The Difficulties Of Getting Dune Onto The Screen – Movie-A-Day: Dune

Starring: Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, Brad Dourif, Linda Hunt, Jose Ferrer Director: David Lynch Year Of Release: 1984 Plot: Life in the universe and space travel is dependent upon a spice found only on the planet Arakkis (aka Dune). The Emperor allows the House Of Atreides to guard Dune and the spice, but it’s actually a trap, so that the rival House Of Harkonnen can kill Baron Atreides. Young Paul Atreides and his mother are then sent into exile on Arakkis. However Paul may a messiah, whose destiny is to free the planet and its population of the cruel rule of the Emperor.

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From the moment Frank Herbert’s Dune was published in 1965, people have been trying to find a way to successfully bring it to the screen. Right from the beginning, many felt this may be impossible, simply because Herbert’s book and its sequels are so complex and full of subplots and complex inter-planetary politics that any attempt to properly do them justice would be both inordinately expensive and impossible to fit into the running time of a movie. Although it might be possible by jettisoning some of the story, the books are so loved and rabidly defended by fans that there’s a real fear among moviemakers of tampering with them.

It’s even impossible to truly do justice to the history of trying to get Dune onto the screen over the years, which includes a 1970s attempt by the nutty director Alejandro Jodowrowsky, Ridley Scott attempting to film it until he left to make Blade Runner, before David Lynch signed on, spent three and a half years and $50 million on making a Dune film, which was released in 1984 and turned out to be a critical and commercial disaster. Indeed, when you watch the film and see Sting (who’s a rubbish actor anyway) running around in ridiculous blue underpants that look like they come from a Jetsons porn film, you wonder what everyone involved thought they were doing. Even Lynch himself later said he felt it was the only time he truly sold out.

There was even at one point in the early 1970s talk of David Lean directing a Dune movie.

Since then there’s been a 2000 Dune mini-series and a follow-up, Children Of Dune, in 2003, which many consider to be better than Lynch’s movie but still a long way short of perfection. And for the last few years there have been yet more attempts to bring Dune back to the silver screen. Until fairly recently Peter Berg (Hancock) was going to direct, but he left late last year and has been replaced by Taken’s Pierre Morel, with work currently ongoing on the script.

It really would take a book to go through it all, so instead I thought I’d point you towards a few interesting resources that are well worth a read, and reveal the complex problems of adapting Dune, particularly with the versions that never actually got made.

The first thing that’s worth reading is an article by Alejandro Jodowrowsky, director of El Topo, where he talks about his attempts to film Dune in the early 70s. It’s a fascinating tale, where he reveals his interesting but unusual ideas for the story (which were hated by Frank Herbert), as well as well as how he wanted Salvador Dali involved as both a designer and actor – with the painter only agreeing if he became the highest paid actor ever, getting $100,000 per hour of work, with the rest of his role performed by a statue. The director felt he was ahead of his time, promoting an aesthetic that turned out to be similar to Star Wars, but which was failed to excite Hollywood at the time and so the movie never happened. Jodorowsky’s version would also have had music by Pink Floyd, and designs from HR Giger, long before the Swiss artist worked on Alien.

Also worth reading is an article from BritishFilm, which is part of a longer discussion of the works of David Lynch from Eraserhead to Wild At Heart. Although rather cloaked in academic film speak, it’s an interesting look at how Lynch tried to embrace the mainstream in the early 1980s, and why it worked with the Elephant Man, which was a critical and commercial hit, but failed so miserably with Dune. The piece is also a fairly interesting dissection of how Lynch’s work in Dune fits with auteur theory, and indeed whether it reveals flaws in the various ways people try to pigeonhole movies, suggesting the whole idea of an auteur breaks down when directors work in the studio system, even if they’re somebody as idiosyncratic as David Lynch.

Finally www.duneinfo.com is well worth exploring. The website covers the whole history of the attempts to film Dune, including concept art from Jodorowsky’s planned version, and comes right through to the latest news on the mooted Pierre Morel version. It includes huge amounts of info and imagery on Lynch’s version, so it’s well worth a bit of an explore, even if the navigation is a little hit and miss. And if you just fancy a timeline of exactly what happened between a Dune film first being suggested in 1971 and Lynch’s movie arriving in 1984, click here. It’s a bizarre and complex tale, and suggests maybe Dune simply isn’t a book that can be successfully filmed.

The history of Dune and the cinema is pretty interesting, and if nothing else, the article by Jodorowsky is utterly fascinating, so take a look.

TIM ISAAC

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