Books vs. film · what the 2017 film took, changed and dropped

Books vs. Film

Twelve moments the books spent seven volumes building, set beside what ninety-five minutes made of them.

The film does not open where Book I opens. It opens after Book VII closes. The Horn of Eld, which Roland left in the dust at Jericho Hill and gets back only on the last page of the saga, when the Tower sends him round again, is already in his gunna, by the makers’ account and the set photographs, when the film begins. Akiva Goldsman proposed the device to King; King agreed, cut Roland’s dialogue down himself, and in May 2016 tweeted a photo of the Horn lying in ash captioned “LAST TIME AROUND”. The director, Nikolaj Arcel, called the result “not so much an adaptation as a continuation”. On that reading, which fans have numbered the nineteenth turn of the wheel, every departure from the page is a difference the loop allows.

What the framing buys is licence. A Jake who walks into Mid-World alive instead of falling into a chasm, a Roland with ten fingers, a man in black who is shot rather than eaten: none of it contradicts the books if this is a new cycle. What it costs is that the film never says so. No line mentions the loop, Gan, the Beams’ Guardians or a previous Roland, and the Horn itself is so hard to find on screen that a careful reviewer never saw it. A viewer who has not read the books (King put them at “about 3,000 pages”) sees a ninety-five-minute Western that skips the West; a reader sees a sequel to a story the audience has not been shown.

The table below lists thirty things the film does and names the book and part each comes from, with what changed and why it matters. The twelve pairs that follow set the page beside the screen: the book’s version on the left is painted from King’s text, the film’s version on the right from the production’s designs, never from any performer’s face. Where the film changed something, the caption says so; where it kept something, the caption says that too.

What it kept

The nouns survive. Roland Deschain, last gunslinger of Gilead, carrying two revolvers and a dead father’s creed; Jake Chambers, eleven, of New York, who draws what he dreams; Walter, called Padick and o’Dim, the man in black. Mid-World, the Beams, the Tower at the centre of everything. A Devar-Toi, taheen, a Dixie Pig, a Sayre, a Pimli, a Tirana, a Manni village. The number nineteen on Jake’s bedroom wall. And the opening line, spoken over Jake’s dream, word for word: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” King insisted on it; apart from the creed, it is the one sentence of the books the film speaks whole.

Three shapes survive too. From Book I: a man in black, a gunslinger behind him, a desert between, and a boy from New York who turns up in the sand. From Book III: a boy in New York whose drawings and dreams the adults explain away, and a condemned house in Brooklyn that is really a door, guarded by a thing made of the house. From Books V and VII: children taken for their minds, a facility where that power is turned against the Beams, a restaurant in Manhattan full of things wearing human faces, and a door in its basement.

And the creed survives, in full. Cort’s catechism, which Roland recites to Susannah in Book III and Jake gives back in Book V, is the film’s spine: Roland and his father speak it together in Jake’s dream of the battlefield, Roland teaches it to Jake in New York, and Jake recites it into Roland’s mind in the climax. It is the film’s main use of King’s language, and its best idea.

What it changed

Jake lives. In Book I he dies under a car in 1977 and wakes at the way station; in Book III he is drawn back through a door marked THE BOY, with a key, while a plaster demon tries to eat him. The film sends him through a keypad portal in the same house, alive, with no key, no death and no fall, so Roland never chooses the Tower over the boy. His family goes with it: Elmer the network executive and the housekeeper Greta Shaw become a fireman father dead a year and a stepfather, and his mother Laurie, a minor adulteress in Book III, is burned by Walter so nothing holds Jake in New York. His “touch” becomes “shine”, a word carried in from The Shining.

Walter changes genus. The books’ man in black talks: he deals cards at the golgotha, raises Nort in Tull, comes to Roland’s mother as Marten, and dies in Book VII when Mordred makes him tear out his own eyes. The film’s Walter kills with two words, “Stop breathing”, catches bullets, suffocates Steven Deschain in Roland’s arms, and dies, if he dies, by a trick shot in which a second bullet strikes the first and bends its path. Palaver becomes a duel.

The machinery changes scale. The Devar-Toi of Book VII is a college town under a false sun where some three hundred adult telepaths take their pills and erode the Beams by thinking; the pills are refined from the brains of the Calla’s children, which is the horror of Book V. The film folds those two into one image, children strapped into a chair inside a black pyramid on a mesa, firing a visible column of light at a visible Tower. Taheen, who have animal heads in the books, are merged with the can-toi, who wear living masks, so the guards wear a seam behind the ear. Sayre, who runs Sombra and dies to Susannah’s gun in Fedic, becomes Walter’s lieutenant and dies to Roland’s.

Roland changes least and most. Both hands whole, the beach of Book II being wanted for a sequel; no hat because, King said, the studio believed hatted Westerns underperform; two bright engraved revolvers with light wood grips instead of sandalwood and, by the books’ lore, steel from Arthur Eld’s own sword. The Tower, which he reaches and climbs in Book VII, is a spire on the horizon he never walks toward.

What it dropped

Most of the cast. Eddie Dean and Susannah, drawn through the doors of Book II and promised for a sequel never made. Oy, replaced by a raccoon in a television commercial. Blaine the Mono and the riddling that ends Book III and opens Book IV. Mejis and Susan Delgado, Cort and Cuthbert and Alain, Gilead and its fall, all of which were to be a television series. Father Callahan, the Calla and the Wolves. Mordred. Patrick Danville. Stephen King, a character in Books VI and VII. The Crimson King, reduced to a slogan on a wall and an employer never seen.

Most of the first book. Tull, the way station, the oracle, the slow mutants, the palaver at the golgotha and the boy’s fall are all gone; the Mohaine Desert stays, but Jake crosses it rather than Roland.

And the ending. Book VII sends Jake to his third death on a Maine road, Susannah through a drawn door into a New York where Eddie never touched heroin, and Roland alone through the Tower’s door and back to the desert. The film ends with the Tower mended, the children freed, and Roland and Jake stepping through a portal to Mid-World together, which is on no page of the books, and which the Horn, if you can find it, is meant to excuse.

Alignment

Thirty things the film did, and where each came from

Film element	Source book	What changed	Why it matters
The Horn of Eld in Roland’s gunna	VII, Coda	Books: dropped at Jericho Hill, regained only for the next turn of the wheel. Film: carried from the first scene, and barely visible.	The whole “continuation” claim hangs on one prop.
The loop	VII, Coda	Implied by the Horn and the “LAST TIME AROUND” marketing; never stated on screen.	Readers see loop nineteen; everyone else sees a reboot.
The opening line	I, Part I	Spoken as narration over Jake’s dream; then Jake, not Roland, crosses the desert.	King’s sentence survives; the book it opens does not.
Jake as the way in	I, Part II; III, Book One	Books: Jake dies into Mid-World, then is drawn through a magic door with a key. Film: walks through a machine portal, alive.	No sacrifice at the trestle, no paradox, no “other worlds than these.”
Jake’s family	I, Part II; III, Book One	Books: Elmer the network executive, Laurie, the housekeeper Greta Shaw. Film: a fireman father dead a year, a stepfather, a mother Walter burns.	Grief replaces neglect; Laurie’s death frees Jake to leave.
Jake’s gift	III–VII	“The touch” becomes “shine”, a word borrowed from The Shining.	Ties Jake to the Breakers plot by renaming King’s own device.
The Dutch Hill house	III, Book One	Books: a plaster demon that is the house guards a door marked THE BOY. Film: the demon guards a keypad portal said to be Walter’s.	Magic becomes machinery; the key is gone.
Walter’s name	VII, Part Two	The film uses “Walter Padick”, the birth name Book VII reveals, alongside “o’Dim”; no Marten, no Flagg.	A deep-cut signal aimed at readers.
Walter’s magic	I, Parts I and V; IV; VII	Books: a trickster who deals cards, raises the dead and talks. Film: kills with “Stop breathing”, catches bullets, throws Roland about a gun shop.	Palaver becomes a duel.
Steven Deschain’s death	IV (recalled); the comics	Books: off the page, and not at Walter’s hand. Film: suffocated by Walter in Roland’s arms.	Invents a revenge motive for a quest that was never about revenge.
The creed	I; III, Book One; V	Roland and his father recite Cort’s catechism; Roland teaches it to Jake; Jake gives it back in the climax.	The film’s main use of King’s language.
Roland’s revolvers	I; IV	Books: sandalwood grips and, by the books’ lore, steel from Arthur Eld’s sword. Film: engraved bright-steel revolvers with light wood grips, no origin given.	Faithful in silhouette, not in lore.
Roland’s right hand	II, Prologue	Books: a lobstrosity takes two fingers on the first morning. Film: both hands whole; the beach was wanted for a sequel.	The maiming shapes how book-Roland shoots for six volumes.
Roland’s hat	I–VII, by King’s own account	Gone; King said the studio believed hatted Westerns underperform, and hoped a sequel would put one on him.	The most visible costume departure.
Gilead and its fall	IV; VII	Reduced to an unnamed battlefield and Steven’s death; no Cort, Cuthbert or Alain, and Jericho Hill never named.	Held back for a television series that never came.
The Mohaine Desert	I, Part I	Jake crosses it, dying of thirst; no Tull, no way station, no mule.	The book’s landscape with the wrong traveller in it.
The Breakers	VII, Part Two; V	Books: adult telepaths pampered in a campus prison, dosed with pills made from Calla children. Film: children strapped into a machine.	One scene explains the threat; the moral texture goes with it.
The Devar-Toi	VII, Part Two	Books: a college town under a false sun in Thunderclap. Film: a black pyramid on a mesa firing a visible beam.	Visual shorthand for an invisible process.
The Beams	III, Book One; VII	Books: six Beams with named Guardians, failing over centuries. Film: six spokes of light on a spire that is struck from a pyramid.	The cosmology survives as an emblem.
Pimli and Tirana	VII	Books: Pimli Prentiss is the Devar-Toi’s Master, the man who kills Eddie; Tirana a low woman at the Dixie Pig. Film: two technicians at the machine.	Names kept, roles shrunk.
Sayre	V–VII	Books: Richard Sayre of Sombra, who presides over Mordred’s birth and is shot by Susannah in Fedic. Film: Walter’s enforcer, shot by Roland.	Promoted to henchman, demoted in menace.
Taheen and can-toi	VI–VII	Books: animal-headed taheen and rat-headed low men in living masks. Film: one race, called taheen, wearing the low men’s seam.	The ear seam is the film’s tell.
The Dixie Pig	VI; VII, Part One	Books: a Manhattan restaurant of vampires and low men with a door to Fedic, and Callahan’s last stand. Film: Walter’s base, a portal to the Devar-Toi, and still full of vampires.	Kept nearly intact; the priest is missing.
Walter’s death	VII, Part Two	Books: Mordred makes him tear out his own eyes and eats him. Film: a trick shot with no counterpart in the novels.	The director later said that, for him, Walter did not die.
The Crimson King	VII, Part Five	Books: on the Tower’s balcony, erased by Patrick save his eyes. Film: graffiti and an unseen master.	The saga’s last enemy reduced to a slogan.
The Manni and Arra	V; VI	Books: Henchick’s clan in blue cloaks, with plumb bobs and magnets; “Arra” is a name from the comics. Film: a grass-valley village with a seer.	The film’s clearest borrowing from Book V.
The number nineteen	I (Tull); V–VII	Books: Tull’s trigger word, then the tet’s omen. Film: a bedroom wall of 19s, a darts total, a portal code.	King’s motif becomes a keypad password.
The red tear in the sky	IV; V	Books: thinnies that sing, and todash darkness. Film: a red breach over the city, never named.	Shown, not explained.
The Tower itself	VII, Part Five; Coda	Books: reached, climbed, a door marked FOUND. Film: a distant spire, struck and then mended; nobody travels toward it.	The quest without the destination.
Oy	III–VII	Replaced by a raccoon in a television commercial and a joke.	The one cut the books would resent most.

Paired frames

The book’s version, the film’s version

The opening

Painted frame: The gunslinger follows — **The gunslinger follows** Book I, Part I. Roland crosses the Mohaine Desert on foot behind a dying mule bought in Pricetown, burning devil-grass at night and reading the cold ash of his quarry’s fires; the sun no longer sets quite due west. The book’s first sentence is the whole chase: “The man in black fled across the desert, and the gunslinger followed.” The film keeps the sentence, as narration, and gives the desert to someone else.

Painted frame: Six beams and a spire — **Six beams and a spire** The film’s first image of the Tower: a slim dark spire at the centre of everything, six pale beams radiating from it like spokes, under a sky about to go red. In the books the Beams are felt in the lean of trees and the run of clouds, and seen only at the last, flowing from the Tower’s summit; the film makes them a diagram you can hit. A title card explains that a child’s mind can bring it down.

Jake’s entry

Painted frame: The way station — **The way station** Book I, Part II. Sixteen days into the desert and out of water, Roland sees a figure in black at a far building and faints in its barn. It is a boy. Jake Chambers, a schoolboy pushed into traffic in 1977 Manhattan, has woken in this abandoned way station and hidden from a priest in black who passed through without drinking. He revives the gunslinger with water from a pump that still works, and the two leave together.

Painted frame: A door onto a desert — **A door onto a desert** The film sends Jake through the Dutch Hill house of Book III instead: behind the demon is a lit steel room, a keypad, and a doorway that opens on white hardpan. He crosses the desert the book gave Roland, nearly dies of thirst, and finds the gunslinger asleep by a fire. Nobody dies to get him there, which is the point and the cost: Roland never has to let him fall.

The man in black

Painted frame: Palaver at the golgotha — **Palaver at the golgotha** Book I, Part V. In a bone-strewn place between the mountains and the sea, the man in black builds a fire, conjures a rabbit and shows his face: handsome, and younger than Roland expected. He reads Roland’s future in a deck part Tarot and part his own, the Prisoner, the Lady of Shadows, the Tower, and talks until Roland sleeps. “Only enemies speak the truth”, he says. In the books Walter’s weapon is a conversation.

Painted frame: A sorcerer in a doorway — **A sorcerer in a doorway** The film’s Walter does not palaver. In a slim black coat with a high collar he walks through New York unhurried, lets himself into Jake’s apartment, eats the family’s chicken, kills the stepfather with a word and burns the mother after she shows him the drawings. “Stop breathing” is nearly his whole vocabulary of magic. The books’ trickster is gone; what remains is a killer who happens to be witty.

The creed

Painted frame: Cort’s yard — **Cort’s yard** Book I, Part IV, told again in Book IV. Roland is fourteen when he challenges Cort, the scarred teacher of Gilead’s apprentice gunslingers, years early, with a hawk for a weapon, and ends standing over the old man with his own ironwood stick: “I yield, gunslinger.” The creed the film quotes is Cort’s catechism. Roland recites it to Susannah in Book III, and Jake recites it in Book V.

Painted frame: The lesson in New York — **The lesson in New York** In the film the catechism is the plot. Roland and his father speak it together in Jake’s dream of the battlefield; Roland, who has not said it since his father died, teaches it to Jake in New York after the boy has seen what happened to his mother; and Jake, strapped into the machine, recites it into Roland’s mind for the final shot. It is the film’s best borrowing.

Roland’s hand

Painted frame: The first morning of Book II — **The first morning of Book II** Book II, Prologue. Roland wakes on the beach of the Western Sea with the tide on his legs. A four-foot thing with claws, a serrated beak and a scorpion’s tail comes out of the surf asking “Did-a-chick? Dum-a-chum?” and, while his wet shells misfire, takes the first two fingers of his right hand and most of a toe. He kills it with a rock and packs the stumps with tobacco. He shoots left-handed for the rest of the books.

Painted frame: Ten fingers, two guns — **Ten fingers, two guns** The film’s gunslinger has all ten fingers and uses them: he reloads engraved, bright-finished revolvers at speed and fires one in each hand. King and the director both wanted the beach and its lobstrosities for a sequel built on the second book. That sequel was never made, so this Roland stays whole, and six volumes of a man relearning his trade with a ruined hand never begin.

The doorkeeper

Painted frame: The house is the keeper — **The house is the keeper** Book III, Book One, “Door and Demon.” Jake has followed a dream and a dare to a condemned mansion on Dutch Hill in Brooklyn. Inside is a hall of small bones and a door marked THE BOY, and the house itself wakes to stop him: plaster hands, jagged wooden teeth, dust pouring from a mouth in the wall. The doorkeeper is not in the house; the doorkeeper is the house. Jake turns the key, and Roland’s arm comes through.

Painted frame: A demon for a machine — **A demon for a machine** The film keeps the house, the borough and the demon, now a towering thing of floorboards, lath and plaster that assembles itself from the building to bar the way. What it guards has changed: not a magic door opened with a key but a lit steel portal chamber with a keypad, said to be Walter’s, dialled with the number nineteen. The scariest chapter of Book III becomes a set piece on the way to the plot.

The Breakers

Painted frame: Blue Heaven’s lawn — **Blue Heaven’s lawn** Book VII, Part Two. The Breakers are grown men and women, some three hundred of them, telepaths lured by advertisements or simply taken, and kept in comfort at Algul Siento: five dormitories, green lawns, a false sun on a timer, a cinema, dozens of pills a day. They erode the Beams by sitting in armchairs and thinking. The pills are refined from the brains of children taken from the Calla, which is the horror of Book V.

Painted frame: Children in the chair — **Children in the chair** The film merges the Breakers with the Calla’s harvested children: the ones taken through its portals are children with “shine”, strapped into a chair whose metal plates close around the skull while their power is drawn out as light and fired at the Tower. It is one image where the books have two, and it is efficient. It also makes the villainy obvious, where Book VII’s horror is a prison that looks like a nice college.

The Devar-Toi

Painted frame: A campus in Thunderclap — **A campus in Thunderclap** Book VII, Part Two. From a cave on the butte of Steek-Tete, the ka-tet looks down on the Devar-Toi, also called Blue Heaven: blue-tiled roofs, lawns, a Queen Anne house with the Study in it, a main street with a bakery and a theatre, all fenced and watch-towered and lit by an atomic sun in the one patch of light in Thunderclap’s poisoned dark. It is a prison built to look like a pleasant American college town.

Painted frame: A pyramid on a mesa — **A pyramid on a mesa** The film’s Devar-Toi is a flat-topped mesa in a wasteland with a too-perfect pastel suburb on top, where children play on lawns until their wristbands beep and they are led into a black stepped pyramid. From the pyramid a column of light fires at the sky and the Tower cracks. The books’ idea, that the Beams are being broken by thought, becomes a weapon you can point at, which is easier to film and easier to destroy.

The Dixie Pig

Painted frame: Callahan’s last stand — **Callahan’s last stand** Book VII, Part One. Father Callahan, the priest of ’Salem’s Lot, climbs onto a table in a Manhattan restaurant full of low men, taheen and vampires, holds up an ivory turtle that freezes the lesser ones, and sends Jake on to find Susannah. When the Grandfathers come out from behind the tapestry his cross blazes, and then light pours from his bare hands. He dies by his own gun, under his chin, saying “Hile, Roland. Hile, gunslinger.”

Painted frame: Shooting through the restaurant — **Shooting through the restaurant** The film keeps the Dixie Pig nearly intact, a dim restaurant hung with bones where low men and vampires bow to Walter, and makes it his New York base and the door to the Devar-Toi. There is no priest. Roland walks in alone and shoots his way to the portal, which the books’ Roland never does; when he finally walks into the Pig himself, late in Book VII, it is a crime scene behind police tape.

The taheen

Painted frame: Finli o’ Tego — **Finli o’ Tego** Book VII, Part Two. Finli o’ Tego is the Devar-Toi’s security chief, a taheen seven feet tall with a weasel’s head, tar-black eyes and a docked tail, who talks shop with the Master about failing Beams the way a deputy warden talks about headcount. The books keep two races apart: taheen, with animal heads they cannot hide, and can-toi, rat-headed low men who wear living human masks. Eddie shoots Finli in the battle, still sneering.

Painted frame: A seam behind the ear — **A seam behind the ear** The film calls its creatures taheen but builds them from the can-toi: a human face that is a mask, cracked and twitching, with a surgical seam behind the ear and grey rat fur underneath. They pass for clinic staff in New York and attack the Manni village unmasked. The merger loses the books’ sharpest joke about the low men, that they believe they are becoming human, but the seam is the film’s one truly unsettling invention.

Walter’s end

Painted frame: Fedic, under the Dogan — **Fedic, under the Dogan** Book VII, Part Two. Walter comes to Fedic in a thinking cap of woven wire, meaning to kill the newborn Mordred and take the red mark on his heel as a key to the Tower. The child has already slipped the cap. From inside his head Mordred makes him pluck out his own eyes and tear out his tongue, then eats him and inherits fifteen centuries of his memory. Roland, four levels up, never sees it.

Painted frame: The trick shot — **The trick shot** The film gives Roland the kill the books withhold. On a New York street Walter pulls down masonry and stops every bullet in the air, until Jake, strapped in the chair, recites the creed into Roland’s mind and Roland fires a second round into the first to bend its path. A head shot finishes it. The duel has no counterpart in the novels, and the director later said that, for him, Walter did not die.

The Horn of Eld

Painted frame: The Coda — **The Coda** Book VII, Coda. Roland climbs the Tower, opens a door bearing his name, and is sent back, not to the start of his life but to the Mohaine Desert and the first sentence, with no memory. One thing is different: the Horn of Eld, left in the dust beside Cuthbert at Jericho Hill, hangs at his hip this time. A voice allows that “there may yet be rest. Even salvation. If you stand. If you are true.”

Painted frame: In the gunna, if you look — **In the gunna, if you look** The film’s claim to be a continuation is this horn. Set photographs show it in the gunslinger’s gunna, and it is the object lying in ash in the picture King tweeted; on screen it is hard to find, and at least one careful reviewer never spotted it. No line mentions a previous turn of the wheel. The books’ most argued-over page becomes a prop the audience is barely shown, which is either subtle or a hedge.

The verdict in bullets

A continuation by one prop and an adaptation of nothing: the film borrows nouns from Books I, III, V, VI and VII and the plot of none of them.
Its best decision is the creed, spoken three times and made to matter; its worst is the chair, which turns the books’ slowest horror into a laser.
Its gunslinger is intact-handed, hatless, dark-eyed and heavier than the page; the lead performance and the score were the exceptions most reviews allowed.
Walter talks less and kills more. The saga’s trickster becomes a boss fight, and the director later said that, for him, Walter survived it.
Jake’s survival is the quietest big change: without the fall there is no sacrifice, and without the sacrifice Roland is not the man the books are about.
Ninety-five minutes, PG-13, “about 3,000 pages”: King named the two problems himself.
Rotten Tomatoes’ consensus line put it best: “Go then, there are other Stephen King adaptations than these.”

What the film dropped

Eddie Dean and Susannah — drawn through the doors of Book II, promised for a sequel, never cast.
Oy — replaced by a raccoon in a television commercial and a line about whether the animals here still speak.
Blaine the Mono — no riddles, no Lud, no Topeka; the end of Book III and the start of Book IV go unused.
Mejis and Susan Delgado — the five hundred pages at the heart of Book IV, held back for a television series that was never made.
Gilead — Cort, Cuthbert, Alain, the fall and Jericho Hill reduced to an unnamed battlefield and one invented death.
The Crimson King — a slogan on a wall and an employer never seen.
Mordred — no spider, no son; Roland takes over Walter’s death.
Stephen King — not a character; nobody is saved on a Maine road.
Father Callahan and the Calla — the Dixie Pig stays, its priest and the Wolves do not; Tull, the way station and the palaver go with Book I’s chase.
Roland’s maiming — both hands whole; the lobstrosities were wanted for a sequel.
The hat — the studio, King said, believed hatted Westerns underperform.
The Tower as a place reached — seen from a distance, struck and mended; nobody walks the field of roses or opens the door marked FOUND.

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