Hmmm... I'm not sure it helps! Which part(s) was the focus of the original screenplay - the Darujhistan story?

What helped more for me was to know this was originally developped as a role playing setting. It definitely has the feel of that. For the better, as from the get go it is extremely well realised, detailed and rich, and for the worse as at times as it makes you feel thrown into a very advanced game and its players just won't be bothered to help you get up to speed on much of anything. The book ends up with this feeling that Erikson knows his characters and settings too well, and wasn't always so good at judging how much a "newcomer" would need to know to keep interest in what is going on. It lacks balance somewhere, its many mysteries lack interest because you don't even always have enough to get these are mysteries, not just purely unexplained and confusing elements. For this, GotM felt very self-indulgent in places - like a personal playground which isn't really for yoou, like if Erikson was writing mostly for Esslemont (the Daru story is the easiest to get into, but this one is plagued a bit by its cliché characters, who don't much get out of their clichés until later books). That impression gets largely corrected later when you understand more what Erikson is doing and what the tone and focus of the series will be, but even though I appreciated GotM a lot more in a re read many books later, I still think it's not a fully succesful intro to the series. Erikson pushed the 'in media res' perspective just a little too far for an opener. I don't think I would have read the others, and given how much I loved those that would have been to my loss, if people had not convinced me to go on with books 2-3 and decide then to stop or continue. GOtM as such didn't do its job with me of drawing me into the series, not on its own. DGH did that.

That said, I have a problem with "beginnings" in general and I'm terribly hard to satisfy when it comes to those. I lose patience with LOTR's pastoral beginning, and I hated WOT's all too conventional and simplistic opener and lost patience with how the characters get behind you at some point, and yet Erikson spares you that but goes a bit too far for my taste in the other direction. Of the "big works" of Fantasy out there, I think the most satisfying and balanced series opener I've read would probably be Martin's.