Random Affairs

Jodorowsky’s Dune (via Coudal)

He had decided to create a film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s “Dune” without even having read the book. He had only begun reading it after purchasing the rights. The film was slated to star Orson Welles, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, David Carradine, and Gloria Swanson, and feature an original score by Pink Floyd, Magma, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. H.R. Giger (designer of “Alien”) and Jean “Moebius” Giraud were in charge of designing storyboards, costumes, and character sketches. Each planet was to have a separate designer and score, to giving each world a unique feel.  

Dali was cast as the mad emperor of a planet, and granted a whopping $100,000 per hour salary. But just as the storyboards and scripts were nearing completion, funding had run dry. Around the same time, Frank Herbert paid a visit to the pre-production studio, only to find that two million of the nine million dollar budget had already been spent, and that the script was “the size of a phonebook,” resulting in what would have been a 14 hour movie. The film rights were resold to Dino De Laurentiis and later directed by David Lynch. Lynch’s take on the film was universally panned by critics. Although Jodorowsky’s version of Dune was never made, the illustration and storyboard work inspired a mystical comic strip series known as “Incal.”