Useless but essential pop culture tidbits and trivia from the worlds of Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror that will not interest any of the other parents at the upcoming PTA meeting.
Most Science Fiction fans are familiar with David Lynch’s big screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s epic novel Dune, and whether you love it or hate it you have to acknowledge that adapting that book presented a monumental challenge. But how many people know about the early failed attempts at a Dune movie that included at one point the involvement of surrealist artist Salvador Dali?
Herbert’s book came out in 1965 and as early as 1971 production company Apjac International had optioned the rights for the film. Not much progress was made on it during the early 70’s and in 1974 a French company acquired the rights and signed avant-garde director Alejandro Jodorowsky to helm the film. His plans would have included bringing on such actors as Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Hervé Villechaize, and Mick Jagger, and Pink Floyd would have produced the soundtrack. He also wanted to bring Salvador Dali on board to play the Emperor Shaddam IV. Also included in the early plans of this production were artists Moebius and H.R. Giger (who would later infamously provide the concept art for Ridley Scott’s Alien). Dali allegedly want $100,000 per hour to appear in the film and Jodorowsky had plans to film all of his scenes within a relatively short time-frame (perhaps as little as one hour) to keep costs down. The script ballooned out of control, though, and would have resulted in a fourteen hour movie! (Which actually makes sense when you consider the source material.) Dan O’Bannon allegedly entered a psychiatric hospital after working through 13 iterations of the script and supposedly the 13th eventually morphed into Alien.
When this production unraveled, Dino de Laurentiis acquired the rights to the film and had Frank Herbert write a script for it and considered Ridley Scott as a candidate for director. De Laurentiis rejected Herbert’s script, though, and nothing ever came of this third attempt to adapt Dune. Ultimately the film passed into David Lynch’s hands, but we can only imagine what it would have been like to see Salvador Dali playing the emperor next to Orson Welles and some of the other well known names attached to the project (and we can only guess that Mick Jagger would have played Feyd-Rautha whom Sting eventually brought to life on the big screen).
Source: Wikipedia
Read John J. Joex’s Review of the Dune Audio Book
