Dune (1984). Directed by David Lynch. Written by David Lynch, based on the novel by Frank Herbert. Starring Kyle MacLachlan, Francesca Annis, and Kenneth McMillan.
Here’s the thing: My father read Frank Herbert’s Dune to me and my siblings as a bedtime story. He read several of his favorite books to us over the years, and Dune was one. Even now, every time we walk on sand dunes or beaches, we remind each other not to walk with a steady rhythm. Then, of course, we stomp with a steady rhythm right next to a sibling, to lure the worms to come eat them first. We still tell each other to stick our hands into open boxes under threat of the Gom Jabbar. In fact, we sometimes use “gom jabbar” the same way people use words like doohickey or thingamabob, as a catch-all for an object: “Pass me that thing there, no, not the screwdriver, the gom jabbar.”
None of this makes me a Dune expert. Compared to the average readership of this site, I barely know anything about Dune.
Sure, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know Dune, but I also haven’t read the novel since I was young enough to have it read to me. I never read any of the other books in Herbert’s series. I’ve never seen any adaptation except David Lynch’s, and prior to this month the last time I watched it was probably about thirty years ago. (Yes, Dad, I will watch Denis Villeneuve’s films at some point, stop pestering me about them. I might also reread the book some day.)
My point is: If you want a write-up about this movie from somebody who knows the ins and outs of Herbert’s novel in great detail, there are many to choose from, including several on this very site. I am not that person. I am just somebody who has been rooting for the giant worms since childhood. I love the giant worms.
So let’s talk about how the movie Dune (1984) came about.
Frank Herbert’s novel Dune was published in 1965, and it has been widely read and beloved ever since. The first producer to acquire rights to adapt Dune into a film was Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind The Planet of the Apes (1968) and the franchise it spawned. Jacobs bought the rights to the novel in 1971, and that’s where we begin our brief tour of “Directors Who Didn’t Make Dune (But Whose Versions of Dune I Would So Totally Watch If I Had the Chance).”
First on that list is Sir David Lean, director of a few films you might have heard of: Great Expectations (1946), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Doctor Zhivago (1965). Yes, Lean seems like an odd choice for a sci fi epic about people doing psychedelic drugs to travel through space. But you can appreciate what Jacobs envisioned, because if somebody can adapt Charles Dickens and Boris Pasternak, they can handle a complex story with a cast of thousands. Lean was, alas, not interested, so we’ll never know what his version of Dune might have looked like. Jacobs approached a few other directors, but he didn’t find anybody before his death in 1973.
The film rights were then purchased from Jacobs’ production company by what every article amusingly refers to as a “French consortium.” That’s where Alejandro Jodorowsky comes into the story. His long, involved, ambitious, and ultimately doomed attempt to make the movie has been told in the award-winning documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013). The film was eventually abandoned because it would have been much too long (10-14 hours of film were storyboarded) and much, much too expensive. The production’s imagination was, alas, bigger than its available resources.
The Dune that Jodorowsky never made would have been fascinating and strange. I know we all want to visit a parallel universe where it came to fruition. Even without actually existing as a film it has managed to be impressively influential on sci fi cinema, although in a somewhat indirect way, as several people involved with the project would go to work on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979)—including artist H.R. Giger and Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon.
The owners of the film rights sold them on again, this time to Dino De Laurentiis, the producer behind a vast and eclectic assortment of movies ranging from Federico Fellini’s La Strada (1954) to Roger Vadim’s Barbarella (1968) to Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973). De Laurentiis first got Herbert to write the screenplay, but Herbert himself described his effort to compress the book into a film as a failure.
That’s when De Laurentiis brought on the third and final of the “Directors Who Didn’t Make Dune (But Whose Versions of Dune I Would So Totally Watch If I Had the Chance).” Ridley Scott had just finished with Alien, and he spent several months working with yet another Dune screenplay, this one by author Rudy Wurlitzer. Scott soon came to the conclusion that the story would take two movies to tell, and that would require more time than he was willing to put into it.
So we’ll never know what Ridley Scott’s Dune would have looked like, which is unfortunate, because I bet it would have been really cool. But I’m also glad he didn’t do it, because he went on to make Blade Runner (1982) instead, and we know how I feel about Blade Runner.
You have probably noticed the pattern by now: Everybody who looked at Dune knew that it would take more than two hours to tell the story properly.
There are very few universal truths when it comes to Hollywood and adaptation, but this is one of them. Everybody knew this story required more than a single movie. Directors knew it, screenwriters knew it, even the producers knew it, although they probably lied to the money people about it. Everybody knew it.
At this point, it was 1981 and the nine-year film option was about to expire. (Shocked professional aside: Nine years? Good lord.) But letting go of a hugely popular sci fi property right smack in the middle of the “hugely popular sci fi movies are making bank” era was not the plan, so De Laurentiis negotiated a new agreement with Herbert. And at some point De Laurentiis’ daughter, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis, took over the project. With the money coming from Universal Studios, she was the one who brought David Lynch into the fold.
Lynch was still a pretty new director, but his reputation was experiencing a meteoric rise at the time. After Eraserhead (1977) enjoyed its indie success as a midnight movie and arthouse darling, Lynch made The Elephant Man (1980), which is loosely based on the life of Joseph Merrick. The Elephant Man was a tremendous success both commercially and critically. It was nominated for a pile of awards, including several Academy Awards. (The film also led to an organized push in Hollywood to demand the Academy recognize the work of makeup artists, which led to the creation of the Academy Award for Best Makeup.)
As Lynch’s star was rising, so too was Hollywood’s demand for big, flashy sci fi movies, thanks to the wild success of Star Wars (1977). Lynch was also offered a chance to direct Return of the Jedi (1983), because everybody and their brother was offered a chance to direct Return of the Jedi, but he declined. (Aside: I maintain that of all the directors who didn’t direct Return of the Jedi, Lynch was in fact not the strangest possibility. That honor belongs to David Cronenberg. Imagine a Cronenberg Return of the Jedi… Imagine Cronenberg Ewoks.)
Lynch didn’t know Dune before Raffaella De Laurentiis approached him, but he read it, liked it, and set to work writing his own screenplay. At first he was working with his cowriters from The Elephant Man, Eric Bergren and Christopher De Vore, but they left the project after some time. Lynch wrote several drafts of the screenplay. He wanted to tell the story across two movies, just like everybody else who had tried to adapt it, but Universal disagreed. They wanted a standard two-hour movie. They wanted a big, flashy, popular space opera that would launch a new series or trilogy.
To address the obvious question: I don’t know if any of the people in charge at Universal had read Dune. I may not know Dune that well, but even I know that you don’t look at Dune if you want another Star Wars.
That’s not what they got. What they got is… well.
The most frustrating thing about David Lynch’s Dune is that it could have been so fucking good. It’s not a good movie, but the elements are there. There are glimmers of beauty and possibility all over the place. It’s so easy to imagine what it might have been, but the film aggressively compresses a story that needs time to breathe. And, as Jill Krajewski wrote in Vulture last year, “It’s also a shame to watch Lynch’s special-effects budget run out in real time….”
I think that’s even more disappointing than a film that has no potential.
That’s not mere speculation about the time and budget problems; the production of the film was thoroughly documented and reported while it was happening. See, for example, a 1983 New York Times article on the production, or the on-set diary from journalist and filmmaker Paul M. Sammon that was published in Cinefantasique in 1984.
The movie was filmed at Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, largely because Dino De Laurentiis thought it would save money. It’s unclear if the benefits outweighed the problems. From basic issues like not always having reliable electricity to more complex geopolitical issues like not being able to acquire certain equipment due to import embargos and weeks-long delivery delays—or even relying on crew members to bring supplies in their personal luggage when they arrived—one has to wonder if the choice caused more problems than it solved.
In any case, the production was massive and constantly in need of more time and more money. In one interview, model unit supervisor Brian Smithies recalls arriving at the studio to find Raffaella De Laurentiis going through the script page by page and tearing out things she knew they wouldn’t have the money to film. And that wasn’t at the beginning of the production—that was several months in, after one effects crew had already left and others had been brought in to do a huge amount of work in a very short amount of time.
I always watch the movies for this column before I do any reading or research. And when I sat down to watch Dune, not having seen the movie since I was a kid, at first I was thinking, “Why does everybody hate this? It’s not nearly as bad as they make it sound.”
That feeling did not last. But the film really does begin with promise! The first third is quite good! Sure, the voiceovers are annoying and unnecessary, but that’s the kind of thing where you can practically hear the confused memos from studio execs forcing awkwardness onto the film. The cast is strong, with a few standouts, such as Kyle MacLachlan as Paul Atreides and Brad Dourif as Piter De Vries, and while the Baron Harkonnen character has some, uh, problems (to put it mildly), those problems aren’t with Kenneth McMillan’s performance.
One aspect of Lynch’s Dune that remains impressive is the art and production design. For all of the film’s problems, the work overseen by production designer Anthony Masters (who also worked on 2001: A Space Odyssey) and art director Benjamín Fernández is incredible. Especially in the first half of the movie, the combination of wonderfully unique design, extensive use of miniatures and matte paintings, and the construction of elaborate sets do so much work in establishing this film’s different settings. The overall design is maximalist and baroque, and each setting has an immediately identifiable look and feel: the dark wooden rooms on Caladan contrasted with the garish gold around the emperor, or the nauseating industrialism of Giedi Prime versus the cramped underground warrens of Arrakeen.
Even though it’s a scene that some reviews—both contemporary and retrospective—call out as a bit too much, I completely adore the scene where the Spacing Guild comes to call on Emperor Shaddam IV (José Ferrer). I love everything about it: the fuss and anxiety of the emperor and his court in that gilded hall, the unsettling demeanor of the Navigator’s attendants and the jarring language translation, the Navigator arriving in that tank that looks like a combination of an art deco train engine and a steampunk contraption, and the lumpy design of the Navigator themself and the constant focus on that spice-breathing sphincter-like mouth. I even love the small detail that there are attendants mopping the floor as the Navigator arrives and leaves.
I know the scene exists to provide exposition—to explain the film’s entire plot, really—but it also serves to demonstrate just how weird the universe of Dune really is.
Unfortunately, it also emphasizes just how poorly later scenes in the film hold up, particularly those that are supposed to show Paul and Jessica’s (played by Francesa Annis) time with the Fremen. We see and feel places where massive chunks of the story were cut out or abbreviated; Universal insisted on editing Lynch’s first rough cut of three to four hours down to two hours, which is why there are all those time skips and voiceovers. That’s a problem for any film, but it’s especially a problem for a film that is supposed to show a young man’s transformation from feudal heir to messianic cult leader. That’s the kind of story that needs to show its work, because the themes of politics and religion and rebellion and power are really very complicated.
To clarify something that is sometimes misreported: Lynch had nothing to do with the longer television version that came out in 1988, nor with any of the other re-edits and versions that have come out since. When he did speak about Dune, which was rarely, he was openly bitter about how it had gone. He once said, “Don’t make a film if it can’t be the film you want to make. It’s a sick joke, and it’ll kill you.” Only after decades had passed did he express interest in a director’s cut but, tragically, it’s too late now.
It’s not that I think all of Dune’s problems would have been solved with more time and more money. More time and more money would not have solved the problem of the almost childishly over-the-top Harkonnen characters. It wasn’t a lack of time or money that had them bringing Toto on to do the soundtrack—which is fine in some places, but laughable in others. And nothing can explain Sting and his winged codpiece. Why is Sting even there? Some things only make sense in the ’80s.
In a larger sense, the adaptation was always going to be complicated by the fact that in Herbert’s novel, Paul Atreides is very much not a Hollywood-style heroic figure. That’s kinda the whole point of the story. And as we have previously discussed, Hollywood in the early 1980s was not terribly favorable toward sci fi films without heroic plotlines. There was always a fundamental disconnect between what the studio wanted and what Dune actually is, and that’s not something that would go away even with all the time and money in the world.
Even so, I would have liked to see it. I wish we had a chance to watch the version of Dune that existed in David Lynch’s screenplay and imagination. I would love to see the full version of Dune that Lynch tried to make, flaws and all. There is enough that is weird and dark and wonderful in the movie to hint at what could have been.
It wouldn’t have been perfect. Maybe it wouldn’t even have been good. But I bet it would have been glorious.
What do you think about Dune? I didn’t even talk about the worms. I have no complaints about the worms. I think they’re cute and very large and they can chomp anything they want. I’m always cheering for the worms.
Next week: It’s hard for me to articulate just how formative Twin Peaks was for me as an impressionable tween who suspected the world was so much more fucked up than adults were telling us. Watch Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me on Max, Criterion, Amazon, Apple, or Fandango.
