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 "When I knew David Lynch will do Dune," moaned Jodorowsky, "I was ill for a year! Then my children bring me to theater, and I start to see film." Huddled in his seat on the stage, Jodorowsky the storyteller became a broken moviemaker woefully peering up at an invisible screen. "Suddenly, I start to do this...." As if infused with helium, he began to rise, an expression of delight breaking across his troubled countenance. Halfway out of his seat, Jodorowsky yelled triumphantly, " FANTASTIC! DUNE IS A HORRIBLE PICTURE!! If picture was  good," he added, dropping back into his seat, normal again, "I think I
die of jealousy." - Alejandro Jodorowsky

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FILM INFORMATION (hypothetical)

FORMAT - 70mm
DURATION - unknown
PRODUCTION - Camera One
PRODUCER - Michael Seydoux
EXECUTIVE PRODUCER - Jean-Paul Gibon
HISTORY - Frank Herbert
SCENARIO & ADAPTATION - Alejandro Jodorowsky
DIALOGUES - Michel Demuth
REALIZATION -  Alejandro Jodorowsky
STORYBOARD - Jean ' Moebius ' Giraud
MUSIC - Henry Cow, Magma, Pink Floyd & Tangerine Dream
GRAPHIC DESIGN - Chris Foss, HR Giger, Moebius & Richard Corben
SPECIAL EFFECTS - Dan O'Bannon
MARTIAL ARTS - Jean-Pierre Vigneau

      In 1965 Dune the novel was published; on March 20, 1983, Dune the film began shooting on soundstages at Mexico City's Churubusco Studios. During the 18 year genesis between fiction and film, Frank Herbert's book so grew in popularity that a movie adaptation was inevitable. Inevitable but difficult. Before writer/director David lynch and producers Raffaella DeLaurentis and Dino DeLaurentis finally transferred Dune to the screen, a number of prior attempts were made to film Herbert's novel. All of these adaptations faced obstacles, not the least of which was boiling down Herbert's 500 plus-page manuscript into a palatable screenplay retaining the books complex characters and ideation. Although the initial attempt at a Dune film took place in the late 60's (by Planet Of The Apes producer Arthur P. Jacobs, whose sudden death finished the project before it really began), it was a full ten years after the novel originally appeared in print before the first serioous attempt to fix Dune on celluloid was made. In 1975 the Chilean born director Alejandro Jodorowsky(well known for his cult classics El Topo and The Holy Mountain) secured the rights to Herbert's novel, wrote his own screenplay of the book and recieved financial backing from wealthy Parisian Michael Seydoux.  Anticipating and predating such "designer cinema" projects as Star Wars, Alien, & Conan the Barbarian. Jodorowsky's Dune  was also to be visualized by a number of artists. Among those talents contributing to Jodorowsky's Dune were Salvador Dali, Ron Cobb, H.R. Giger, Chriss Foss, and Jean Giraud Moebius. Dan O'Bannon, writer of Alien, Blue Thunder, and Dark Star, was to be the film's director of special effects. For his Dune cast, Jodorowsky had tentatively engaged such actors as Orson Welles for the Baron Harkonnen, David Carradine as Kynes, Salvador Dali as the emperor, and Charlotte Rampling as the Lady Jessica. Jodorowsky himself was to play Duke Leto. The budget was set at a tentative $9.5 million. But after $2 million had been spent in preproduction on set, costume and special effects construction, the money ran out. Unable to raise further funds, Jodorowsky's version of Dune died. But in 1978 DeLaurentis also took an interest in Dune. Rights to the novel again changed hands, and in that same year of 1978 DeLaurentis returned to the source and commisioned a Dune script from Frank Herbert himself. But Herbert's resulting 175 page screenplay was deemed unsatisfactory and, after re-reading the novel 3 more times, DeLaurentis decided to first hire a director with a strong visual sense and then find a workable script. Therefore in January of 1980, director Ridley Scott, a hot property due to his recently-released Alien was hired by DeLaurentis to helm the 3rd attempt at a Dune film. Scott set up base in London's pinewood studios, hired H.R. Giger as his production designer, and soon began to translate Herbert's novel into a series of storyboards and other drawings. The search for a Dune screenwriter, however, was still on. Scott interviewed a number of writers before finally selecting Rudolph Wurlitzer(Two Lane Blacktop), as the final Dune scenarist. But eight months and three drafts later, opinions were divided as  to the merits of the Scott/Wurlitzer Dune. One of the sore points was a lovemaking  scene between Paul and Jessica, an  incestuous union which resulted in Alia becoming Paul's daughter, a fundamental change which Frank Herbert did not  exactly endorse. Subsequently, by September of 1980 Scott had aboandoned Dune for Blade Runner and Wurlitzer also said goodbye to Dune. Enter David Lynch. Lynch's first film Eraserhead had turned the Midnight Movie circuit on it's collective ear. In the spring of 1981, Lynch's second movie, The Elephant Man, catapulted him  from the underground into the Hollywood establishment. At this point Lynch was offered by George Lucas the chance to direct the then titled Revenge Of The Jedi.  Lynch turned down the offer, claiming he was unable to follow someone else's vision. However, when DeLaurentis approached Lynch with the idea of adapting Dune, Lynch immediately saw the artistic potential of Herbert's book and accepted the challenge. Thus, in May 1981, David Lynch moved onto the Universal Pictures lot and took an office there. The fourth, and perhaps final, attempt to film Dune had begun...and the rest is history.

     "To show the process of illumination of a hero, then a people, then an entire planet (which in turn is the Messiah of the Universe since in abandonning its orbit, the holy planet leaves to spread its light through all the galaxies)...I didn't want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it. For me, Dune didn't belong to Herbert just as Don Quixote didn't belong to Cervantes. There is an artist, one alone among millions of others artists, who one time in his life, by a piece of divine grace, receives an immortal theme, a MYTH...I say "receive" and not "create" because works of art are received in a state of mediumness directly from the collective unconcious. The work overtakes the artist and in some way it kills him, because humanity, in receiving the impact of Myth, has a profound need to erase the individual who receives it and transmits it: his individual personality hampers, stains the purity of the message which, at the root, asks to be anonymous... We don't know who created the Notre-Dame cathedral, nor the Aztec solar calendar, nor the tarot of Marseille, nor the myth of Don Juan, etc. One feels that Cervantes gave HIS version of Quixote--of course incomplete--and that we carry in our soul our total character... Christ didn't belong to Mark, Luke, Matthew or John... There are many more gospels called apocryphal and there are as much lives of Christ as there are believers. Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul... I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and at the same time conflict (I think the same thing happened to him)... He hampered me... I didn't want him as an advisor of technique... I did everything to keep him away from the project... I had received a version of Dune and I wanted to transit it: the myth had to abandon the literary form and become image... In the film, Duke Leto (father of Paul) would be a man castrated in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight. (The emblem of the Atreide house being a sacred bull...) Jessica--Bene Gesserit nun--, sent like a concubine to the duke to create a daughter who would be the mother of a Messiah, falls so much in love with Leto that she decides to blow a link in the chain and create a son, the Kwizatz Haderach, the saviour. In using her powers of Bene Gesserit--as soon as the duke, madly in love with her, confides his sad secret--Jessica lets herself be inseminated by a drop of blood of this sterile man... The camera followed (in the script) the red drop through the ovaries of the woman and accompanied its meeting with the ovule where, by an miraculous explosion, it inseminates the egg. Paul was born of a virgin, and not by the sperm of his father but by his blood... In my version of Dune, the Emperor of the Galaxy is mad. He lives on an artificial planet of gold, in a palace of gold constructed according to the non-laws of anti-logic. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The resemblance is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are facing the man or the machine... In my version, the spice is a blue drug of a spongy consistency filled with a vegtable-animal life endowed with consciousness, the highest level of consciousness. It doesn't stop taking all sorts of forms, shifting without cease. The spice continually reproduces the creation of innumerable universes. Baron Harkonnen is an immense man of 300 kilograms. He is so fat and heavy that, in order to move, he needs to continually use antigravitational bubbles attached to his extremities... His delusions of grandeur have no limit: he lives in a palace constructed as a portrait of himself... This immense sculpture stands on a sordid swampy planet...In order to enter the palace, one has to wait for the colussus to open its mouth and stick out a tongue of steel (landing strip...) At the end of the movie, the wife of Count Fenring bounds towards Paul, who has already become Fremen, and she slices his throat. Paul while dying says: "Too late, you can't kill me... because..." "Because, (continues Jessica with the voice of Paul) in order to kill the Kwizatz Haderach, you would have to kill me too..." And every Fremen, every Atreide talks now with the voice of Paul: "I am the man collective. He who shows the way." Reality transforms rapidly. Three columns of light shoot out from the planet. They mix. Sink into the sand of the planet: "I am the Land that awaits the seed!" The spice dries up. The sun trembles. Drops of water form a piller surrounded by fire. Filaments of silver surge from the spice. Creating a rainbow. They merge into a cloud of water, producing a red "lava". Then vapor. Some clouds. Some rain. Some rivers. Some grass. Some forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring now surrounds the planet. It separates. It produces more and more rings. Dune is at present an illuminated world which traverses the galaxy, that leaves it, that gives its light--which is consciousness--to all the universe. In order to conceive this final sequence of transmutation of matter, I had the chance to come in contact with some real alchemists... Some mysterious beings (one of them seemed to have more than a hundred years, an advanced age which yet permitted him to move about with the energy of a young adolescent) approached me because Dune could be a philosophical stone, the stone which changes all the other metals into gold... In this sequence, they described what really happens when they transform, in their alchemical ovens, matter... For the "guerilla" war that Paul and the Fremen lead against the imperial army, I had the chance to contact a guerilla expert in South America... He had fought in Bolivia, Chili, Peru and Central America... His precious information brought to the story a soldierly reality... When Jessica becomes the supreme mother of the Fremen and has to go through the ceremonies of initiation, learn sorcerors' medecine and contact other dimensions of reality, I knew of gypsy magical medecine through Paul Derlon, already deceased... And the ceremony of magic mushrooms and the miraculous operations by the witch Pachita, a being who had way more powers than the so-called Phillipino surgeons. My son Brontis, who had to play Paul, was initiated at age nine by a legendary bodyguard--Jean-Pierre Vigneau--at knife combat(real combat), at karate, at archery... He received lessons from an almost real mentat--Michel de Roisin--who possessed an encyclopedic brain... I remember seeing him give Brontis a lesson on the fable La Cigale et la Fourmi which lasted more than fifteen days... Through the verses, he described a whole age and its civilisations. With the production, we traversed the Sahara. I wanted to film Dune in the Tassili, braving with the actors, the thousands of extras and the technical teams, the torrid heat and the dryness to get a real lunar landscape... The Algerian government was very interested by the project... One time, divinity really wanted to tell me in a lucid dream: "Your next film must be Dune". I had not read the novel. I got up at six in the morning and like an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited for the bookstore to open to buy the book. I read it in one stroke without stopping to drink or eat. Right at midnight, the same day, I finished reading it. At a minute aftermidnight, from New York, I called Michel Seydoux in Paris... He would be the first of the seven samurai that I needed for the immense project. Michel was for me a young man (26 years old) without experience in the cinema but his society Camera One had bought the rights to The Holy Mountain, my last film and had distributed it very well... He told me: "I would like to make a movie with you." I didn't know much about him but, by intuition which surprises me today, seeing him, despite his youth, I recognized in him the greatest producer of this age... Why? Mystery... And I wasn't wrong. When I told him I wanted to purchase the rights to Dune and that the film had to be international because it would be more than ten million dollars (a fabulous sum for that time: even Hollywood didn't believe in science-fiction films, 2001 would be unique and unsurpassable) he didn't move a muscle: "Alright. We'll meet in two days in Los Angeles to buy the rights". He hadn't read the book... I think that he still hasn't read it because the prose of Herbert is bored him... And the rights could be bought-- easily because Hollywood found the book unfilmable and non commercial... Michel Seydoux gave me a carte blanche and an enormous financial support: I could create my team without economic problems. I needed a precise script... I wanted to direct the film on paper before filming... Now all films with special effects are made like that, but at that time this technique wasn't used. I wanted a comic artist who had the genius and the speed, who could serve as camera and at the same time give give a visual style...I found myself by accident with a warrior: Jean Giraud alias Moebius(at the time he hadn't yet done The Airtight Garage). I tell him: "If you accept this job, you have to abandon everything and leave tomorrow with me for Los Angeles to talk with Douglas Trumbull(2001 A Space Odyssey)". Moebius asked me for some hours to think it over. The next day, we left for the United States. It would be a long story...Our collaboration, our meetings in America with strange illuminaries and our conversations at seven in the morning in the little cafe that was the base of our work and was by "chance" called "cafe Univers". Gir made more than 3000 all marvelous drawings...The script of Dune thanks to his talent is a masterpiece. You can see the characters living, you follow the movements of the camera. You visualize the editing, the decors, the costumes...All that with, each time, some strokes of a pencil...I was behind his shoulders asking him for different points of view...In directing the actors, etc. We had filmed the movie... For the third warrior I needed and ingenious dreamer who could paint the space ships in a different way than the American films. That's why I wrote to Christopher Foss, an English painter who illustrated science-fiction book covers... Like Giraud, he had never thought about cinema... With great enthousiasm, he left London and came to settle in Paris... This artist, with the ships that he produced for Dune put a mark on cinema. He could create semi-living machines that could metamorphose the rocks of space with colour... He could create "battleships made thirsty dying century after century in a desert of stars waiting for the living body who would fill empty reservoirs with subtle secretions of its soul... "After I found Giger, the Swiss painter whose catalogue Dali had shown me...His decadent art, sick, suicidal, genial, was perfect to create the Harkonnen planet... He made a project of the castle and the planet which really touched metaphysical horror. (Later he created the sets and monster for Alien.) For the special effect, thanks to the power that Michel Seydoux gave me, I could refuse Douglas Trumbull... I couldn't swallow his vanity, his big boss airs and his exorbitant prices. Like a good American, he played at looking down upon the project and tried to mix us up by making us wait while talking with us the same time as ten other people on the telephone and finally by showing us the superb machines that he was trying to perfect. Tired of all this comedy, I told him to fuck off and went looking for some young talent. I was told that in L.A., it was like looking for a needle in a haystack. I saw in a modest amateur science fiction film festival a movie made sans moyens that I found to be marvelous: Dark Star.
I contacted the young man who had done the special effects: Dan O'Bannon. I almost found myself with a wolf-child. Completely outside of conventional reality, O'Bannon for me had a real genius. He couldn't believe that I could confide in him a project as important as Dune. He was forced to believe it when he received his airplane ticket for Paris. I wasn't wrong: Dan O'Bannon later wrote the screenplay for Alien and many other successful films. With Jean-Paul Gibon, who was the executive producer of Camera One and loved the project as much as we, we left for England to find the musician. A vital aspect for me: each planet had its style of music, for example a group like Magma could realize the Harkonnen warrior rhythms which would be capable of cristallizing the beauty of the sand planet with its mystery and its implacable force, the strange symphony of rings of giant worms. Virgin Records met with us and offered us Gong, Mike Oldfield, Tangerine Dream. At this moment I say: "And why not Pink Floyd?" The group at that time was having such success that almost everyone considered that an unfeasible idea. I had the chance, thanks to my film El Topo, to be known by these musicians. They happily agreed to meet us in London at Abbey Road Studios where the Beatles had recorded their success. Jean-Paul Gibon was very pleasantly surprised that the group would see us. At that time, I had already almost lost my individual consciousness. I was the instrument of my sacred, miraculous work where everything could happen. Dune wasn't at my service, I was like the samurai that I had found, at the service of the work. They were in the middle of recording Dark Side of the Moon. Upon arriving, I didn't see a group of musicians in the middle of making their masterpiece, but four young guys eating fried steaks. Jean-Paul and I, standing in front of them, had to wait for their voraciousness be to satisfied. In the name of Dune I was taken by an anger and I left slamming the door. I wanted some artists who knew how to respect a work of such importance for human consciousness. I think that they didn't expect that. Surprised, David Gilmour ran behind us giving excuses  and made us attend the final mixing of their record. What ecstasy... After, we attended their last public concert where thousands of fanatics cheered. They wanted to see The Holy Mountain. They watched it in Canada. They decided to participate in the film by producing a double album which was going to be called Dune. They came to Paris to discuss the financial part and after an intense discussion, we came to an agreement. Pink Floyd would do almost all the music of the film. With the best music on our side, I started to look for actors. I had seen Charlotte Rampling in Zardoz. I wanted her for Jessica. She refused the role. She wanted at the time to do two or three commercial films, the life of love interested her more than art. David Carradine came to Paris, interested by the role of Leto. The actor that I wanted the most was Dali: for the small role of the mad Emperor... What an adventure!... Dali accepted with much enthusiasm the idea of playing the Emperor of the galaxy. He wanted to film at Cadaqu"s and use as his throne a toilet made up of two intertwined dolphins. The tails would form the feet and the two open mouths would serve one to hold the "pipi", the other to hold the "caca". Dali thinks that it is in very bad taste to mix the "pipi" and the "caca". He was told that he would be needed for seven days... Dali replied that God made the universe in seven days and that Dali, not being less than God, must cost a fortune: 100000 dollars an hour. Probably upon arriving on the set, he would decide to film each day no more than an hour for the same price.  The Daliesque happening would cost us 700000 dollars. We asked him for time, a night, to make a decision and we left each other. That night, I tore a page from a book on the tarot; it had a card reproduced on it: the Hanged Man. I wrote him a letter saying that the film couldn't pay him 700000 dollars. For 150000 dollars, I wanted three days and no more than an hour and a half of filming. I also wanted to have a polyethylene puppet, his replica, to use as his double in the film. Dali got angry. He cried: "I'll have you like rats! I will film in Paris, but the set will cost you more than the landscape of Cadaqu"s and the cadre of my museum. Dali costs 100000 an hour!" Bitter, he calmed down and accepted the idea of reproducing him in plastic if after the film the sculpture was given to his museum. We decided to definitively finish with the contract the next day. I had a discussion with Jean-Paul Gibon and we arrived at the conclusion that it was impossible to haggle with Dali. I meditated for a long time and I took this final decision: I reduced the role of Dali to a page and a half of script. I accepted his price, 100000 dollars an hour, but I would only use him for a single hour. The rest, I would film with his double. Dali couldn't allow himself to go back on his price. We went to see him. I gave him the little page and a half and Dali accepted the proposition because his honor was safe. He would be the highest paid actor in the history of cinema. He would earn more than Greta Garbo. Dali, with enthusiasm, showed me his wooden bed as the sculpture of a dolphin. A worker was there, already making the blueprint of the dolphin to make the toilet. As much for Dali as for me, the card of the Hanged Man on which some words were written served as a contract. Dali liked the aristocracy and like all men of noble spirit, he respected his word. I liked fighting for Dune. We won almost all the battles, but we lost the war. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was not "Hollywood enough". There was intrigue, plunder. The storyboard was circulated amongst all the big studios. Later, the visual aspect of Star Wars strangely resembled our style. To make Alien, they called Moebius, Foss, Giger, O'Bannon, etc. The project signalled to Americans the possibility of making a big show of science-fiction films, outside of the scientific rigour of 2001: A Space Odyssey. The project of Dune changed our lives. All those who participated in the rise and fall of the project of Dune have learned to fall one and a thousand times with a fierce stubbornness, until learning to stand up. I remember my old father who, while dying happy, told me: "My son, in my life, I have triumphed because I have learned to fail."

        While David Lynch's unlucky 1984 adaptation of Dune came as an extreme disappointment to many fans, it might be  comforting to remember just how much stranger the movie could have been. In the early 1970s, underground filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for the psychedelic western "El Topo," assembled an all-star pre-production team to "recreate" Frank Herbert's novel. Swamped in the Hollywood backwash of "Star Wars," the film was never made. What is left behind, like echoes of water in the desert, are names, reminiscences and occult hints. Pink Floyd, at the height of their career, had agreed to provide music. French comic-book legend Jean "Moebius" Giraud drew thousands of character sketches and designs, Christopher Foss was creating the spaceships and H.R. Giger had claimed the decadent Harkonnens as his own. Those who dislike the Lynch film, with its sound-based  weaponry and "mutilated" storyline, may be horrified to learn that Jodorowsky took on the task of adapting Dune before he had even read the novel. As he told French documentarian Louis Mouchet, Jodorowsky proposed the project to one of his distributors, Michel Seydoux, sometime around 1973. "In fact I hadn't even read the book," he said. "Someone had  simply told me what the book was about. Besides I just liked the story, and needed to support my family."Elsewhere, in a 1985 interview with the French magazine Metal Hurlant, he remembers his first encounter with Dune as a more characteristically hyperbolic experience.

'YOU'RE NEXT FILM MUST BE DUNE"

     "One time, divinity really wanted to tell me in a lucid dream: 'Your next film must be Dune,' " he said. "I had not read the novel. I got up at six in the morning and, like an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited for the bookstore to open to buy the book. I read it in one stroke without stopping to drink or eat. Right at midnight, the same day, I finished reading it."In any case, he would later compare Herbert's masterpiece to the cathedral at Notre-Dame, the Aztec solar calendar, and the tarot of Marseilles -- all works of profound and universal mythological importance. It was on this level that Dune fascinated him."I didn't want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it," he explained. " Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul. I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and, at the same time, conflict. (I think the same thing happened to him.)"As such, Jodorowsky did everything he could to keep Herbert away from "his" film. Herbert would not make it to Paris, where the nascent production set up shop, until 1975, and it is unknown whether the director and novelist ever actually met.

'SEVEN SAMURAI'

    Meanwhile, Jodorowsky was busy getting what he would call his "seven samurai" together. Seydoux was the first of these, and filled the role of producer. Moebius and Chris Foss were brought in to provide the film with their unique design senses, but Douglas Turnbull, the special-effects wizard who realized "2001: A Space Odyssey," was rejected for "his vanity, his big boss airs and his exorbitant prices."Instead, Dan O'Bannon, fresh off the unexpected triumph of "Dark Star," was hired to do effects. In perhaps the ultimate coup for Jodorowsky's unworldly  sensibilities, even surrealist painter Salvador Dali was onboard in a small but important role as the galactic Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. After a brief but typically eccentric display of egoism, Dali agreed to spend an hour on the film set as the emperor for a fee of $100,000 -- an extreme  sum for a project with a reported budget of $20 million .To work around this apparent cinematic problem -- apparently caused by Dali's desire to earn more for his dramatic efforts than, if not God, then Greta Garbo -- Jodorowsky reworked the script, assigning most of Shaddam's scenes to "a polyethylene puppet" molded to exactly resemble the money-crazed surrealist. Fortuitously, Dali introduced Jodorowsky to the work of Swiss painter H.R. Giger, who was quickly pressed into creating the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime and all associated elements of design and costuming. Giger was captivated by the chance to "arrange a whole planet," as he put it in his essay, "Dune: Giger on
Jodorowsky." "My planet was controlled by sinister magic and the indulgence of aggressions," he recalled of Giedi Prime. "Perversions were on the agenda -- briefly, an area for me." Jodorowsky's samurai would work on the film until 1976, when they fell away one by one. By 1977, the project was dead.

WHERE ARE THEY NOW

    Giger, disgusted at how David Lynch would later realize Dune without him, went on to become darkly famous as the designer of "Alien." He eventually mounted a New York exhibit of his Harkonnen designs at the Limelight dance club in 1984. Moebius became even more famous as a comic-book  illustrator in the French style, eventually coming to belated U.S. acclaim as the designer of "The Fifth Element." Dan O'Bannon, described by Jodorowsky as "a wolf-child, completely outside of conventional reality," would later distinguish himself as a screenwriter, penning such films as "Alien," "Invaders from Mars" and the upcoming "Flicker."  Christopher Foss and the members of Pink Floyd all got on with their lives, enjoying lucrative, successful careers in their chosen fields. Dino de Laurentis bought the film rights to Dune and assigns  the project to Ridley Scott, who had just directed "Alien" to great acclaim. However, Scott walks off the film, opening the door for David Lynch. The movie would finally start filming in 1983 and would be released a year later, a financial failure and a source of critical confusion. Dali never got his $100,000. The fate of the polyethylene  puppet bearing his likeness is unknown. Alejandro Jodorowsky is still making films, many of which  never see the light of day.

     "I liked fighting for Dune," he told Metal Hurlant. "We won almost all the battles, but we lost the war. The project was
 sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was 'not Hollywood enough.' " "The project of Dune changed our lives."

BEFORE 1973

     Before Alexandro Jodorowsky do not stick with the implementation of the realization of Dune it existed already two draft amendments: first by APJAC, the company of production of Arthur P. Jacobs (the producer of the series of films the Planet of the Apes) and the second, British, would have been initiated by Patrick McGohan (The Prisoner) But I did not find no information on these two projects.

1973

     After having been almost on the straw by fault of the producer of his film,  Holy mountain Jodorowsky accept proposal of Michel Seydoux (Camera
One), its French distributor, to do one film together: "I said, yes. It has me asked what and I said Dune . But for to laugh! I had not read Dune when I him
proposed. I had intended some to speak. Then it was filled with enthusiasm, it bought them rights. And while reading it, I went count that I was right, that it was necessary to make Dune . But I said that simply parce that I needed to do something, to survive with my family " . Jodorowski thus reads Dune in one night and already it has its film at the head, an enormous film, it describes it with Seydoux as a film internationnal which will exceed the 10 million dollars of budget.
Incredibly, Seydoux accepts. A few days later they are found in Los Angeles to buy the rights of the book, which is done without problem because at the time Hollywood found the book unrealizable with the screen and not commercial... Michel Seydoux give white chart to the realizer and an enormous financial support: It can create its team without economic problem.

1974
     odorowsky work on its adaptation of Dune , it has a vision well with him to make film, very personal. For him Dune is a myth, an immortal topic which exceeds the work of Herbert , it does not even want like adviser to him technical, in fact, it does all to move away it from the project. It does not want to respect the novel, it carremment wishes to recreate it to put it in image. In sound scenario it wants to show the process of illumination of a hero, people, a whole planet . In his film, the Duke Leto (father of Paul) is a man châtré in a ritual combat in the arenas during a bullfight (emblème of the Atréide house being a crowned bull...) Jessica - nun of Bene Gesserit -, sent like concubine at the duke to create one girl who would be the mother of a Messiah, becomes so in love with Leto which it decides to jump a chain link and to create one wire, Kwisatz Haderach, the saver. By using its capacities of Bene Gesserit it is made inséminer by a drop of blood of this sterile man...: " the camera followed (in script) the drop red by the ovaries of the woman and attended her meeting
with the ovule where, by a miraculous explosion, it inséminait it. Paul had been born from a virgin; and not of the sperm of his/her father but of its blood... "
In its version of Dune the Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palate built according to not-laws' of antilogical. It lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him. The ressemblence is so perfect that the citizens never know if they are opposite of the man or machine.. In its version, the spice is a blue drug with spongy consistency filled of an animal vegetable-life endowed with the most level of conscience. It does not stop taking all kinds of forms, while stirring up unceasingly. The Baron Harkonnen is an immense man of 300 kilogrammes. It is so fatty and heavy that, to move, it must make use continuously of antigravitationnelles bubbles attached to its ends... Its delusion of grandeur does not have limits: it lives in one palate built like a portrait of itself... This sculpture immense draws up itself on a sordid and marshy planet... For to enter the palate, one must wait until the colossus opens the mouth and draw a language from steel (landing strip...). " A the end of film, the wife of the Count Fenring leaps towards Paul, already become Fremen, and it slices to him gorges. Paul while mourrant known as: "Too late, one can kill me... because... - Because, continuous Jessica with the voice of Paul, to kill Kwisatz Haderach, it would have to be also killed... "And each Fremen, each Atréides speaks now with voice of Paul: "I am the collective man. That which
show the way "reality changes quickly. Three columns of light spout out of the planet. They mix. Are inserted in sand planet: "I am the Earth which waits
seed! "the spice is desiccated. The ground trembles. water drops form a pillar surrounded by fire. money filaments emerge from spice. Create one
rainbow. They are based in a water cloud, produce a red "lava". Then of the vapor. Clouds. Rain. Rivers. Grass. Forests. Dune becomes green. A blue ring
surround planet now. It is divided. It product more and more of rings. Dune is with present an illuminated world which crosses the galaxy, who leaves it, who gives his light - which is Conscience - with all the universe. " To conceive this final sequence of transmutation of the matter, Jodorowsky come into contact
with truths alchemists which affirm to him that the spice of Dune is during stone philosopher, the stone which changes into gold all other metals.. For the war of "guerrilla" that Paul and Fremen carries out against the imperial army it contacts one expert of the guerrilla in South America... It interress also with the magic gitane and mushrooms hallucinogens for the ceremony of initiation of Jessica. I dare hardly to recall you that we are at the beginning of the Seventies, difficult to imagine all that with the special effects of the time... The dialogues are entrusted to Michel Demuth author of many novels of science fiction
French and translator of Herbert.

1975
     Jodorowsky needs a story-board and a very precise script, it wants to carry out film on paper before turning it. It proposes with Jean Giraud alias Moebius to work on film " I him say: "If you accept this work, you must all give up and to leave tomorrow with me to Los Angeles ". Moebius has me asked for a few hours of reflexion. The following day, us left for the United States " For the anecdote, intimidated by the task to achieve Moebius try of "refiler the baby" with Druillet . But this last shakes his/her friend and persuades it to accept the opportunity offered by Jodorowsky. They leave to Los Angeles to meet the star of the special effects of the time, Douglas Trumbull (2001: Odyssée of Space 3rd Type Meets Blade Runner At the end of one week of work, the Chilean one does not support any more the condécendance of the American and snap the door: "For special effects, thanks to the capacity which gave me Michel Seydoux , I pus to refuse Douglas Trumbull ... I pus to swallow his vanity, its airs of business leader and his prices exorbitant. Like good American, it played to scorn the project and tried to complex us in us making wait while speaking with us at the same time as with ten people on the telephone and finally by showing us superb machines which it tried to improve. Tired of all this comedy, I sent it to shit and left with research a young talent " (it will be daN O' Bannon)

JUNE 1975
     Moebius attacks the préproduction of film. storyboard and research of visual concepts are on the way... Jodorowsky is in the search of one engineer who can draw the space ships in another way that that of American films : "I do not want that the man conquers space in the ships of NASA, these camps of
these freezer, concentration gigantic vomitting the imperialism, these slaughters of plundering and plunder, this arrogance of bronze and thirst, this eunuque science, dribbles of clamping plate effleurant only hardly the divine one, it delirious, superb UNIVERSAL CHAOS. I want vibrating entities magic, vehicles
to prolong to be to it abyss, like fish of a timeless ocean. I want jewels, of mechanics as perfect as the heart, belly-ships, anterooms of rebirth for other dimensions. I want shuttles courtesans, driven by sperm the ejaculations impassioned in an engine of flesh. I want rockets complex and secret, ship-birds, butinant nectar millenium of dwarf stars of the battleships assoiffés dying century after century in one star desert, awaiting the alive body which will fill their empty tanks of secretions subtle of its heart... " It Writes In Christopher Foss an English draughtsman who illustrates covers of books of science-fiction... Like Giraud it never thought of the cinema... With a great enthusiasm, it leaves London and comes to settle in Paris...

DURING 1975(Unknown months)
     DaN O' Bannon (future scenario writer of Alien and of Recall Total ) is engaged as director of special effects and share to settle in Paris. Jodorowsky discovers it by seeing film Dark Star of John Carpenter at the time of the festival of fantastic film of Paris. It describes it like somebody of completely out of conventional reality, O' Bannon has for him a real genius . Herbert et sa femme Bev font leur premier voyage à Paris. Une rencontre entre l'écrivain et
Jodorowsky est fortement probable.

JULY 1975
     Pink Floyd connects the meetings of recording of Wish You Where Here with studios EMI of Abbey Road, in London. It is probably for this period that Jodorowsky makes contact with them to propose to them to compose the music of film. For Jodorowsky , the music is one vital aspect of film. Each planet will have its style of music, Magma , group French is had a presentiment of to carry out the warlike rates/rhythms of Harkonnen. With Jean-Paul Gibon , executive producer of Camera One they leaves for England to seek the musician. Virgin Records receives them and their offer Gong , Mike Oldfield , Tangerine Dream, Henry Cow . Jodorowsky wants too Pink Floyd for the planet of the Emperor: "I had the chance, thanks to my film El Topo , to be known by these musicians. They condescended well to receive us in London with the Abbeyroad studios where Beatles had recorded their success. I wanted artists who can respect a work of one such importance for the human conscience. They decided to take part in film in producing an album which was going to be called Dune composed of two discs. They came to Paris to discuss the economic part and, after an intense discussion, one was able at an agreement.
Pink Floyd would make almost all the music of film."

DECEMBER 1975
     Jodorowsky meets Hans Rudi Giger, artist Swiss, in Paris. Of return at his place, Giger starts to carry out tables to conceptualize the world of Harkonnens: " Its art declining, sick, suicidal, brilliant, was perfect to carry out the Harkonnen planet...It made a project of castle and of planet which really touched with the
metaphysical horror " the Corben draughtsman is contacted to design the world of Bene Gesserit, planet covered of pyramids.

1976
     For the actors, selected Jodorowsky his Brontis son for interpreter Paul Atréide, it wants Charlotte Rampling for the role of Jessica but this one will refuse. David Carradine moves in Paris to work the role of Leto. Amanda Lear will be Irulan, the girl of the emperor. The actor whom he wants more it is El Salvador Dali, for interprêter the insane Emperor.  " Dalí agrees with much enthusiasm the idea to play the Emperor of the galaxy. It wants to film in Cadaquès and to use like throne a W.C made up of two intersected dolphins. The tails will form the feet and the two open mouths will be used one to receive the " wee ", the other to receive the " excrement ". Dalí thinks  that it is of horrible a bad taste to mix the " wee " and the " excrement ". It wants to choose its court among his friends, wants to say what it wants. I ask to him whether it is ready to show its sex and its anus and it say to me that not and that it would like to be doubled, that he wants only that it is seen sitted. It does not want to be directed (put in scene). It wants to do what it wants. I ask him: " If I were a rich person owner and that I said to paint me what you would like yourselves but in the octagonal shape of table, you would do it? " Dalí: " Yes ". Me: " Then, it is possible to work together, I will direct you while asking you questions (the form) and you will answer me as you want with actions "
     Dalí accepts. Me, I think that the battle will be formidable. It will be necessary that I find questions which have only one answer. And as, it will be necessary as I envisage his answers as in part of failures. The idea of a similar play authentically seems to me surrealist and I am more than ever ready to work with
the peintre.Un scenario writer which made a film for the T.V with Dalí says me that it is unforeseeable up to the point to choose to be filmed obscure corners   although have it spent all the day to light decorations where it refuses at the last time to put the feet. That gives me the idea to light the day of turning with Dalí not only the decoration, but also the corridors, the toilets, the roofs, all. If I do not have dark corners, this battle will be gained. I would like to also make make   polyethylene a headstock, his counterpart, to use it like his double in film. Imeditate lengthily and I make this final decision: I reduce the role of Dalí to a          page and half of script. I accept his price, 100 000 dollars the hour, but I take it only for only one hour. The remainder, I will film it with his double robot. I give him the small page and half, and Dalí accepts the proposal because its honor is except. He will be the actor expensive paid in the history of the cinema.

APRIL 1976
     Moebius works on film at least until this period. Giraud made nearly 3000 drawings. The script of Dune (+ of 1000 pages), thanks to its talent, is a           masterpiece. One can see living the characters, one follows the movements of camera. One visualizes cutting, the decorations, the costumes..

1977
     Fault of financial means sufficient, the draft amendment of Dune is definitively given up by Jodorowsky and its producers. " Me, I liked to beat me for Dune. All the battles almost were gained, but the war was lost. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Its message was not " enough Hollywood ". There were intrigues, plundering. The story-board circulated among all the large studios. Later, the visual aspect of Wars Star resembled our style étrangement. To make Alien, one invited M.bius, Foss, Giger, O' Bannon, etc. The project announced to American the possibility of carrying out science fiction films to large spectacle and out of the scientific rigour of 2001: Odyssée of Space. The Dune project changed us the life. When it was not done, O' Bannon entered a psychiatric hospital. Afterwards, it returned to the fight with rage and wrote twelve scripts which were refused to him. The thirteenth one was Alien. Like him, all those which took part in the rise and with the fall of the Dune project learned how to fall one and thousand times with savage obstinacy until learning how to be held upright. I remember my old father who, while dying happy, said to me: " My son, in my life, I triumphed because I learned how to miss ".

1980
     Dino di Laurentiis repurchases the rights of the novel of Herbert and entrusts the realization to Ridley Scott. But this last is annoyed with the production and leaves the place to David Lynch. The continuation of the history, you know it. 

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