I’ve mentioned before that I consider Frank Herbert one of my Three Pillars and that the Dune series has had a profound impact on me and my writing. I’ve also discussed how I studied adaptation of the written word in grad school. One of the main themes of the course was stories that are “unadaptable”, that is, ill-suited for the screen for one reason or another. Working out the how and why a particular story could be considered unadaptable was a decent chunk of our in-class discussions. Anyway, I bring all this up because if ever there was a story that was unadaptable, Dune is it. If you’ve seen the David Lynch version (or its Alan Smithee variant), you know that it was a mess. There are some good points to it, but it misses the mark by a wide margin. I thought the mini series made by the Sci-Fi Channel was better as an adaptation, but still came up short. I honestly don’t think the gap can be overcome, though I could potentially see it working in animation. Working better, at any rate, in the right hands, of course. A 13- or even 26-ep series would probably do the trick. All that aside, I want to talk about the first attempt to bring Dune to the silver screen as chronicled in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, which I watched last week.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is something of an experimental filmmaker and at a friend’s recommendation, he decided to make the leap from arthouse indie flicks to a a big-budget magnum opus with Dune. I highly recommend the documentary, so I’m not going to hash out everything that it covers. What I am going to say is how intrigued I was at Jodorowsky’s concept, the years of work he sunk into it and the grand assemblage of talent he was pulling together. Salvador Dali as the Padishah Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen… That’s just scratching the surface. Each step of the story seems more impossible than the last and the amazing thing is how far Jodorowsky actually got. It was an impossible vision and the final result was inevitable. Still, it’s amazing to see and the aftermath isn’t nearly as dire as you might think.

My all too brief treatment doesn’t come anywhere close to doing the material justice, but in conclusion, check out Jodorowsky’s Dune. It’s a real trip. In more ways than one. ^_^

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