are there won't be too much narration. I hope there won't be, at least.) I'll probably just try and dig out the kernel of the story, that he presumably provided, and try to suss out exactly how rad it might've been had he written it.
Honestly, it all boils down to this being a very specific instance. The Dark Tower is not a fantasy series with off camera events that could easily be filled in later by anyone. ("Like that bounty hunter we ran into in Ord Mandell.") Jericho Hill, for example, was only touched on, but it was done that way deliberately, not to leave the door open for a Bill Willingham mini-series. The Little Sisters Of Eluria, which I suppose would be the best example of what this is supposed to be, was a short story written by King and thus, is very clearly what he visualized happening to these characters.
A mini-series merely conceived by him is just that, merely an idea of what an actual Dark Tower story telling those events could be.
The Dark Tower is not The Wheel Of Time or The Lord Of The Rings. King did not, before starting the novels, craft elaborate back story notes that anyone could fill in after he died. Everything (quite obviously) grew organically over the course of writing the novels and thus any disruption of that organic process pretty clearly seperates it from The Dark Tower proper.
Has anyone else who's read the books make this clearer to those who haven't? Because, having read the books, it's blindingly obvious to me, so I can't be certain I'm doing the best job at clarifying my position. |
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