Shadows of Dune

The most overrated trilogy of science fiction books in history has finally been turned into a TV series. 

Apple TV is bringing Isaac Asimov’s Foundation to the small screen. Trailer below:

I can see why Apple is making Foundation. After all their streaming service is in a lot of ways last and least, and so they need something that will make a big impact, up until now they couldn’t find one.  What I can’t see is why anyone is making yet another Dune movie.  It’s been done twice already?

When I was getting close to graduating from high school, Foundation’s Edge came out and reignited interest in the original trilogy.  I somehow managed to slog my way through those first three books. After that, I couldn’t be bothered with Foundations Edge because I honestly didn’t see how it was going to be an improvement. Not that I thought that the concept couldn’t be improved upon, I was just dead certain that Isaac Asimov couldn’t do it. 

It was at best, a sluggish read.  Asimov’s prose was never that good. The characters were bland, cardboard cut-outs.  And there was a palpable air of know-it-all-ism about the story that’s just a bit grating. The various protagonists always knew more than anyone else and the evangelizing atheist church of science reeked of intellectual self-satisfaction.  Isaac Asimov was worse than Clarke from that perspective.

In short, Foundation enjoys a lot more respect than it really deserves. 

I strongly suspect that it was inspired by the vastly superior Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp. Darkness was published in 1939, whereas the first of the Foundation stories made their way into Astounding in May of 1942.  The slightly older work was openly acknowledged to be a lot more influential back in its day. Lest Darkness Fall was about a man who was thrown back in time to a period it just prior to the collapse of the Roman Empire and his successful struggle to save it from falling, thus preventing the dark ages.  

Times have changed, we now know that the dark ages weren’t quite as dark as they were thought to be back then. And it is even arguable that the fall of the Western Roman Empire was indeed a good thing long term. However, we’re talking about the general view of the late 1930s and early 40s. While Asimov didn’t steal the plot line, Foundation is clearly and obviously heavily influenced by de Camp’s work. 

However, to give credit where it’s due, Asimov did create the trope of a galactic empire loosely based on the Roman model. This trope shouldn’t be mistaken for George Lucas’ thinly veiled Nazi regime. It is definitely its own thing and has been used in a number of books, the most famous recent example is probably the Warhammer universe.

Regardless, the best example of the galactic empire trope isn’t Foundation at all.  

It is Dune.

Frank Herbert’s seminal work is everything that the Foundation Trilogy isn’t. Big, sprawling, and epic. A genuine groundbreaker. It turned writing conventions on their heads. Dune created a deep and rich mural in words, where Foundation had only been an outline.

And I strongly suspect that the producers of the new Dune movie are pissed off right now because Apple TV appears to have stolen a march on them.  The trailer for Apple’s new Foundation miniseries looks a hell of a lot like a Dune universe should and they don’t even have their own trailer out yet. 

The question is, why do we think it looks like a Dune universe? 

Because it resembles the preproduction drawings of the most influential science fiction movie that you’ve never seen… Because it was never made.

Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Alejandro Jodorowsky was born in Chile in 1929 to Ukrainian Jewish atheist immigrants, (this usually means Trotskyite Communists who fled from Stalin, but I couldn’t find any corroborating evidence for this on the grounds that I wasn’t looking). Jodorowsky hated his father, (not without reason) and ran away to Paris at the first opportunity that presented itself.  He studied being a mime (nothing I can add to that) but decided to make a lateral career move from clown to filmmaker of art films. 

After some minor successes, he moved from France to Mexico and joined the Mexican surrealist, (which is to say the Absurdist) movement of the early 1960s

While in Mexico City he converted to Acid Buddhism and began infusing his chemically induced spirituality throughout his work.

In 1970 he had his first success with the original ‘midnight movie,’ El Topo.  El Topo’s plot (not that it really had one) was about a Mexican gunslinger wandering in the desert and his quest to kill the Four Master Gunfighters, in order to win the love of a beautiful woman.  Like I said, the plot didn’t matter, the movie was all about the visuals. It was film as performance art. And it was an insane hit in New York.  Everyone who was anyone in the counterculture movement (to include of course John fucking Lenin) declared it the greatest thing ever.

His next movie was Holy Mountain.  And a horrifying truth was suddenly evident, Jodorowsky had had the brakes ON for El Topo.

Before writing the script, he stayed up for a solid week under the supervision of a Japanese Zen master.  Then before shooting started, he and the core cast underwent the “Arica” method, which was a sixties mosh pit of Yoga, Sufi, and Zen exercises with what was claimed to be an alchemical overlay. After doing this for three months, they lived communally in his home for another month. Once they were all brain-addled enough, shooting began.

If you have never seen Holy Mountain, don’t.  Just watch the trailer:

Again, it has a thumbnail for a plot. The main protagonist is a Christlike figure called the thief. He goes on a quest for enlightenment that involves him climbing a mountain along with seven other pilgrims. Like I said the plot is nonexistent. What this film really is, is a bunch of vignettes strung together in no real cohesive way. Because cohesive thought was impossible for Alejandro Jodorowsky. 

Holy Mountain was as insane as the process that created it. And it was enough of a success that some studio madman decided to tell him, “do whatever you want Alejandro.”

Dune was the “in” book with his crowd at that time, so he decided he was going to do that. 

Frank Herbert absolutely hated the script that Jodorwosky came up with, its resemblance to his book was faint at best. Which the mad Chilean freely admitted, “I am raping his book, but I am raping it with love.”

I am Indeed and truly sorry the movie never got made. For that matter, I’m sorry there was never even any test footage shot. 

It would have starred Mick Jagger as Feyd. David Carradine as Duke Leto.  Gloria Swanson as Gaius Helen Mohiam. Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor Shaddam. And the one I’m really sorry I never got to see, Orson Welles as Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. 

H.R. Giger was in charge of the concept art.  And Jodorowsky must have made sure he was getting the good pills.  

This “movie” was to be over twenty hours long. That being the stripped-down version.  No one was quite sure how any audience was supposed to watch the thing.  Marathon sitting? Come back to the theater each night for about a week?  In the case of the latter does the audience member have to pay for each separate chapter? No one knew because this problem had never come up before.

I have zero love for hippies but there was such an insane audacity to the project I can’t help but admire the ambition behind it.

It was however, clearly and obviously doomed.  

George Lucas was barely able to get the drastically less ambitious Star Wars made for eleven million. And Jodorowsky was going to try to film his version of Dune for twenty? The budget was way too low for what he wanted to do and there was no way in hell any studio was going to back something that was not only going to be R rated but defy the best efforts of any marketing department to come up with a coherent reason for normal people to come see it.

Jodorowsky assembled his pre-production pitch book and marched it around the studios for about ten years trying to get funding for it.

Dino De Laurentius eventually optioned it, waited for a time limit to run out, and kicked Jodorowsky off the project.  He then hired the slightly less insane David Lynch to make it.

Lynch was nuts in his own right but he was clearly a more functional madman.  He actually got his version of Dune made.

It has to be said, Lynch appears to have respected Jodorowsky’s intentions.  There were a number of choices that he made that just don’t make sense otherwise.  Casting Sting as Feyd feels like a call back to the original decision to cast Mick Jagger in that role. It wasn’t Jodorowsky weird, but it was definitely weird. 

But there were a lot of fundamental problems.  Jodorowsky’s script, (the one where Paul was the result of an immaculate conception because Leto had been castrated and Paul is killed by Feyd at the end of the movie), obviously had to be chucked.  Lynch had Frank Herbert himself do the first draft and this was a mistake.

Herbert was a good author, but that skill set does not transfer into being a screenwriter.  Anyone who has read the book knows that there is a shit-ton of internal dialog, Herbert just had the characters thoughts being conveyed by voice-over while the actor mugged on-screen in time to it.  When it comes to voice-over, less is better but non-existent is usually best. Voice-over narration of internal thoughts is a huge drag on any film’s action.  And just about all of the characters were constantly doing it.

Another problem was audience expectations. In 1974 Lynch’s Dune would have enjoyed much more success than it did in 1984 because in those ensuing ten years Star Wars had changed the rules of the game.  Great special effects and exciting action were now expected by Gen-X filmgoers.  Dune didn’t really have much of either.

It’s biggest problem was its producer. Dino De Laurentius was very active in the development of the film.  He didn’t know anything about the Herberts’s work and didn’t really get it. Consequently, his typical river of “production notes” was incredibly corrosive. 

The worst crimes against the film were the mid-production budget cuts and the cutting room butchery that was inflicted upon it. Although, in truth, both were sadly unavoidable.  

Dune was drastically overbudget during production and everyone in the industry was still keenly aware of the Heaven’s Gate (1980) box office disaster. Lynch’s first cut was over four hours long.  This was originally supposed to be a feature but was downgraded by Dino into a bug.  Big cuts were made, leaving a film that was nearly incoherent.  David Lynch was so furious, he demanded that his name be removed from the credits and the directors union backed him. Dune is officially credited as having been directed by Alan Smithee.

Dune bombed, killing any chance of a sequel.

The property vanished from Hollywood for another sixteen years until the Sci Fi Channel decided to produce its own version of Dune as a mini-series. 

Sci Fi’s version was cheaper but more coherent than Lynch’s version.  Sadly, it is not aging well.  Late 1990s CGI looks awful by modern standards, although the sandworm still looks good.   

There some substantial story changes made, Princess Irulan was not a nice girl in the books and was re-written to be more sympathetic in the series.  She was married to a man she was in love with, but who didn’t love her and refused to share her bed.  She ends up raising his children in the second series. 

Dune did well enough for Sci Fi that they produced a second mini-series that covered the events of Dune Messiah and Children of Dune in 2003.  They wanted to do God-Emperor but in 2004 Battlestar Galactica blew the ratings doors off, leaving Dune in the dust and Sci Fi didn’t have the money to make both.

Dune went back into the wilderness for another seventeen years.

And now, it’s being relaunched again as movie a-n-d a tv series by Warner Brothers.  

Warner Media is high-rolling big time on this property. It doesn’t really lend itself to being a franchise but that is obviously what they are planning.  They have already greenlit a series for HBOmax titled; Dune the Sisterhood. 

The reason why is obvious, their two biggest franchises are both struggling.  The magic has gone out of the Harry Potter Universe with the Fantastic Beasts series and the DC Comics world is a legendary train wreck. Starting fresh with something that has an established name has real appeal, despite the fact that Dune does not have a track record for being a major moneymaker.  

There is also the question of, will it be too woke to be entertaining?  I had known that Zendaya had been cast as Chani.

 Which presupposed that Liet Kynes had been race bent.  My reaction was fine it hardly matters these days. Except that it turns out he has also been gender-bent. Liet Kynes who was the leader of the extremely patriarchal Fremen is now a woman.

The actress who plays Kynes recently gave an interview where she went on at great length about how feminist and empowering this version of Dune will be.

So, yeah.

Maybe, they are just making sure the press will be nice to them.  Maybe, this version of Dune will finally be a good one. I notice they are using David Lynch’s design for the stilsuits so at least they have a vision even if is someone else’s.

But I strongly suspect that a good and representative version of Frank Herbert’s masterpiece will remain a mirage in the desert that filmmakers strive for but never reach.

Okay, I’m done here.