Jodorowsky’s Dune, The Most Influential Movie You've Never Seen

One of the most influential films of all time, especially in science fiction, has to be Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune.

This film’s art designs have inspired just about every movie that isn’t trying to imitate Star Wars or Star Trek, it clearly inspired ship, set, and costume projects as diverse as Alien, The Black Hole, Babylon 5, and Farscape. Arguably the revived version of Battlestar Galactica as well. Its influence is strongly felt in Warhammer 40K and Starcraft.

Yet, not a single person has ever seen this film.

Because it was never made.

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Chile in 1929 to Ukrainian Jewish atheist immigrants. This usually means Trotskyite Communists who fled from Stalin, but I couldn’t find any corroborating documentation for that. Jodorowsky hated his father and ran away to Paris at the first opportunity that presented itself. He studied being a mime, but he decided to make a lateral career move from clown to filmmaker of art films.

After some minor successes, he moved from France to Mexico and joined the Mexican surrealist movement of the early 1960s.

While in Mexico City, he converted to Acid Buddhism and began infusing his chemically enhanced spiritualism throughout his work.

H. R. Giger with his concept art for Jodorowsky's Dune — H. R. Giger with his concept art for Jodorowsky’s Dune

In 1970 he had his first success with the original ‘midnight movie,’ El Topo. El Topo’s plot (not that it really had one) was about a Mexican gunslinger wandering in the desert on his quest to kill the Four Master Gunfighters in order to win the love of a beautiful woman. Like I said, the plot didn’t matter, the movie was all about the visuals. It was filmed as performance art. And it was an insane hit in New York. Everyone who was anyone in the counterculture movement (to include of course John fucking Lennon) declared it the greatest thing ever.

His next movie was Holy Mountain. And a horrifying truth was suddenly evident, Jodorowsky had had the brakes ON for El Topo.

Before writing the script, he stayed up for a solid week under the supervision of a Japanese Zen master. Then before shooting started, he and the core cast underwent the “Arica method,” which was a sixties mosh pit of Yoga, Sufi, and Zen exercises with what was claimed to be an alchemical overlay (emphasis on the chemical I suspect). After doing this for three months, they lived communally in his home for another month. Once they were all brain-addled enough, shooting began.

If you have never seen Holy Mountain, don’t. Just watch the trailer. Adult verification is required.

This one, too, has a thumbnail for a plot. The main protagonist is a Christlike figure called The Thief. He goes on a quest for enlightenment that involves him climbing a mountain along with seven other pilgrims. Like I said, the plot is nonexistent. What this film really is, is a bunch of vignettes strung together in no real cohesive way. Because cohesive thought was utterly impossible for Alejandro Jodorowsky by then.

Jodorowsky's Dune storyboard — Jodorowsky’s Dune storyboard

Holy Mountain was as insane as the process that created it. And it was enough of a success that some studio madman decided to tell him, “Do whatever you want Alejandro!”

Dune was the “In” book with his crowd at that time, so he decided he was going to do that.

Frank Herbert absolutely hated the script that Jodorowsky came up with, its resemblance to his book was faint at best. The mad Chilean freely admitted, “I am raping his book, but I am raping it with love.” Well, that always makes rape so much better, doesn’t it?

I am Indeed and truly sorry the movie never got made. For that matter, I’m sorry there was never even any test footage shot.

It would have starred Mick Jagger as Feyd. David Carradine as Duke Leto. Gloria Swanson as Gaius Helen Mohiam. Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. And the one I’m really sorry I never got to see, Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen.

H.R. Giger was in charge of the concept art. And Jodorowsky must have made sure he was getting the really good pills.

This “movie” was to be over twenty hours long. That being the stripped-down version. No one was quite sure how any audience was supposed to watch the thing. Marathon sitting? Come back to the theater each night for about a week? In the case of the latter, does the audience member have to pay for each separate chapter? No one knew because this problem had never come up before.

I have zero love for hippies but there was such a mad audacity to the project I can’t help but admire the ambition behind it.

It was, however, clearly and obviously doomed from the start.

George Lucas was barely able to get the drastically less ambitious Star Wars made at the same time for eleven million, and that was drastically over budget. But Jodorowsky was going to film his version of Dune for twenty million? The budget was way too low for what he wanted to do (because he knew nothing about special effects), and there was no way in hell any studio was going to back something that was not only going to be R-rated but defy the best efforts of any marketing department to come up with a coherent reason for normal people to come see it. Plus, you have to remember that twenty million was potentially a studio killer back then, and this monster was more realistically going to cost at least 70 million in 1970s money. No studio had that kind of money back then.

Regardless, Jodorowsky assembled his pre-production pitch book and marched it around the studios for about ten years, trying to get funding for it. That book has become a legend in the industry.

Dino De Laurentiis eventually optioned it, waited for a time limit to run out, and kicked Jodorowsky off his own dream project. He then hired the slightly less deranged David Lynch to make it.

While Lynch was nuts in his own right, he was clearly a more functional madman. He actually got his version of Dune made.

Lynch appears to have respected Jodorowsky’s intentions. There were a number of choices he made that just didn’t make sense otherwise. Casting Sting as Feyd feels like a callback to the original choice of Mick Jagger in that role. It wasn’t Jodorowsky weird, but it was definitely weird.

But the film had a lot of fundamental problems. Jodorowsky’s script, (the one with the immaculate conception because Leto had been castrated and Paul being killed by Feyd at the end of the movie), obviously had to be chucked. Lynch had Frank Herbert himself do the first draft, and this was a huge mistake.

Herbert was a good author, but that skill set does not transfer seamlessly into being a screenwriter. Anyone who has read the book knows that there is a shit-ton of internal dialog. That’s fine in a novel but Herbert just had the characters’ thoughts being conveyed by voice-over while the actor mugged on-screen in time to it. When it comes to voice-over, less is better, but non-existent is usually best. Voice-over narration of internal thoughts is a huge drag on any film. And just about all of the characters were constantly doing it.

Then there was the barrage of accents. In the original Star Wars, the Imperials mostly have Oxbridge accents, the Rebels were mostly American. However, in Lynch’s Dune, the accents were shotgunned at random all over the place. On Caladan alone, you have German, Oxbridge, and American accents.

Another problem was audience expectations. In 1974 the Lynch version of Dune would have enjoyed much more success than it did in 1984 because, in those ensuing ten years, Star Wars had changed the rules of the game. Special effects had to reach a certain standard by then, and Dune didn’t meet them. On top of that, Eighties blast-flicks had already changed the film school grammar on how action scenes were to be shot, and Dune was drastically behind that power curve there as well. Generation X was the primary film-going audience by then, and Dune didn’t meet our standards for those things.

However, its biggest problem was its producer. Dino De Laurentiis was very active in the development of the film. He didn’t know anything about Herbert’s work and didn’t really get it. Consequently, his typical river of “production notes” was incredibly corrosive.

The worst crimes against the film were the mid-production budget cuts and the cutting room butchery that was inflicted upon it prior to release. Although, in truth, both were sadly unavoidable.

Dune was drastically over budget during production, and everyone in the industry was still keenly aware of the Heaven’s Gate (1980) box office disaster. Lynch’s first cut was over four hours long. Big cuts were made, leaving a film that was nearly incoherent. David Lynch was furious. When a longer cut was finally made using his footage, he demanded his name be removed from it, and the Director’s Union backed him on it. That version is credited to Alan B. Smithee.

Dune bombed, killing any chance of a sequel.

Although, Westwood’s groundbreaking Dune games were based on Lynch’s film at least visually. Sidenote: House Ordos only appeared in the Dune Encyclopedia, (which now goes for $750 a copy and I distinctly remember throwing mine away when I was transferred to Okinawa, damn it!).

Anyway, the property vanished from Hollywood for another sixteen years until the Sci-Fi Channel decided to produce its own version of Dune as a mini-series.

Sci-Fi’s version was cheaper but more coherent than Lynch’s version. Sci-Fi Channel put a lot of their budget into their early 2000s mini-series events. Which is not to say they had a lot of money to work with.

Sadly, Sci-Fi’s Dune is not aging well. Late 1990s CGI looks awful by modern standards, although the Sandworm still looks pretty good.

There were some substantial story changes made, Princess Irulan was not a nice girl in the books and was re-written to be more sympathetic in the series. She was married to a man she was in love with, but who didn’t love her and refused to share her bed. She ends up raising his children by another woman as her own. Harrah was completely absent and will remain so. Way too problematic these days.

Dune did well enough for Sci-Fi that they produced a second mini-series that covered the events of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune in 2003. They wanted to do God-Emperor but in 2004 Battlestar Galactica blew the doors off, leaving Dune in the dust and Sci-Fi didn’t have the money to make both.

Dune went back into the wilderness for another seventeen years. Then came Villeneuve’s Dune, which I am a notable fan of. I’m not alone there. He delivered a lot for comparatively little at $165 million. The global haul was $400 million, which would normally be nothing to cheer about, except we are talking about a Covid release with a same-day-on-streaming launch. Zaslav has apparently decided there is blood in that stone, and it needs squeezing.

Warner Brothers is high-rolling big time on this property. It doesn’t really lend itself to being a franchise, but that is obviously what they are planning. They are clearly hoping their TV series Dune: Prophesy is going to be a new Game of Thrones. It’s a TV show that has been three years in production with numerous reshoots and rewrites. It’s got the Sisterhood, the Harkonnens, the Corrinos but no Atriedes. Almost all of the parts are for women. I’ll give it an honest look so long as I don’t hear the word “Fish-Speaker.”

The reason why Warner Brothers is gambling is obvious, their biggest franchises are all struggling. Westeros is the healthiest, no thanks to George Martin, but they can’t make movies in that world, they just can’t. The DC CU has somehow managed to be an even more impressive trainwreck than Marvel. Nobody knows if James Gunn can breathe life back into superheroes. The magic has gone out of the Potterverse movies, although the fans might still spend money on something good on the off chance that that comes along. Finally, Middle-Earth has been horrendously brand-damaged as a movie and TV franchise by Amazon (don’t argue with me on this one, I’m talking about normies here).

The appeal of a new franchise that appears to have considerable positive fandom interest is rarer than diamonds these days.

If this gamble pays off, Warner Brothers will be a valuable property again, and never forget that the only reason Zaslav was brought on board was to get it ready for a quick sale. So, there aren’t millions riding on Dune II but billions.

This ball would never have started without a madman and his dreams about Dune.

If you want to find out more about Jodorowsky’s Dune, there is an excellent documentary of that name currently streaming on Max.

What are your thoughts on Dune, the novel series, the various movies, and the mini-series? Which one is your favorite? Sound off in the comments!

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