Year: 2012

A film of Dune, one of the classic books of science-fiction literature, took a long time to arrive after it was published in 1965. A lot of directors were lined up to make the movie version, including David Lean and Ridley Scott, before David Lynch finally created his not entirely faithful version in 1984.

One of the directors originally lined up to make the movie back in the 70s was Alejandro Jodorowsky. He planned to shoot a 10-hour (possibly 14) feature that would have starred Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger, that would have been scored by Pink Floyd, that would have had Dan O’Bannon has the head of the SFX department, and would have had creatures and characters designed by HR Giger. His aim: “to create a movie similar to taking LSD”.

In the end though, nothing ever came of it because the funding fell through after approximately $2.5m of the $9m budget had been spent. Now some enterprising people are about to make a documentary about the movie that never was. Here’s a trailer and you can read more about the history of the Dune movies here.