Long before either of its film adaptations, Frank Herbert's Dune was a classic science fiction novel that was acclaimed and beloved by many. Numerous directors and studios sought to bring the world of Arrakis to the big screen, even if such ambition required a budget just as big. At one point, the movie was going to be helmed by a popular Chilean-French filmmaker, and the result would have been surprisingly artistic.
Intending to bring in Salvador Dalí and turn the material into a long-winded acid trip of a film, Alejandro Jodorowsky's planned Dune movie certainly would have been something special. Though this likely would have strayed rather far from the original novel, the film is still seen by many Dune fans as one of Hollywood's biggest missed opportunities.
Jodorowsky's Unmade Dune Was an Acid Trip on Arrakis
Production for Alejandro Jodorowsky's ill-fated take on Dune began in 1974 after a French consortium acquired the cinematic rights to make the movie, with Jodorowsky chosen as the director. To say that the avant-garde filmmaker's plans were grandiose is an understatement, with his imagination flowing more freely than Arrakis' mélange spice ever did. Jodorowsky wanted to make the film 10 hours long, though his gargantuan script, arguably, would've made it closer to 14 hours. This Biblical size was matched with a similar scope, as the director wanted the movie to be "prophetic" in its vivid passion.
The result would be a film that took its viewers to a higher state of consciousness and existence, which matches what the director had stated about his goals. Jodorowsky once said about his version of Dune, "I wanted to do a movie that would give people who took LSD at that time the hallucinations that you get with that drug, but without hallucinating." Given what many people of the time thought of science fiction and science fiction films, such a magnanimous feat was certainly necessary to aid the genre.
Most interesting was Jodorowsky's casting choices, which involved both nepotism and pure artistry. Brontis Jodorowsky, the director's son, was selected to play series protagonist Paul Atreides, while the villainous Emperor Shaddam IV was going to be portrayed by none other than famous artist Salvador Dalí. Upon discovering this, Dalí actually wanted $100,000 per hour to play the character, making Jodorowsky engineer the part so that all of Dalí's footage could be shot in one hour. Having Salvador Dalí, of all people, portray an intergalactic emperor is certainly something that many can't even comprehend.
Even stranger was Jodorowsky's intention to have many of Shaddam's scenes shot with a robotic duplicate of the artist. Mick Jagger was also selected to play Feyd-Rautha, with Pink Floyd chosen to provide music for the movie. Sadly, none of this cinematic drug was ever going to be taken by theatergoers, though the film's failed production was far from in vain.
Jodorowsky's Unmade Dune Inspired Numerous Science Fiction Stories
The production design for Dune was worked on by artists such as Chris Foss, Jean Giraud (a.k.a. Moebius) and none other than Alien's H.R. Giger. Many of the unused concepts for the film, namely some of the design cues for Baron Harkonnen's castle, were clearly the aesthetic ancestors of Giger's iconic Xenomorph. The Dune book was a more than minor inspiration for George Lucas' Star Wars, with A New Hope beginning with a crawl shot in space similar to the one that was meant to begin Jodorowsky's Dune. Some of the other concept art for the movie would be used in The Incal, which Jodorowsky and Giraud worked on together.
Sadly, the film as it was intended never came together, with Dune not seeing a film adaptation until 1984's version by David Lynch. This movie was released 10 years after Jodorowsky's began production, with Salvador Dalí sadly not part of the cast. The film remains the Holy Grail of unmade science fiction, and while it might have kept Lynch's version from being made, this now infamous vision for Dune remains an acid trip in the minds of many. The award-winning documentary Jodorowsky's Dune, which recalls the intended film and its production, can be streamed through Hulu.