Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) by Frank Povich

[cranefly]

Begin Spoiler Alert!
This movie was never made.
End Spoiler Alert

This is both fascinating and depressing. It is fascinating in the scope of Jodorowsky's mad genius, depressing in the knowledge that it never came to fruition. I'm a bit skeptical it would have been as great as some claim. But wow, at worst it would have been a spectacular experimental piece well worth the ticket. Various people are interviewed, including Giger, who has this bizarre tortured facial expression while forcing out each sentence. It fits his art perfectly. But the main person interviewed is Jodorowsky. He is by turns brilliant and crippled by eccentricity. One sees his svengalish talent for talking so many big names (Dali? Mick Jagger? Orson Welles?) into agreeing to do the film. But one also sees his one weakness. He totally despises money. One would think with his talent at swaying so many big names to be in the film that he could have applied that same talent to acquiring money. But his attitude was that money should not matter. The vision his film has to offer is priceless. Though one Hollywood studio after another is wowed by the scene-by-scene layout he has prepared, the money discussions turn them cold. A case in point. The studios want it to run an hour and a half. Jodorowsky tells them he won't know how long it is until he completes it.

How sad that this vision was never realized, but I can't completely blame the studios.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

Think how much better his pitch would have been if he had read the book!!

I'm curious to see this film.

[Greg_phpbb3_import1]

That boy is crazy. I'm surprised that DM didn't take me to see his films back in the day. He seemed to have a lot in common with Bunuel.

It was a really good look at this production. Jodorowsky was a man with a lot of passion and it was great that he had a producer that was really trying to help him make his vision. I'm curious who was paying for the development cost on that film. As in who paid Geiger to come up with all those drawings or O'Bannon to come to Paris for two years. It all came across as a very strange experience.

There were a lot of great quotes from the film but my favorite was probably 'I am raping Frank Herbert'

It is a fascinating film. Go see it. No sword fights but some martial arts training.

[Drunk Monk]

That was more ED's style. He turned me on to El Topo and The Holy Mountain. Maybe we didn't invite you to those because we were worried they would give you nightmares.

[thatguy]

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--tg

[thatguy]

https://boingboing.net/2021/11/08/alejan...ction.html

Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune, the holy grail storyboard book of Moebius's drawings for the unmade 1970s epic, goes up for auction

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Sometimes called "the greatest movie that was never made," Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune was the cult director's mid-1970s effort to adapt Frank Herbert's novel for the big screen. Jodorowsky and comic artist Jean "Moebius" Giraud famously collaborated on a massive collection of set and character designs and a nearly complete story board of the entire proposed film including dialogue in English and French. Producer Michel Seydoux and Jodorowsky made a handful of copies of a hardcover tome compiling the drawings and set off to the United States to find funding that unfortunately never materialized. (For the whole story, watch this wonderful documentary.) There are reportedly only ten or so copies of the Dune book that survived. In two weeks, Christie's will auction off one of them. This scarce book—officially titled Michel Seydoux Presents Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune from Frank Herbert's Novel—is expected to fetch EUR 25,000 – EUR 35,000. See below for a few samples spreads.

From Christie's:

This copy is numbered 5 on the reverse of the lower board. Some other copies are known : one was auctioned a couple of years ago, and Jodorowsky owns a copy as well. There are probably a couple others surviving copies.
The book is partially reproduced online. We do not know if the other surviving copies are numbered as well, so it is a bit tricky to evaluate the amount of initially printed copies. We can logically suppose that between 10 and 20 copies were printed and bound.

Sky blue cloth binding, with, pasted on the upper board, a photographic reproduction of the proposed movie poster after an original work by Christopher Foss, printed title piece on the spine, remains of a snap button clasp.

--tg

[thatguy]

https://gizmodo.com/turns-out-the-crypto...1848371833

Turns Out the Crypto Bros Who Bought Jodorowsky's Dune Book Aren't Sure How Rights Work
[color=rgba(27, 27, 27, 0.65)]The cryptocurrency-backed consortium TheSpiceDAO wants to make its own Dune. So why did they need to buy Jodorowsky's pitch in the first place?[/color]
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[img=343x0]data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==[/img]

Image: Chris Foss/Sony Classics
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Late last year, a rare copy of one of the pitch books legendary director Alejandro Jodorowsky made to pitch his vision for an adaptation of Dune went to auction. Expected to sell for around $30-40,000, it went for around a baffling three million dollars, thanks to an ether-backed collective known as TheSpiceDAO. Now, they want to use manuscript to... make their own Dune.

SpiceDAO’s overwhelming bid for the book—one of a handful of copies still in existence, some of which has already been partially made available online before—was part of a number of headline-making landmark auctions for collectors items last year. Rare copies of Mario and Zelda games, comics like Spider-Man’s debut in Amazing Fantasy, and more all generated wildly-overestimated record breaking bids, in part driven by people with more money than sense placing speculatory bids into rare collectibles as the next big thing. The Christie’s sale of Jodorowsky’s Dune was no exception to this trend, albeit that it was one brushing up with another speculatory trend: cryptocurrency-backed DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, pooling together millions of dollars from supporting crypto owners in an attempt to buy something and web3-ify it in some nebulous capacity. There was a failed attempt to purchase the US constitution, and plans to transform Blockbuster into a future streaming service by similar DAOs, and now, there is SpiceDAO. The difference with SpiceDAO’s plans to these, however, is that they suddenly think spending three million dollars just means they own Dune.

SpiceDAO attracted a bevy of attention—mostly scorn—over the weekend by reiterating their plans for Jorowsky’s Dune after its purchase. The first, to make the book public with a new digitized copy while the purchased physical book is stored in a “fine art quality storage with a professional, insured service,” is admirable, if not, as previously mentioned, something that’s never happened with other copies of the book before. The problem is the other two plans, which involve turning the Moebius-illustrated storyboards into an animated series to sell to a streaming service, and then also having done that, encourage derivative projects based on the manuscript from the crypto enthusiasts who backed the bid in the first place.

Except, of course, Jodorowsky’s Dune is still Dune, an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s iconic novel. Purchasing a book of storyboards—one of several in existence, even if that number is low—and expecting that to transfer the rights to those storyboards, or the story itself, would’ve been like whoever purchased that copy of Amazing Fantasy #15 last year expecting they could go to Sony and direct Spider-Man: Are We Still Doing Home Puns?. Or, perhaps, you walking into a book store, picking up one of those re-released copies of Dune with the cast from Denis Villeneuve’s movieon the cover, and thinking you could walk up to Timothée Chalamet and tell him how Chapter Two is yours now.

SpiceDAO at least, in other avenues, has admitted that this would be a significant roadblock to adaptation, and intends to instead lean more towards creating something inspired by the work instead. “Jodorowsky’s expansive vision for Dune in some way planted the seeds for nearly every Sci-Fi project over the last 50 years. While we do not own the IP to Frank Herbert’s masterpiece, we are uniquely positioned with the opportunity to create our own addition to the genre as an homage to the giants who came before us,” the DAO wrote on its own Medium page in the wake of the auction late last year. Any project that came out of SpiceDAO’s purchase would have to delicately tread the line of homaging not just Herbert’s work—and now the work of a major Hollywood studio in Warner Bros.—but the legal rights of Jodorowsky’s estate, Moebius’ estate, and others involved in the original pitch itself. But then why would SpiceDAO need to purchase Jodorowsky’s pitch bible to create something simply inspired by Dune and the aesthetic Jodorowsky and his collaborators envisioned, if they were so intent on creating an original work?

Perhaps, the answer, is that you couldn’t run an ancillary grift of getting those crypto enthusiasts who supported the bid in the first place to invest in your own Dune-themed cryptocurrency that way, could you? After all, the spice must flow one way or the other.

--tg