Art and Designs from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Aborted Dune Adaptation

Did you know that Alejandro Jodorowsky was originally going direct Dune? (I could swear I’d written about this here before, but I apparently haven’t. For this, I am sorry.)

In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Dune from Arthur P. Jacobs. Jodorowsky was set to direct. In 1975, Jodorowsky planned to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Salvador Dali, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine, Geraldine Chaplin, Alain Delon, Hervé Villechaize and Mick Jagger. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction periodicals, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger. Moebius began designing creatures and characters for the film, while Foss was brought in to design the film’s space ships and hardware. Giger began designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius’ storyboards, and Dali was cast as the Emperor with a reported salary of $100,000 an hour. His son Brontis Jodorowsky was to play Paul. Dan O’Bannon was to head the special effects department.

Instead, some of the people involved went on to make Alien and Jodorowsky went on to write the comic book series Metabarons, and David Lynch gave up the opportunity to direct Revenge of the Jedi to direct Dune (Wikipedia says David Cronenberg was also offered the chance to direct Jedi and turned it down – I didn’t know that before today!)

Anyway, the Drawing Room in London will have an exhibition of the materials created for the movie 17 September – 25 October 2009

(Drawing Room link via Dangerous Minds)

More info on Jodorowsky’s Dune:

Unseen Dune

Jodorowsky: The Film You Will Never See Jodorowsky’s eulogy for the ill-fated project.

Moebius’s designs

H.R. Giger’s designs

Gallery with larger images of some of Giger’s Dune designs [bad link - anyone have a replacement?]

(much thanks to Popjellyfish for all the Jodorowsky Dune trivia)

Richard Metzger also points to this saying it was some footage from the movie (I haven’t watched it yet): It’s actually trailers for two Moebuis animated movies: 1) L’Incal, based on a comic book collaboration between Moebuis and Jodorowsky and later ripped off by Fifth Element and 2) An animated version of Moebuis’s Arzach. Neither was ever released, to the best of my knowledge. The video was uploaded, incidentally, by the above mentioned artist extraordinaire and pop culture trivia maven Popjellyfish.

See Also:

Quenched Consciousness, a Moebius art blog curated by Popjellyfish.

Our dossier of Alejandro Jodorowsky

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