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Before David Lynch's 'Dune", there was Alejandro Jodorowsky's...

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Andrew.

Banned
Since it's the day before Refn's "Only God Forgives" (dedicated to cult fillmmaker Jodorowsky) I figured i'd make a thread revealing (to those that didn't know) Jodorowsky's original idea and plans for the Dune movie in the 1970s.

Jodorowsky is known primarily for the acid Western "El Topo" which was a main influence in Suda51 creating the game "No More Heroes".

He followed up on "El Topo" with "The Holy Mountain" which was actually produced with the help of John Lennon, who was such a hardcore "El Topo" fan that he contributed 1 million to creating Alejandro's psychedelic mindfuck of a movie.

the-holy-mountain.jpg


In 1974, after "The Holy Mountain", rights were bought to Dune. Jodorowsky was asked to direct. This was the result:

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version.

In the role of the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, Jodorowsky planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dalí, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. He also planned to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen; Welles only agreed when Jodorowsky offered to get his favourite gourmet chef to prepare his meals for him throughout the filming.

The book's protagonist, Paul Atreides, was to be played by Jodorowsky's own son, Brontis Jodorowsky. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen.Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction publications, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger.

Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour movie ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later recalled). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship.

The production for the film collapsed, and the rights for filming were sold once more, this time to Dino de Laurentiis, who employed the American filmmaker David Lynch to direct, creating the film Dune in 1984.
 

Thai

Bane was better.
God this would have been so fun to watch. I am still waiting for a good Dune adaptation.
 

Funky Papa

FUNK-Y-PPA-4
His inventiveness and insanity are fun to watch. The bene gesserit would have, no doubt, all been 90% naked and constantly having orgies.

I still fail to understand how he managed to score such a big project. Was everybody on acid at the time?
 

Andrew.

Banned
I still fail to understand how he managed to score such a big project. Was everybody on acid at the time?

Probably

LSD is the secret ingredient in creating his films.

I could never trip while watching his stuff, especially "The Holy Mountain." That movie scarred me mentally in ways I never even thought possible and I wasnt even high when I watched it.
 
man i never knew david lynch did the dune movie, my brother has been telling me for ages to read either the books or watch the movie but i have been brushing him off..now i really need to see this
 
I watched Dune couple of days ago (I think it was on HBO) after a very long time. My opinion of the movie was that it wasn't very good. But after my recent viewing I changed my mind. Its actually decent. Still one of Lynch's weaker efforts (not as bad as Inland Empire, mind you) but the movie itself isn't bad.
 
man i never knew david lynch did the dune movie, my brother has been telling me for ages to read either the books or watch the movie but i have been brushing him off..now i really need to see this

Don't get your hopes up for the film though. It's lynch's worst movie

But definitely read the book and check it out
 

xenist

Member
It would have been weird and fun as fuck. It would also be even less related to the book than Lynch's version.
 
I seriously can't wait for the documentary about his version of the film. I have a soft spot for the Lynch film (even if its horrible) and love the novel... Jodorowksy's version would have been incredible.
 
Probably

LSD is the secret ingredient in creating his films.

I could never trip while watching his stuff, especially "The Holy Mountain." That movie scarred me mentally in ways I never even thought possible and I wasnt even high when I watched it.

I watched El Topo on shrooms 2 decades ago.

It was metamagical.
 

Andrew.

Banned
I watched El Topo on shrooms 2 decades ago.

It was metamagical.

I love what he said about creating and filming "El Topo":

"I ask of film what most North Americans ask of psychedelic drugs. The difference being that when one creates a psychedelic film, he need not create a film that shows the visions of a person who has taken a pill; rather, he needs to manufacture the pill."

This quote basically follows suit for all of his work. His films are basically one big acid trip.
 
I love David Lynch, I love the Dune novels that Frank Herbert wrote (before his son got involved) but I have never been more disappointed in a movie. I wanted disgust and cold malevolence from the Harkonnens and what he gave us was melodramatic slapstick with pimples, ginger hair, and floating about the place like a let-go balloon while overacting insane laughter, oh, and a weird obsession with massive bushy eyebrows ...


.
 

Andrew.

Banned
Cannes review for the Jodorowsky "Dune" documentary:

http://variety.com/2013/film/reviews/cannes-film-review-jodorowskys-dune-1200483641/

Pretty positive.

If even a fraction of Jodorowsky’s claims are true, his “Dune” would have been an astounding film, and Pavich does his part by reinforcing the talking-head footage (including two of the Web’s top genre-movie gurus, Devin Faraci and Drew McWeeny) with concept sketches, character designs and the Holy Grail: one of two known surviving copies of the script, which Jodorowsky had commissioned French graphic novelist Moebius to storyboard completely. Via rudimentary animation, Pavich combines these elements to mock up several key sequences from the film, while composer Kurt Stenzel augments the entire picture with a suitably trippy score

Here’s where things get really far-out: Still feisty at 84, the director reveals all the talent he had lined up to participate in the project, starting with Dan O’Bannon (“Dark Star”) on special effects and extending to Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger. On the casting front, Jodorowsky shares wild tales of how he allegedly got verbal agreements from David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Udo Kier and a washed-up Orson Welles to accept major roles and, even more astonishingly, convinced Salvador Dali to appear in the film. Still, would you greenlight a big-budget “Dune” with such a cast of loose cannons, especially if the two principal roles were being reserved for Jodorowsky and his son Brontis?

Pavich does an admirable job tracking down surviving parties (except for the suspicious-sounding cast), opting for a humorous rather than indignant tone to the interviews. In shaping them for the film, he happens upon a compelling theory: that even in its still-born form, the film manifested the sort of collective conscious that Jodorowsky was trying to peddle through its plot, trickling down to influence other sci-fi films that followed. The evidence presented regarding details George Lucas may have stolen for “Star Wars” is unconvincing, though O’Bannon, concept artist Chris Foss and Giger did go on to collaborate on “Alien,” extending a relationship that started with “Dune.”

WHAAAAAAT
 

Muffdraul

Member
The Alien design was adopted from this failed project.

Dan O'Bannon was involved with this Dune project, and that was probably how he first became familiar with HR Giger. But the Alien design came from a Giger painting that was published in his first book and had nothing to do with Dune.
 

sankt-Antonio

:^)--?-<
Seem MAGMA at a festival this past weekend, would fit so good into a dune/ psychedelic movie with it's invented language. Ah well...
 
Honestly, you look at this movie, who was involved, and where the set designs and other such ideas appeared afterwards...and this would've been easily one of the greatest, most influential films of all time.
 
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