The God-Emperor's new clothes.

I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this!  But with love, with love.

Alejandro Jodorowsky, Jodorowosky’s Dune

I’ve just finished watching Jodorowsky’s Dune, a documentary dealing with the legendary failed attempt by Alejandro Jodorowsky to make a film version of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel in 1975. 

Jodoworsky’s production of Dune is a bit like the Holy Grail of science fiction film making, a mystical, almost mythical event that is surrounded by mystery and legend.  For years, bits and pieces of the pre-production work have been floating around: sketches, paintings, storyboards, costume designs, casting and location choices.  This documentary provides a clear view of the process whereby Jodorowsky made his decisions, and offers fascinating insights into one of the most unique and creative film making minds of the 20th century.

However, simply because something is a documentary, that doesn’t mean that it’s unbiased. The greater part of Jodorowsky’s Dune features Jodorowsky speaking about the project, with additional commentary by the producer for the film, Michel Seydoux, conceptual artists H.R. Giger and Chris Foss, and film directors Richard Stanley and Nicholas Winding Refn.  They are unanimous in their praise of the project, describing it as being literally ahead of its time and a great lost opportunity.

What the documentary does not feature is any sort of input from people speaking about the less positive aspects of the production.

Jodorowsky’s script is a million miles away from Frank Herbert’s novel, by everyone’s admission - including Jodorowsky’s. Herbert’s Dune is a brilliant combination of politics, sociology, ecology and religion, but it is firmly grounded in its own reality. Jodorowsky envisioned it as a mystical journey with completely different background, narrative, and climax, which might have been an incredible viewing experience, but which might as well have had a different title as far as its connection to the original.  In fact, Jodorowsky would go on to collaborate with one of the design team, French fantasy artist Jean Giraud, to create a graphic story entitled The Incal which would utilize exactly the same plot elements that appear in his Dune script.

Pre-production was littered with odd examples of excess and indulgence. Jodorowsky speaks blithely of enlisting Orson Welles to play the malevolent Baron Harkonnen by agreeing to hire the head chef from the restaurant where Welles was eating and having him cook for Welles every single day.  Dali, who was to play the Padishah Emperor, was to have been paid $100,000 per minute of his performance, and also demanded a personal helicopter and a flaming giraffe.

Other sources state that when Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976, two million dollars had already been spent on the pre-production planning without even having a contract.  When the script and the lavish production concept book were finally circulated in Hollywood, the studios were polite but definite in their uniform rejection of the entire idea as impractical and unproducible, especially with Jodorowsky at the helm of the project. 

Ultimately, I found that Jodorowsky’s Dune was rather like an inversion of the classic fable from Aesop about the fox and the grapes - instead in this case the grapes would have been the most incredible grapes ever tasted, grapes that would have redefined what grapes meant to the world, grapes that would have altered the perception of a generation of grape-eaters - if only it had been possible to obtain them!

Or it's entirely possible that the grapes - and the movie - would ultimately have proven to be sour after all.

- Sid