DUNE: PROLOGUE

The story of the Dune film project unfolds something like this...

In 1971, Apjac International, headed by Arthur P. Jacobs, purchased the film rights to the movie Dune. The company had a projected budget of 15 million dollars to film the movie. In 1972, Arthur P. Jacobs worked to develop a script for Dune, with the hopes of shooting it in 1974 after he finished his The Planet of the Apes series but Jacobs died of a heart attack in 1973 and the Dune film was never made.
      In 1974, director Alejandro Jodorowsky took up the cause when a French consortium purchased the movie rights for Dune from the Arthur P. Jacobs estate. The rock group, Pink Floyd met with Jodorowsky in the Abbey Road Studios in London about possibly scoring Dune. A deal was tentatively agreed upon for the popular rock group to compose most of the music for the film.
      However, two years later, Frank Herbert paid Jodorowsky a visit and found the pre-production of Dune was already in serious trouble. Two million dollars had already been spent on the movie and Jodorowsky had failed to produce a suitable shooting script. Jodorowsky's script would have resulted in a twelve hour movie. Eventually Jodorowsky's project stalled and was abandoned in 1976, when Dino De Laurentiis decided to buy the movie rights from the French consortium.
      Jodorowsky's vision of Dune was a surreal world of mysticism and fantasy. "In my version of Dune," Jodorowsky said. "The Emperor of the Galaxy is mad. He lives on an artificial planet of gold, in a palace of gold constructed according to the non-laws of anti-logic. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are facing a man or the machine... In my version, the spice is a blue drug of a spongy consistency filled with a vegetable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It doesn't stop taking all sorts of forms, shifting without ceasing. The spice continually reproduces the creation of innumerable universes."
      Though wildly exotic and imaginative, Jodorowsky's quixotic vision of Dune would prove too much for the screen. Frank Herbert would later add,"Alejandro Jodorowsky spent a couple of million dollars in preproduction of his version. He even hired Salvador Dali as his production designer. Nothing ever happened. I'm not quite sure why it fizzled. Without exaggeration, his script would have made an eleven-or-twelve-hour movie. It was the size of a phone book. It was pretty anti-Catholic, too."
      In 1976, as part of the negotiated deal, Frank Herbert was commissioned by Dino De Laurentiis to write a script for the film. However, Herbert's 175 page script was deemed unsuitable for filming. Herbert would later admit, "A lot of people tried to film Dune. They all failed. I tried writing a screenplay of it, once. It was rotten."1

Perhaps in retrospect, Herbert's failed literary attempt was the just one more warning sign that the Dune movie was headed for troubled waters. If Herbert had difficulty devising a sensible screenplay from his own work, what hope could there be that anyone else could?
      In 1979, Dino De Laurentiis, impressed with the movie Alien, hired Ridley Scott to direct Dune. In the fall of 1979, Dino De Laurentiis, Frank Herbert, and Ridley Scott met in London to read Herbert's script. Scott agreed the Frank Herbert's script was unsuitable for filming. Ridley Scott hired writer, Rudolph Wurlitzer to write a screenplay for the up-coming Dune movie. In August of 1980, Frank Herbert read the first draft of Wurlitzer's script. Much to Ridley Scott's dismay, Frank Herbert was disappointed with the finished product. Herbert felt Wurlitzer had failed to capture the essence of Dune's main plot. The script would go through two more re-writes. Then Scott unexpectedly dropped out of the Dune project when personal tragedy struck his own family.
      Ridley Scott says, "After seven months, I dropped out of Dune, and by then Rudy Wurlitzer had come up with a first-draft script which I felt was a decent distillation of Frank Herbert's (book). But I also realized Dune was going to take a lot more work- at least two and a half years worth. And I didn't have the heart to attack that because my brother Frank unexpectedly died of cancer while I was prepping the De Laurentiis picture. Frankly, that freaked me out. So I went to Dino and told him the Dune script was his." 2.
      As the end of 1970's drew to a close, the 9 year option of film rights for Dune had expired. In 1981, Dino De Laurentiis renegotiated the film rights to Dune once more. This time, Laurentiis not only secured the movie rights for Dune, he acquired subsequent film rights for any Dune sequels- both written and unwritten. Meanwhile, hot off the heels of Alien, Ridley Scott would turn his attentions to a Warner Bros' project called, Blade Runner.

DUNE: MESSIAH

Director David Lynch

The Elephant Man saves Dune

David Lynch's The Elephant Man was the most critically acclaimed film of 1980. It had garnered an astounding 8 Academy Award nominations; surpassing even the number of nominations of 1980 Best Picture winner, Ordinary People. The Elephant Man was honored with Grand Prize for Best Picture at the Avoriaz Fantastic Film Festival in France. The film also won the BAFTA Award, the British Society of Cinematographers' Award in 1980, and both the Cesar Award and the French Syndicate of Cinema Critics Award in France for Best Foreign Film. Elephant Man also received a Special Achievement Award for cinematography at the London Critics Circle Film Awards in 1982. David Lynch created a masterwork that was praised by film critics all over the world.

In 1981, Dino De Laurentiis's daughter, Raffaella, saw David Lynch's The Elephant Man and was moved to tears by the director's sensitive cinematic portrayal of the life of John Merrick. The Elephant Man convinced Raffaella David Lynch was the man to direct Dune.
      In January of 1981, Rafella placed a call to David Lynch. She later recalled, "David had no idea why I was calling him. He didn't know Dune. He said, 'What? June?' He thought we were making a summer movie." 1.

Dino De Laurentiis, Raffaella De Laurentiis, David Lynch, and cinematographer, Freddie Francis.

      Later that year, David Lynch met with Dino De Laurentiis and agreed to direct Dune. "My first reaction was... it's not going to work," Lynch recalled. 1. However, Lynch did make it work and what emerged from the whole Dune project was the contractual agreement for Dino De Laurentiis to produce one of David Lynch's own personal projects. The whole film idea had languished in the director's head for sometime. The script was still not complete, but Lynch desperately wanted to get the project made. The film that would emerge from the Laurentiis-Lynch collaboration would be Blue Velvet.
      In May of 1981, David Lynch moved into the Universal Pictures studio and threw himself head-long into the Dune project. Lynch hired writers Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, who had collaborated with him on the script for his critically acclaimed, The Elephant Man. Lynch, Bergren and De Vore worked for six months, trying to develop a script for Dune. The collaboration would turn out to be an arduous undertaking. De Vore and Bergren's story was too detailed and lengthy. From the men's best collaborative efforts, two separate scripts emerged; the first of which ended at the point where the family of Paul Atreides is defeated and he is cast into the desert of Arrakis to die. The lengthy two-part script proved unsuitable for the shooting of a two-hour movie.
      Lynch recalled, "The script was just as long as the book, maybe longer. It just wasn't happening. I think Chris and Eric wanted to go in a different direction than I was intending... " 1.
      Unable to reach any type of artistic resolution, the team parted company. And though Lynch, himself, had said earlier, "I figured Dune was a giant project and I couldn't write the script on my own." That's exactly what Lynch ended up doing. "I told Dino I wanted to take a crack at it myself. He wasn't too sure about that but he told me to go ahead and start and we'd see how it went."1.
David Lynch wrote a seventeen page treatment of what was to become a Dune script and brought it over to Dino De Laurentiis's house in Beverly Hills. "He (Dino) said they were the best seventeen pages he had read of all the scripts so far and that I had the assignment. So, I started writing,"Lynch said.
      On May 29th of 1982, David Lynch completed a second draft of the Dune script. The script would undergo four more re-writes before it finally produced a feasible shooting script on December of 1982.
      For Lynch, the enormity of the Dune project was only now becoming apparent. The Dune novel was a literary animal that could swallow a writer whole. Dune consumed three years of David Lynch's life and subsequently produced seven different variations of a shooting script. The problem with all the scripts was their length. "The script was difficult to cut,"Lynch later admitted in an interview. "Eventually we boiled the script down to 135 pages." Lynch was so devoted to the Dune project that he turned down Lucas' offer to direct Return of the Jedi, preferring to explore the rich texture of Herbert's imaginative, literary work over Lucas's Star Wars franchise.
      Lynch told Herman Weigel in an 1985 interview that:"George Lucas got in touch with me at the same time Dino did, and I had to make an important decision. George was great. He's a living legend, but although I was fond of him; I realized that his projects are entirely his projects, and I prefer to do my own... In George's imagination the movie was already done. It wouldn't have made a difference with me doing it. It would have looked exactly the same." 4.
      Frank Herbert was finally pleased with a Dune script. It had taken Lynch's whimsical touch to win over the gifted, albeit, eccentric science-fiction writer. Herbert found Lynch's imagination almost as fertile as his own. He would later comment on the Lynch script by saying, "The characters are exactly as I have envisioned them... sometimes even better... I'm please with the screenplay. I'm well aware of the fact that film has to use a shorthand process to convey things that are in the novel. It's a translation process, actually, from one language to another."