Unmaking movies – part two

If Paul Martin was fully committed to the concept behind his article about unfinished films then he would have stopped writing at the end of Part One, and left the piece forever incomplete. But he hasn't. He's written a Part Two instead. And here it is.

Published the year after the collapse of Clouzot's Inferno and the release of Goldfinger was a science fiction novel by Frank Herbert, entitled Dune, which went on to become one of the most widely-praised and enduringly popular works ever to emerge in that particular literary field. And a decade on from the publication of Herbert's book came a bold attempt to bring it to the big screen, with the Chilean-born writer/director/star of lunatic western/religious allegory El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky, taking the reins of what turned out to be one of the most legendarily ambitious movie projects ever to fail to get off the ground.

Jodorowsky is famously every bit as eccentric as his movies might indicate, and writing in the French magazine Métal Hurlant in 1985, he offered a typically offbeat take on how he came to be involved in adapting Herbert's tome for the cinema; 'Once the Divinity agreed to say to me in a lucid dream: “Your next film must be Dune.” I had not read the novel... as an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited until someone opens the bookshop to buy the book.' From such strange beginnings, Jodorowsky found himself at the centre of a massive Paris-based production, with an eclectic ring of collaborators assembled around him. Fresh off of no-budget John Carpenter movie Dark Star, Dan O'Bannon was put on special effects duty; Swiss artist H. R. Giger was engaged as a designer; and French comic book whizz Moebius was enlisted to storyboard Jodorowsky's epic script (the suggestion was that three hours was the absolute minimum duration for which the film would have lasted).

More than anything else, it is probably this alignment of cult talents which has ensured the Jodorowsky Dune can still inspire wistful sighs in film fans, still smarting with disappointment that it never made it to the screen, most of them too young to have even been aware of the attempt till twenty years after it all fell apart. There were other elements though within the project which strongly suggest any completed movie would have been more bold folly than genre classic. As they were on Antonioni's intriguingly pretentious Zabriskie Point, Pink Floyd were installed on soundtrack duties, while the key role of Paul Atreides was to be filled by Jodorowsky's own son, Brontis (who appeared as an eight-year-old in El Topo). Most eyebrow-raising of all was the decision to cast Salvador Dalí as the Padishah Emperor, with the surrealist icon agreeing a fee of $100,000 for one hour's filming, thereby becoming the sole human being in history to make Marlon Brando look like he got stiffed on his Superman deal. Furthermore Dalí demanded creative control of his scenes, suggesting that his character should sit on a toilet-throne made of two dolphins – one dolphin to receive his urine, one to receive his faeces. In his Métal Hurlant piece Jodorowsky recalls Dalí explaining to him that “It is completely necessary to see the Emperor making wee and excrement.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, Dune soon floundered over budgetary concerns and the perceived difficulty of Jodorowsky's vision, with the property eventually re-emerging in the shape of the oft-pilloried, David Lynch-helmed, Dino De Laurentiis production of 1984. That failure served to put Dune on the cinematic back-burner for a period; although a fresh version is now brewing at Paramount, with news emerging earlier this week that Taken director Pierre Morel will be calling the shots.

Around the same time that Lynch's Dune was flopping at the box-office, De Laurentiis was involved in another science fiction movie wrangle, with the veteran producer attempting to put together a David Cronenberg-helmed Total Recall. Following his work on the effects for Jodorowsky's Dune, Dan O'Bannon had penned a number of screenplays in conjunction with Ron Shusett, including Alien, and an adaptation of Philip K. Dick's short story We Can Remember It for You Wholesale. This latter script, entitled Total Recall, intrigued Cronenberg with the questions about memory and identity upon which it touched, but as the Videodrome and History of Violence director notes in the book Cronenberg on Cronenberg, he spent a year gamely battling against Ron Shusett's vision for the film as “Raiders of the Lost Ark goes to Mars”. Despite having got as far as scouting Tunisia as his Mars location (following the lead of George Lucas with Tatooine in Star Wars), Cronenberg eventually abandoned the project, leaving the path clear for Paul Verhoeven to deliver his loud, bloody, but not wholly charmless Schwarzenegger-starring version in 1990.

Blade Runner aside, Philip K. Dick has not been particularly well-served by the cinematic interpretations of his writings, with the likes of Next, Screamers, and Paycheck all going down poorly with his devoted following. And the same problem bedevilled Umberto Eco in the late 80s, as he saw his medieval mystery novel The Name of the Rose turned into a Sean Connery-starrer that did little to endear itself to the Italian author. Eco was reputedly so infuriated with Jean-Jacques Annaud's film that he subsequently refused to countenance offers for his any of his other books to be turned into movies.

Meanwhile, somewhere in Hertfordshire, a great cinematic brain was stirring. Over the course of his dazzling career behind the camera, Stanley Kubrick accumulated more than his fair share of long-gestating projects (a Napoleon biopic with Nicholson as the Little Emperor, Brian Aldiss' Super-Toys Last All Summer Long, which would later transmute into Spielberg's A. I.), but he was apparently keen for a while to chance his hand at an adaptation of Eco's occult puzzler Foucault's Pendulum. The story goes that Kubrick's attempts to acquire the rights to the book were batted away without the novelist being informed, only for Eco to try to facilitate a deal once he latterly learned that the legendary director of 2001 and A Clockwork Orange was interested. Alas, by then it was all too late, and the director passed away before proper contact could be established between the two. A great pity for many reasons, though it would have been extremely interesting to see what Kubrick would have done with a book that is only one-third breathless conspiracy thriller, and two-thirds a bunch of blokes sat in a room, gassing about the history of the Knights Templar. Still, if it had happened it might have spared us The Da Vinci Code.

Yet if we refer back to the Lynch version of Dune, then we can instantly see that it underlines the perils of eulogising the unmade film – that, as they are never completed, they are never put to any kind of critical stress-testing. Imagine a reality in which Lynch had been denied his tilt at Herbert's epic, as Jodorowsky was, or as Tarantino was with Bond, a reality in which his vision was adjudged too oblique for the general public. It would to this day be a cause of great lament amongst cinephiles, as they salivatingly pondered what incredible filmic wonders the Blue Velvet and Lost Highway director might have conjured up in order to tell the saga of Paul Atreides. But, in any such flights of fancy, would these fans for even a second have considered that the end result would have delivered Sting, in Action Man underpants, trying to look mean and moody to a Toto soundtrack? Why, it seems every bit as unlikely as the continuing screen success of Matthew McConaughey.