Entry Forty-Nine: Jodorowsky's Dune (2014)

Jodorowsky's Dune (2014)

Dir: Frank Pavich

"The greatest science fiction movie never made."

 

If you're a cinephile, you're no doubt at least vaguely aware that Chilean surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Santa Sangre) was attached to an ambitious adaptation of Frank Herbert's legendary science fiction novel Dune in the mid-seventies.  More precisely, what Jodorowsky attempted to do was fucking win cinema forever by conjouring up a drug-fueled, FIFTEEN-HOUR mindfuck adaptation of Dune that would have starred his own son Axel as Paul Atreides, David Carradine as Duke Leto, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Gloria Swanson as Reverend Mother Mohiam, Charlotte Rampling as the lady Jessica, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha and Salvador motherfucking Dali as Emperor Shaddam IV.  The film would have married Herebert's narrative to Jodorowsky's own obsessions (castration, resurrection, divine ascension).  The production was to be designed by surrealist painter H.R. Giger, renowned SF paperback cover illustrator Chris Foss and legendary French comics artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud and the effects executed by Dan O'Bannon.  Each faction in the story would have music by a different artist, with Peter Gabriel providing the music for the Atreides, Pink Floyd providing the music for Arrakis/the Fremen and Magma providing the score for the Harkonnen/the Emperor.  Because there would simply be no more movies worth making if this one was completed, the gods of cinema decreed that this not come to pass, and Jodorowsky's funding fell through while the film was still in pre-production.

If you're a genre film fan, even if you're not particularly into Jodorowsky or Dune, you owe it to your self to check out this mesmerizing documentary.  So much of what Jodorowsky attempted on this film has come to inform genre filmmaking in the past four decades, and so many of the players involved went on to work on some of the seminal, groundbreaking SF films of all time.  Jodorowsky assembled the script and all of the production artwork for the film into a book (why in god's name hasn't this been published?!), and many of it's pages come to life in Pavich's film as stunning 3-D images.  While director Pavich interviews everybody associated with production who's available/still alive, Jodorowsky is the real star here and, even in his twilight years, he's a magnetic personality.  He comes across as passionate, ambitious, naive, self-obsessed, insane, tenacious, pitiable and enormously generous, often at the same time.  Four decades later, he's still passionate about the project and regretful that it never came to pass.

After Jodorowsky's film collapsed, the rights to Dune were purchased by Dino DeLaurentiis, who produced a David Lynch-directed adaptation that I adore, but which was critically lambasted and bombed at the box office.  Jodorowsky has only directed intermittently since Dune fell apart, he spends more time writing comic books, where his creative impulses aren't restrained by budget.  O'Bannon, Giger, Moebius and Foss all went on to work on Ridley Scott's Alien.  Speaking of Alien...