This week sees the release of Denis Villeneuve’s long-awaited Dune, the second big-screen adaptation of Frank Herbert’s 1965 sci-fi novel. Of all the major works in the canon, Dune has bedeviled Hollywood for decades. The twists and turns that the tale of Paul Atreides and his desert world took are worthy of a legend of their own, so let’s dive into them right now.
Welcome To Arrakis
Here’s a quick Dune primer if you’ve been living under a sandworm for the last 50 years. Set in the distant future, a group of powerful families controls an interplanetary empire. The Atreides family is tasked with overseeing the desert planet Arrakis, a desolate wasteland that is also the sole source of “spice,” a powerful drug that extends life and grants the ability for Navigators to guide spaceships through “folded space.” Young Paul Atreides is the protagonist of our tale, heir to his father Duke Leto’s empire.
A conspiracy among other families leads to Leto’s death and Paul and his mother on the run on Arrakis. He discovers that exposure to spice has gifted him with precognitive powers, and becomes a leader of the native Fremen people of Arrakis. His quest for revenge brings him into conflict with the Emperor himself, but can even the chosen “Kwisatz Haderach” prevent the Fremen from spreading jihad through the galaxy?
Dune had long been considered “unfilmable” due to its complex, sprawling plot, dozens of oddly-named characters, massive set pieces, and impenetrable jargon. But where there’s money to be made, Hollywood will give it a shot.
Dreams Of Arrakis
1971 saw the first nibble from the film industry towards Herbert’s work. Producer Arthur Jacobs, who had seen success with the Planet of the Apes film, was on the hunt for another franchise to adapt. He bought the option for Dune for his APJAC Productions company, and first approached British director David Lean, fresh off the epic Doctor Zhivago, to helm the picture. A script was begun, but Jacobs passed away in 1973 and APJAC was shuttered.
Their assets were sold off, with a French consortium nabbing the rights to Dune for cheap at the promptings of director Alejandro Jodorowsky.
According to Jodorowsky, he had been visited by a divine being during a lucid dream that told him “Your next movie must be Dune.” He had not yet read the book, so he woke up at six in the morning, waited outside a bookstore, purchased it, and read it straight through in one sitting, finishing at midnight. He then immediately called producer Michel Seydoux, who worked for the company that distributed his previous film The Holy Mountain.
Jodorowsky’s vision for the movie was… ambitious, to say the least. The script, which was the size of a phone book, would have clocked in at a 14-hour movie. French cartoonist Moebius was hired to produce 3,000 storyboard drawings. The director wanted his son Brontis, who was 12 at the time, to play the role of Paul Atreides and made him train in martial arts for six hours a day every day for two years. For the role of the mad emperor, artist Salvador Dali was hired. Dali, ever a prankster, wanted to be the “highest-paid actor in Hollywood history” and Jodorowsky agreed to pay him $100,000 per minute of screen time. So obviously things were very under control.
The French firm ponied up $10 million, but to truly execute the director’s vision the production needed to raise an additional $5 million. And that was where things really went off the rails. Jodorowsky had already spent $2 million in pre-production before a single frame of film was shot, and the producers weren’t able to find anybody willing to risk that much money on what might be a movie too long to show in any theater. After two and a half years, Jodorowsky abandoned ship and the rights were sold once again.
The Cult Of Spice
In 1976, megaproducer Dino Di Laurentiis bought the rights to Dune away from the French group and brought Frank Herbert in to write a script. He delivered a much more reasonable three-hour draft, and Ridley Scott was tagged to direct following the success of Alien. That film’s writer, Dan O’Bannon, had been in charge of effects development for Jodorowsky’s movie and checked himself into a mental hospital after it collapsed.
Scott adapted and refined the script, eventually realizing it would need to be two movies to do the plot’s arcs justice, but after completing Blade Runner also realized that it was simply too huge of a project to survive. He ceded the script to Di Laurentiis, who sat on it for a while until an extremely unlikely director came into the picture.
David Lynch was an oddball Midwesterner who moved to Los Angeles in 1971 to study film at the AFI Conservatory. His debut feature, Eraserhead, was a chilling and surreal portrait of post-industrial America that became one of the decade’s most influential cult movies. From there, he was tapped to direct The Elephant Man, which brought him to the attention of Di Laurentiis’s daughter Raffaella. Lynch was mulling other offers, including one from George Lucas to direct Return of the Jedi, but soon agreed to Dune despite not having read the book.
Lynch’s production was not without issues. Filmed in Mexico City, the director indulged in creative set design and the end result is visually fascinating. Rolling blackouts and food poisoning shut the production down multiple times, and the entire operation had the use of just one telephone line. Lynch turned in a working cut that was over three hours long, shocking financiers at Columbia Pictures. Di Laurentiis had the final cut, and many scenes were trimmed to bring the running time down to just over two hours, with a voice-over added to explain things.
Herbert enjoyed the final product, but he wasn’t in good company. Critics savaged Dune, and it made only $30.9 million on its $40 million budget. Plans for two sequels with Lynch at the helm were abandoned, and Arrakis would lay fallow for decades.
New Worlds
Paramount Pictures announced in 2008 that they had optioned Dune once more, with Peter Berg as director and Frank Herbert’s son Brian attached as a consultant. The new take would spotlight the ecological angle of the material, which seemed ever more relevant on a warming Earth. Berg dropped out for undisclosed reasons, for a brief while French director Pierre Morel (hot off the success of Taken) came aboard but Paramount eventually gave up hope and let their option lapse in 2011.
Five years later, Legendary picked up the rights once more, with Denis Villeneuve attached to direct. This has been by far the easiest of all the attempts at Dune – the director had dreamt of tackling the book for years, and proved his bona fides on projects like Blade Runner 2049. He brought many staff members from that film to the new project, with the goal being to split it into a pair of features like had been done with the successful adaptation of Stephen King’s It.
Filming began in Budapest in 2019, with Timothee Chalamet as Paul Atreides. The production went smoothly, with the film originally set to release in November of 2020. However, the COVID-19 pandemic delayed it multiple times, with its American release coming on October 22. The film has already opened abroad, an unusual move, and critical response is favorable. Cutting the story in half, which would have been an absurd decision when Lynch made his movie, is now something that modern moviegoers expect in the franchise era, and narrowing focus looks to have made Dune more successful as a film.
Villeneuve hasn’t officially signed a deal for the sequel, although the treatment has been written. The director worries that simultaneously streaming Dune on HBO Max for the first month – as Warner Brothers is doing with their pandemic releases – will blunt its earnings and make a second and third film less likely. But that’s just par for the course with the franchise, constantly hijacked by bizarre events outside its control. Dune, like the massive sandworms that roil the surface of Arrakis, is an untamable beast that defies empires and goes its own way. The best we can do is hold on and enjoy the ride.
Be sure to check out Mashable’s Dune coverage as well: The first ‘Dune’ reviews are up. Here’s what critics have to say
