DARK DAYS WITH MARK VERHEIDEN

Genre vet Mark Verheiden reflects on his 'dark' days, prepping a shot-but-never-finished pilot remaking the classic gothic soap 'Dark Shadows', and a TV series designed to bridge the gaps between movies as part of a sprawling, epic adaptation of Stephen King's 'The Dark Tower'.

While Mark Verheiden's first two on-screen credits were on big-budget films ('The Mask' and 'Timecop'), the genre veteran - whose writing career has so far spanned more than three and a half decades in comics, movies and television) - has tended to gravitate towards television.

"TV is much more immediate - you write it, and then it's on the stage not long after that," he said.

"The other thing that's great about TV, as far as I was concerned, was the writer/producer has more control; they can contribute more. On 'Timecop' and 'The Mask', I visited the set for half a day each… that was my total on-set contribution. In TV, you are needed a lot, and I liked that too."

Coincidentally, 'Timecop' served as Verheiden's entry point to the world of the small screen.

"While 'Timecop' didn't do as well as 'The Mask', it led to a TV series offer from ABC to the same producers. It was one of those magic things which almost never happens, but for some reason, it did to me, where we went into ABC, and after something like 15 minutes, they said we'd get 13 guaranteed on the air. At the time, I obviously had enormous amounts to learn about television. There was the pace of it, and even the simplest things I really didn't know too much about - simple things like casting issues, for instance. When you work in features, if you write a scene and you want to put 15 people in the background and all of them are talking, that's not a huge deal. But if you're working in television, it becomes a huge deal because you got to cast all those guys, you've got to pay them all, you've got to bring them in, you got to costume them. And you only shoot these for like seven or eight days an episode, so it was a rigorous week-to-week exercise, which was quite a bit different deadline-wise from doing features. The other big thing I learned was that a guarantee of 13 episodes on the air is not actually a guarantee since we were cancelled after nine!"

DARK SHADOWS

For the six years after 'Timecop', Verheiden gained steady work in TV, working on (among others) the Sammo Hung action comedy 'Martial Law' and the 'Superman' prequel 'Smallville'.

"Warner Brothers liked what I'd been doing on 'Smallville', and they were looking for someone to work on an updated 'Dark Shadows' series," he said.

"They (Warners) knew I could do genre work, so I put my hand up and met with Dan Curtis (creator of the original 'Dark Shadows' series and John Wells, and everybody basically agreed I was the guy. Sometimes, it's as simple as that; there wasn't an arduous process of auditioning."

For Verheiden, the chance to work with both John Wells, who was then doing 'The West Wing', and Curtis - a legend in genre TV - was too good to pass up.

"Dan was a reason I wanted to do it; I was such an admirer of his," Verheiden said.

"I'd never met him, but he had done 'Dark Shadows, he'd done 'The Night Stalker', he'd done 'War and Remembrance', these enormous series. He could come across as very strong-willed, and, in the end, he wasn't looking for someone to reinvent the wheel on 'Dark Shadows'. My initial impulse was to fight against that to some extent because the 60s show was cool. But it was the 60s. The 90 show failed for whatever reason - the people involved would probably say it failed because of time slot issues and stuff - but, for whatever reason, it failed. I had pitched something that I think was skewed younger at first. It was certainly true to the world of Dark Shadows, that Gothic mythology that he created. It had Barnabas and the main characters in it, but it skewed a bit younger. But he didn't care for that; he really wanted to go back to the feel of the original 'Dark Shadows', with Collinwood (the massive, gothic estate that is the home for the main characters) and all the mystique of that … right down to Victoria, Carolyn, the other characters and the same mythology that he'd already created. And ultimately, it's his show. He created this juggernaut. It's not like I had to be dragged kicking and screaming into it; the original story is a very rich tapestry - my first take was just to come in and try something a little different."

The pilot, as shot, follows a similar path to the original - Victoria Winters (played in this iteration by Marley Shelton) travels to the lavish Collinwood estate to care for young David Collins (Alexander Gould), a very troubled nine-year-old who is plagued by disturbing visions and suffers from numerous psychological issues. In another part of the estate, we learn that one of the Collins' many staff, Willie Loomis (Matt Czuchry), has deliberately taken a job at Collinwood to scour the property for the massive, legendary and missing-in-action Collins family fortune, which he and his girlfriend Kelly (Alexis Thorpe) believe is stashed in the family's mausoleum. When searching through the crypt at night, they accidentally unleash the long-buried vampire Barnabas Collins (Alec Newman), who kills Kelly, enslaves Willie and subsequently 'turns' David's cousin Carolyn (Jessica Chastain in one of her first roles). From early on in the process, Verheiden says there was tension as he endeavoured to develop a script that met the needs of both Dan Curtis and John Wells.

"Things had gotten pretty fractious between Dan and John Wells and John Wells' people - Dan was a hard man to please, and I had seen that myself," he said.

"I wanted to see it through. I just said, 'You know what, I'm going to keep going'. So I went to Dan's office in Santa Monica for three days in a row, for eight hours a day, going over an outline for what would become the pilot, beat by beat, line by line, period by period with him. It was pretty intense - Dan either couldn't or wouldn't type, and he had this long-suffering assistant sitting in there with us. I'll always remember it. Dan had some kind of pointer, and he'd be tapping at the screen and going, 'NO! NOT A COMMA! A PERIOD! A PERIOD!' It wasn't a pain-free process. I don't know if it was anger or passion or both, but Dan comes across like The Angriest Man alive. I think that's just how he operated. It's how he worked and how he got all those great projects off the ground. So who am I to argue with that? He's done an amazing amount of great work. In the end, we got through it. And he was happy with the outline at that point, and everyone seemed happy with the script."

But the challenges continued, with another roadblock set to emerge.

"Rob Bowman had started doing some prep on the series, but then he was wooed to the dark side of features, and he left us to do 'Elektra'. That hurt Dan's feelings to some extent because he really liked Rob. Rob had worked on Dan's 'Dark Shadows' in the 90s - that first attempt to reboot it. We were scrambling to find someone because we were pretty late in the process. PJ Hogan had just come off 'Peter Pan', which was a big budget fantasy film, and he was interested. He seemed like an interesting guy to bring in for his take on it, and he was willing, so he came in. There weren't a lot of rewrites for him, but he had a very definite tonal thing he wanted to go for, which was a look along the lines of Dario Argento's 'Suspiria'. It wasn't anywhere near the violent range of a Dario Argento film, but it had the look of those Italian giallo films - that very vivid colour palette."

Ultimately, though, a number of factors conspired to prevent the pilot from moving forward.

"We couldn't get the pilot finished in time; when we wrapped, we hadn't shot parts of it," Verheiden said.

"To continue, we'd have had to go back and spend more money and, I think, at that point, the wheels had started to come off. I think the look of the pilot may have also rubbed Warners the wrong way. In addition, Warners did have an issue with casting - I think they wanted someone more classically 'CW' in the part of Barnabas. It's not that Alec Newman isn't a handsome guy; he is, but I think they were after someone who was more of a hunky guy, and we felt that that type of actor wouldn't be Barnabas. And while it may not have been the most pleasant experience for Verheiden ("Two days into the shoot, I came down with shingles… which should give you an idea of just how anxious I was," he recalled), he has no regrets of his time in Collinwood."

"All of these things have an element of push and pull," he said.

"In this case, Dan had a strong vision, PJ had a strong vision of how it should look, the network and the studio had a strong vision of who should be in it, and I had a strong vision, which was to protect the material and to do the script that we had written. Sometimes, those visions line up - and it's awesome when they do - but other times, they just don't, and in this case, I was just so glad to work to work with Dan, as much of an irascible fellow as he was, it was great to work with him."

THE DARK TOWER

Oddly enough, another aborted project helped bring Mark Verheiden into Stephen King's sprawling epic fantasy 'The Dark Tower', where writer Akiva Goldsman and director Ron Howard had ambitious plans for The Gunslinger and his nemesis.

"I had worked with Akiva on a live-action 'Teen Titans' script for Warner Brothers, which had been a good experience but which fell apart because… well, because this is Hollywood, man," Verheiden said.

"This was around the time that Christopher Nolan was starting to do the Batman 'Dark Knight' movies. Now if you know anything about the Teen Titans characters, you'll know there's a character called Nightwing, who started out as Robin but then becomes Nightwing in the Teen Titans. At the time, I was asking the people at Warners and the people from Akiva's company - I was basically asking everyone - whether we could use Nightwing because it'd be hard to do the Teen Titans we were envisioning without him. But because he was Robin in this other world, I wanted to make sure Christopher Nolan wasn't going to use him. And the answer I got was 'No, absolutely not. It's no problem'. So I wrote it, and it went over pretty well. And I remember I was on the set of an episode I was doing of 'Battlestar Galactica' when I got a call to say that George Miller's 'Justice League' movie had fallen through for some reason and they needed something to replace it. They wanted to know if I'd be available to go to Australia to start work on 'Teen Titans' within the week. I told them I'd figure out a way to make it happen, but then I got a call a couple of days later to say that Christopher Nolan didn't want us to use Nightwing, and that was the end of that. So that was how I met Akiva, and we'd stayed in touch over the years, and then when the 'Dark Tower' came together, they remembered me and gave me a call."

Goldsman and Howard had an ambitious plan to realize 'The Dark Tower'.

"The idea was that Ron would direct everything, and Akiva would write three features - three big, epic features," Verheiden said.

"In between each feature, the idea was to do ten hours of an HBO-type series, which Ron would have also directed. It was a way to take the enormity of this series and turn it into something more than just a series of movies that would take forever to realize. The storytelling was just amazing, and this seemed to be the right way to adapt it. So we started up a room at Warner Brothers, and we were lucky enough to have Robin Furth, a very lovely person who's an expert at 'Dark Tower' lore who had come over from England. We were able to read Akiva's script for the first movie. I remember there was a lot of secrecy around that script - I had to be very careful with where I read it and what I did with it. And it was just such a great script, full of giant spectacle. In the series, there would've still been that spectacle, but we'd have had more room to focus on character too. Ten episodes would give us the room to grow, spread out and really tell the stories of these characters. So we worked on breaking the pilot episode and putting together a breakdown of the ten-episode series."

To cater to those who either hadn't seen the first movie or needed a quick reminder, Verheiden's 'Dark Tower' - which serves as a loose adaptation of the second novel in the series, 'The Drawing of the Three' - begins with one of the main characters, 13-year-old Jake Chambers, giving a quick recap to bring viewers up to speed - explaining that he and two others (Susannah Holmes and Eddie Dean) had been plucked from various times in New York and brought to Mid-World, where they have been enlisted by gunslinger Roland Deschain to battle the Crimson King, a monster intent of enslaving the universe.

"We didn't want it to have a 'Star Wars' scrawl or anything like that," Verheiden said.

"We just wanted something that could catch you up quickly, so you wouldn't feel completely lost if you hadn't seen the movie - it's either that or hand out a pamphlet, which probably isn't that cost-effective."

From there, the story kicks off in earnest with Roland set upon by unearthly creatures called lobstrocities, which bite off two of Roland's fingers and leave him seriously injured. Somewhere in the attack, Eddie and Susannah are abducted, and Roland no longer has any memory of the two now-absent travelling companions. Jake, trying to care for the injured Gunslinger while trying to convince him that Eddie and Susannah were not figments of his imagination, takes off in pursuit of the missing members of Roland's ka-tet (a term that effectively means 'posse' or, more literally, 'one made from many'), finding a mysterious circle of stones that leads to a mystical door that acts as a portal to New York in the 1970s where the injured Roland seeks to again recruit Eddie, a drug mule being pursued by the authorities.

"I was fascinated with the story of the Gunslinger being immediately, grievously wounded by one of the lobstrocities, and this little boy being forced to pick up the mantle while they try to pull this drug addict into their world," Verheiden said.

"It's a big moment in the book where Roland loses two fingers, and you've got the entire rest of the series to play around with that. The source material was so rich, and one of the things I've since learned from working on Stephen King projects is that he's great about having a little improv and playing around with things. Not necessarily a whole lot, but he's open to it if you're true to the storytelling, and you can then let some of the detail slide when it creates a story that feels a bit better for this medium than it did for the printed page. There were things we adjusted for it to work as a series, and there were things we adjusted to fit with Akiva's script, but we were always true to the spirit of 'The Dark Tower' and the story."

Howard and Goldsman already had their sights set on the actor who'd anchor both the film and TV iterations of the epic tale. 

"Ron and Akiva were in talks with Javier Bardem to play the Gunslinger, which would have been perfect… you know you say 'Javier Bardem is the Gunslinger,' and you're immediately sold," he said.

"Unfortunately, things fell apart fairly soon after we started talking about those things. The end was pretty abrupt - it was just rolling right along until the point that it wasn't. I was driving my car when I get a call from Ron Howard on my cell saying that it was basically over. Some of this is my speculation, but one thing I'd heard was that Warners had gotten cold feet about the magnitude of it. I think that in some quarters at least, they thought we were making a big western - which is understandable; you've got a character called The Gunslinger, he shoots people with his six guns, and I think there was some fear in investing that level of money in a Western. And when I look back on it, it doesn't surprise me that they got cold feet on such an enormous investment, although to me, if you're going to invest in anything, you should invest in Stephen King. In addition to that, and it's speculation on my part, 'Cowboys and Aliens' came out around the time we were working on this, and it did not exceed expectations, so I don't think that helped us."

Strangely enough, Verheiden experienced a bit of showrunner karma when 'Walking Dead' showrunner Glen Mazzara was getting his adaptation of 'The Dark Tower' off the ground for Amazon.

"Years later, I found out that Glen Mazzara was going a series because he'd hired one of the writers that I was using on 'Swamp Thing', and she left my show to go work on that," he said.

Despite the numerous, failed attempts to get 'The Dark Tower' adapted for either film or TV (the most recent being the poorly received 2017 film, Verheiden maintains there is still hope to see the epic work brought to life, with the most recent iteration being developed by 'Doctor Sleep' and 'Haunting of Hill House' writer/director Mike Flanagan.

"Clearly, he loves the series more than anything, so he's the kind of guy you want doing it," Verheiden said.

"If he brings that love and his level of skill to it, it could be something very special - but the story needs that room. You need that time, that scope, that money and that enthusiasm to tell the story, and hopefully, that's what he will get from Amazon."

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