This was shown in the Irish Film Institute as the opening film in their season of films by Alejandro Jodorowsky. Unlike the others however this is not a film directed by the crazy Chilean but a documentary made by one Frank Pavich about Jodorowsky's ultimately unsuccessful attempt to film Frank Herbert's novel Dune in the early 1970s. The film recounts how the art house success of The Holy Mountain put Jodorowsky in a position where he could choose whatever he wanted for his next project, and he choose to film Dune, despite not having read the book. Jodorowsky seems to have been a persuasive fellow and managed to assemble an impressive if not entirely conventional team to serve as the film's cast and crew, with Moebius, H.R. Giger, and Chris Foss providing conceptual art, Pink Floyd and Magma signed up to do the music, Dan O'Bannon for special effects, and so on. Orson Welles was recruited to play Baron Harkonnen (lured in by the the promise that the chefs of his favourite restaurant would be on hand to cook his meals) and Salvador Dali was to play the Padishah Emperor. Dali insisted that he would only appear if he was to be the highest paid actor in the world, so Jodorowsky offered him $100,000 per minute of screen time and then made plans to limit the screen time used to the bare minimum and arranged for the creation of robot Dali that could double up for the artist. David Carradine, Mick Jagger and Gloria Swanson were lined up for other roles. And Jodorowsky's 11 year old son was to play Paul Atreides, because why not.
An enormous amount of pre-production work appears to have gone into the project, including the creation of a huge book of storyboards and notes on how shots and effects would be realised. But no footage whatsoever of the film was ever shot. To be made the film needed Hollywood onboard, but none of the studios were willing to entrust the big budget required to an art film weirdo like Jodorowsky. Somewhat ironically, in the early 1980s they entrusted a much bigger budget to David Lynch, a different art film weirdo, whose version of Dune was a commercial flop (though it has its admirers).
So Jodorowsky's Dune was never made and vies with Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon for the title of greatest unmade film of all time. The project seems not to have been a complete failure, however. Jodorowsky and Moebius recycled ideas they had developed for the film into the enormously successful comic The Incal. For H.R. Giger involvement in Jodorowsky's Dune was his entree into the world of cinema art design and the wider fame and fortune that came his way through his work on Alien. And allegedly the book of notes and storyboards was ripped off for every Hollywood science fiction film of the later 1970s and 1980s. The documentary may perhaps be over-egging its claims here, but it does have some striking juxtapositions of storyboard images with scenes from Star Wars and others. This then is an engagingly made documentary about another film that does not exist. It helps that Jodorowsky is so engaging and that they have the original Dune concept art to animate to good effect. The music (by Kurt Stenzel) is also very evocative of the 1970s.
image sources:
Chris Foss spaceship (vocal.media: Jodorowsky's Dune)
Moebius story board (Open Culture: Moebius' Storyboards & Concept Art for Jodorowsky’s Dune)
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