In 1974, French producer Jean-Paul Gibon's consortium hired Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. Jodorowsky assembled an extraordinary creative team: H. R. Giger, Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, Chris Foss, and future Alien writer Dan O'Bannon. His proposed cast was equally surreal, with Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha, Udo Kier as Piter De Vries, David Carradine as Duke Leto, and Jodorowsky's own son Brontis as Paul. Pink Floyd and Magma were approached for music, and Jodorowsky envisioned a mystical, hallucinatory epic that could have run between ten and fourteen hours. The project's grandiosity became its undoing: financing disappeared as the film expanded far beyond a commercially manageable length, and the production was abandoned before a frame was shot. Jodorowsky's team then assembled an enormous presentation book containing storyboards, designs, the script, and visual plans, sending copies throughout Hollywood. Though the film itself never existed, its surviving artwork and concepts influenced later science-fiction cinema, particularly Alien, which reunited O'Bannon with several artists from the failed project. The legend of the unmade film grew so large that a copy of its presentation book sold for more than $2 million in 2021, making a failed production one of cinema's most valuable pieces of unrealized history.
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AI concept artworkArchive Record · 1970s
Alejandro Jodorowsky's 10-Hour Dune That Hollywood Never Dared to Make
Jodorowsky's Dune / 1970s
In 1974, French producer Jean-Paul Gibon's consortium hired Chilean-French filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky to make an adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune. Jodorowsky assembled an extraordinary creative team: H. R. Giger, Jean 'Moebius' Giraud, Chris Foss, and future Alien writer Dan O'Bannon. His proposed cast was equally surreal, with Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen, Mick Jagger as Feyd-Rautha, Udo Kier as Piter De Vries, David Carradine as Duke Leto, and Jodorowsky's own son Brontis as Paul. Pink Floyd and Magma were approached for music, and Jodorowsky envisioned a mystical, hallucinatory epic that could have run between ten and fourteen hours. The project's grandiosity became its undoing: financing disappeared as the film expanded far beyond a commercially manageable length, and the production was abandoned before a frame was shot. Jodorowsky's team then assembled an enormous presentation book containing storyboards, designs, the script, and visual plans, sending copies throughout Hollywood. Though the film itself never existed, its surviving artwork and concepts influenced later science-fiction cinema, particularly Alien, which reunited O'Bannon with several artists from the failed project. The legend of the unmade film grew so large that a copy of its presentation book sold for more than $2 million in 2021, making a failed production one of cinema's most valuable pieces of unrealized history.
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