WHAT WENT WRONG - Dune (1984)

Episode Date: June 12, 2023

20,000 extras, 1,000 pounds of spaghetti, and 1 unexplainable pug! This week, Chris & Lizzie fold space to learn how Dune birthed Alien, David Lynch died the slow death, and Patrick Stewart destroyed Sting’s ego (accidentally!).*CORRECTIONS:*Chris referred to the studio space in Mexico City as the largest in "South America" which is obviously wrong because Mexico City is in North America. He meant that it was the largest in the Southern Hemisphere (at the time).Go Ad-Free - Join Our Patreon!Check Out Our Merch!Follow Us on Instagram!What Movie's Next? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

And welcome to this episode of What Went Wrong. As always, I'm one of your hosts, Lizzie Bassett, here with the other one. Which one are you? Chris Winterbauer. And welcome back, guys, to your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about the making of movies and how it's nearly impossible to make a good one, and we should cherish all of them. Before we dive in, guys, at the time of this recording, we have just passed 500 reviews.

In fact, we have 501, well, I guess I should say ratings. We probably have far fewer reviews, but we have 501 ratings on Apple Podcasts. And that's thanks to you guys. You're the real MVP's. We just wanted to say thank you to everybody that has taken the time to rate our podcasts on Apple, even those of you that have given us one star. And there are a few of you. But we would like to do a couple callouts.

Harken back to the earlier days when we read more of these out loud to you guys. great reasons to revisit older movies is the title of this one. Try it out their apps on the mummy and the exorcist, and I'm amused and impressed by the hosts, and they're info enough that I'll subscribe and give it its earned five-star review. Thank you. Thank you, Calvin, too.

Let's just see. Here's another full one. A good one. Favorite podcast, full stop. I finally feel like I have friends who talk about and think about movies like I do. Well, my pal, mal pal, you don't have friends. but we are thrilled that you have this podcast now to get you through your day. And we appreciate you, usually better than watching the movie.

So we don't want to put down movies, but in some instances we can see how that would be true. One of these folks did compare it to a college course. And so we would like your email address so we can start charging you tuition. Yeah, student loans. We're going to need those. We unfortunately have offended some people. I don't think we're going to address those. No, no, but there is one, Chris, that you brought up to me earlier this week that I think we actually did want to address.

I'm guessing a gentleman wrote this review. Yeah, it just, by the way, it reads. They enjoyed a couple of the episodes, but then they called out that we mispronounced person's name a few times, and there was a piece of technology that I'd not heard of that any, a quote, self-respecting film buff would know about. And just to be clear, I don't respect myself. but this individual did call us sloppy amateurs. And I like to think of us as amateurs, but not necessarily sloppy. However, they did ask the question, what are their credentials?

And that did make me realize that we have not properly introduced ourselves in a long time. And so we thought we could take two minutes right now to quickly explain who we are, what the origins of this podcast were and what our goals are and kind of how we get our information. So Lizzie, do you want to kick it off with a little quick intro? Sure. Well, first of all, I know something in that review said something along the lines of, these are not film historians. You're correct. That's true. We are not film historians. I am a podcast producer. So I am actually doing what I do professionally as well. I work for Wondery. That's at my day job. And I used to work for IMDB, which was wonderful. I love movies. I have always loved movies.

And I particularly have an affinity for older movies. So that's a lot of what I've done on the podcast, a lot of what I hope to continue to do. Very fascinated by early Hollywood. And obviously a big fan of the podcast, you must remember this, which if you'd never listen to that, listen to ours first, but then go listen to that because it's great. So that's who I am, certifiably not a film historian. But in terms of how we kind of prep for these episodes,

I'll cover it a little bit briefly before Chris introduces himself. We do not just read the Wikipedia page, which I would hope that you all can tell, that a lot of work and research does go into these episodes. We do make sure that we are double-checking everything, citing everything. Obviously, sometimes I'm going to get stuff wrong as I have in the past. But we do want to make sure that we're presenting things as accurately as we can and responsibly as we can. And if I'm being irresponsible, I usually use the word allegedly before it.

So if you listen to that, that's what's happening. Exactly. Yeah, we try to find first person accounts or we read books written on the making of these films. We watch documentaries about them. And a lot of the great resources that we find are actually the coverage in the trades that has been archived from the time when the film was made, as will be the case today. I'm Chris Winterbauer. I'm a writer and a director.

I've directed two movies, Worm, which is on Hulu, W-Y-R-M, and Moonshot, which was on HBO Max, but now can be rented on Amazon, iTunes, Google Play, etc. Moonshot was with New Line Cinema. I have also written for Amblin, Vertigo. I have a project with Universal right now, Film Nation. So in total, I've sold five projects on a screenwriting front, and I've directed two films in the last five years when I got started coming out of grad school. I went to USC Film School, studied sound there, and so I do know a decent amount about production and post-production sound. And so that's my background. Again, I'm not a film historical. I don't know everything about film.

I don't know everything about film production, but what I do try to do in our goal is to use the experience we do have around movies in order to demystify certain things and explain certain processes that seem simple when you watch a movie, but in actuality are really complicated or really difficult to pull off. Again, thanks guys for sitting through our reintroduction,

and again, thank you so much for the ratings and reviews. We really appreciate it, But this podcast is all killer, no filler. So let's get to the film that we're discussing today. Not 2021's Dune. Not 2023's Dune. We're talking 1984's Dune by David Lynch. I got to tell you, Chris, there's, for all the faults that this movie has,

there's one thing it has that Deneve Nouve's Dune does not. Do you know what it is? It's that damn pug. Oh, the pug. It's the pug. I love the pug. The pug is incredible. Patrick Stewart carrying a pug into battle, I didn't know that I needed that, but I did.

It's great. You know what's funny? We're not. More pug. It seems like that was a pretty arbitrary decision, and it's not really a big part of my research, so I'm already letting you down. But let's leave that. Let's leave that.

I'm glad we talked to. Fuck you, Chris. I love that pug. The pug is great. The pug is great. Dune released in 1984. It was written and directed by David Lynch. It is a 1980s epic space opera, and it had a long and troubled journey to the silver screen.

But before we get to what went wrong, here are the basic facts. Dune is based on the 1965 novel by Frank Herbert of the same name. It was writer-director David Lynch's third film following Eraserhead, his debut, and The Elephant Man, his sophomore feature. It starred, Kyle McLaughlin, Francesca Anas, Brad Dorif, Patrick Stewart, Max Fon Sido, Jose Ferrer, Sean Young, and Sting, amongst many other wonderful performers. It really is an incredible international cast. Yeah. The film was produced by Dino de Laurentis and his daughter, more importantly,

Raphael de Lorette, who was actually the main producer on the film. It was distributed by Universal Pictures when they were owned by MCA and they were being run by Sid Scheinberg, some names that you guys have heard throughout this podcast. And here, as always, is the IMDB log line of an incredibly convoluted and long story. A Duke's son leads desert warriors against the galactic emperor

and his father's evil nemesis to free their desert world from the emperor's rule. That's the last like 15 to 20 minutes. Exactly. Yes, exactly. That's the last 15 minutes. So, Lizzie, you said you had not seen Dune before, I believe, meaning this version. This version, I had not.

You've seen the Velenov one? Yes, which I love. And I actually started to rewatch before this. Because I will say, this did make me very excited for part two. Because this movie, boy, the pacing is weird. For very specific reasons that we'll get into. So have you, and have you ever read the book? I haven't, but now I think maybe I want to.

Yeah. It's really good. I read it about 10 years ago. And I do think it's a very formative book for a lot of young men. men who see themselves as a young Paul Atreides. Of course, none of us are. Well, you know what's interesting, though, is that I felt like there is a truly stark difference between this one and the Villeneuve one, which is that his is so much more

interested in the women. Yes, he changed a number of things. I think most specifically, obviously, Chani's character, who's played by Zendaya, has a much bigger presence through the visions that Paul has, whereas Sean Young character kind of just shows up out of nowhere in this one. Yeah, she gets to do nothing. She doesn't really get anything to do. And then obviously, whereas Princess Irulan, Virginia Madsen,

and this one has all of the voiceover, that character was kind of written out of the first instance of Denis Villeneuve one, and will then, I believe she's being played by Florence Pugh in the second half. But Lady Jessica is the big character who gets like nothing to do, I feel like, in this version, excuse me, 1984 one. and they make her character really interesting. Not just her. I feel like they're more interested in the, like,

Mother Superior is not the right name for her either, but her as well, who's Charlotte Rambling in the new one. But yeah, that was definitely like, it's a big, it's a pretty stark difference. I think that in the Deni one, it's a world that seems outwardly dominated by men, but is actually secretly ruled by women.

Yeah. Whereas in this originally, one, it feels like it's just more dominated by men, more obviously dominated by men. So let's get into the book. So the story of Dune begins with novelist Franklin Patrick Herbert Jr. More commonly known as Frank Herbert, a lot of Northwest, Pacific Northwest connections in this movie. He was born in Tacoma, Washington. Shout out to the aroma of Tacoma, to any of my friends from that part of the world. There was a pulp factory there that made it real stanky. He was a bit of an autodidact. He worked as a reporter. He worked as a reporter.

and as a journalist, and eventually he landed at the University of Washington, where young Kyle McLaughlin would go years later. Oh, and where David, producer of this podcast, went. He stumbled into a creative writing class. He started writing short stories. He got published in all of these sci-fi-oriented magazines, and his first novel, The Dragon in the Sea, was published in 1956. And it really exemplified kind of what a visionary he was. It took place in a world with dwindling oil supplies. It follows these secret nuclear submarines that travel into enemy. territory to steal from foreign nations oil reserves. And so, I mean, this is like in the 1950s, and it's basically predicting climate change in a weird way. So he's very much ahead of his time.

And so he had this idea for Dune in 1959 when he was researching the Oregon Dune's for a magazine article he was supposed to write. He never ended up writing the story. But the idea proved fertile ground from which he could build up this narrative of Paula Trades and the spice. Melange that he ended up. Melange. Yeah, making his epic. So at the time, he was supported by his wife's income, and he spent the next five years writing the book.

And it was published in 1965 after being rejected by 20 publishers. 20? 20. I don't know what this is about. I don't know what a Kiswachaturitz is. I don't know what a Maudib is. I don't know what any of this is. And then it finally got published, and it became a critical success.

He won the Nebula Award. for Best Novel and he shared the Hugo Award with Robert Zelazni and he went on to turn Dune into a series, becoming one of the most commercially successful authors of his time. So this book was extremely popular. By the time the film got off the ground in the early 1980s, he had written four sequels to the original Dune, Dune Messiah, Children of Dune, God Emperor of Dune, Heretics of Dune, and at that point, 13 million copies of these books had been sold, which is... That's a lot. I mean, best, best, best seller.

Yeah. Now, of course, the issue with adapting Dune is threefold. One, it takes place in a world utterly alien to ours. Two, it's extremely long. And three, it's extremely complex with a quasi-futal political system and semi-mystical religious institution, the Meneh Jeseret, at the center of its narrative. Also, I will pronounce some of these Dune words wrong. Bear with me. Yeah, I think you just did.

Ben-A-Jezerite, right? Ben-A-Jeseret, yeah. I always wanted like frenchify it and it doesn't work. So there's, of course, many attempts to get this movie off the ground, as there always are with big books like this. So the first producer to officially approach the book was Arthur P. Jacobs. And at face value, he actually seems like a great fit. He had produced Planet of the Apes. Oh, yeah.

And he had just done its sequel beneath the Planet of the Apes and was in production on the third film, Escape from the Planet of the Apes. All of which are very fun. And so he optioned the book, and he intended to produce it for $15 million at the time. And for reference, Planet of the Apes was a $6 million film, and 2001 Space Odyssey was about $11 million. So this would have been a big movie at the time. Still probably not enough. No, no, no, no, absolutely. Absolutely not enough money.

I'm just saying that's a good amount of money at the time. So then he hired David Lean, who directed. Lawrence of Arabia. Yep. To direct it with, I mean, great. The guy shot Sand Dunes. Totally makes sense. Yep.

That's a huge sprawling, epic. It's also very long. Yep. And the screenwriter of Lawrence Arabia, of Arabia and Dr. Javago, Robert Bolt to come on and write the film. Both great movies. So according to the New York Times,

Jacobs's option was for nine years. So he had nine years to produce a movie from this book, which is a very long time for an option. Of course, The production stalls because he's making Planet of the Apes. They decide they're going to start filming in 1974. However, midway through 1973, Jacobs died of a heart attack.

Oh, no. And so the option got tied up with his estate, and the project was abandoned by David Lean and Robert Bolt. Honestly, this version of June is the version of all of the ones we're going to talk about. This is the one that sounds like it could have been the best. I was going to say, I think that might have been really good. You have a sci-fi producer. and a very grounded, epic storyteller behind the camera and behind the typewriter. Sounds like a really good combination.

Yeah. Okay. It's not meant to be. 1974, this consortium from France comes forward and they purchased the rights of the film with the express purpose of having one specific director make this movie. Have you ever heard of the Chileanuteur director Alejandro Yodorowski? No. Have you ever seen El Topo or the Holy Mountain?

No, and that man's going to come after me again in the reviews, and I don't care. You're dad. So he is, it's like he's if Salvador Dali were crossed with David Lynch. Like that's who this guy is, he is out there. He is wild. He was like a huge cult director. Both of those films were like Midnight Circus, cult hit films. He's psychedelic acid trip is what I would.

describe, you know, his movies as. And so basically, legend has it that after the success of his first two films, this French producer and millionaire, Michael Seidou. Relation to Leia. Leah Seidu, the incredible French actress, who you may have recently seen in no time to die. In fact, Michael is her grand uncle. He offered to fund Yodorovsky's next film, whatever it is. And Yoderowski says, I want to adapt Dune. And Sedu says, okay, great. And then Yoderowski said, okay, I need to go read it now. He had actually never read the book. He had just heard that Dune was like a great sci-fi book

that somebody should try to adapt. So, Saydu rented a castle for Yoderowski to use a writing space where he went and wrote the script. And once he finished the script, he set out to assemble what he called his seven samurai. And these were like the seven creatives that were going to help him make the movie. So the first was Jean Mobius Gerard, an acclaimed French comic artist

and he did all of these incredible like crazy ship designs. They're really wild. According to a profile on the film produced by BBC in 2019, Yodorowski had Mobius storyboard the entire film. He produced 3,000 drawings

of every individual shot that Yoderowski was going to have in the film. Oh my God. And the film was going to open with an unbroken shot spanning the entire universe and then it was going to end the film with Paula Trades being murdered, morphing into a sentient planet,

and then flying away to spread good vibes across the universe. What? I don't think that's in the book. Nope, it's not. He was going to change a lot of stuff from the book. Okay. But he hired really great people. So then he hired this young kid out of USC Dan O'Bannon.

And if you remember Dan O'Bannon's name, it's because he was the screenwriter of Alien, but he hadn't written it yet. So he had come up with John Carpenter and made these special effects for John Carpenter's first film Darkstar. So Yodorowski hires him to handle Dune's special effects. O'Bannon then hires H.R. Geiger, who would go on to create the alien design for Ridley Scott's alien to design the Harkonen world and technologies. I mean, this sounds cool. It sounds cool.

So H.R. Geiger comes in, designs all these biomechanical. creatures and whatnot. He then hires Pink Floyd to do the score. I mean, right? Great. And then he cast his son, Brontas, to play Paul. Brontas, not a name that stuck around. No. And then he added Mick Jagger, David Carradine, Udo Kier, and Orson Wells to the cast. Was Orson Wells Harkinen? Orson Wells was cast as Baron Harkinen. And he, he was cast as Baron Harkinan. And he, He actually only agreed to do the film if Yodorowski would buy him dinner every single night at his favorite Parisian restaurant. Yeah, that adds up. So, like, Orson Welles, just like, pay me in food.

I'm good. Oh, the French champagne. If anybody out there doesn't know very quickly what Chris is referencing, go look on YouTube and search Orson Welles Champagne. There are a series of, well, it's just one commercial he was trying to make, but you can see the outtakes. I won't spoil it for you. He was so drunk during the filming. He's hammered. So the wildest addition to the film.

was Salvador Dali himself, famous artist, who agreed to play the Emperor of the Galaxy so long as Yodorowski paid him at a rate of $100,000 per hour, which would fulfill his dream of becoming the highest paid actor of all time. And so... Okay. Yotorowski agreed and said, we will only need him for one hour,

because I will only shoot one shot, basically, of him. And the rest of the movie will be a stunt double or from a distance. I guess that's possible. I mean, the emperor doesn't even show up in part one. I know it's Christopher Wacken in part two, but yeah. Yeah. He's in,

he's obviously in David Lynch's version. You're saying in Neville. But even then, he's not in it a ton in this one. No, he's not. So I'm not going to go into all the details on Yodorowski's Dune because it could be its own episode. But suffice it to say that despite storyboarding,

casting, and designing the entire movie, no one in Hollywood would finance it. Basically, there was one big sticking point. The script was so long that the movie would be 10 hours. That feels like a decent sticking point. Yeah. So he refused to cut it down.

Now, Yodorowski apparently later said that his understanding was that it was supposed to be a movie and multiple episodes of like a follow-up mini-series. But that's not how it was being pitched around town at the time. No, also, when has that ever done? Exactly. It wasn't being done in the 70s. So at this point, they had spent $2 million on developing this movie,

just between hiring the artists, designing the storyboards, writing the scripts, renting the castles, you know, paying for Orson Well's dinners. Sure. So the project grinds to a halt, but it does have big ramifications, both on this film and a lot of other films moving forward. So Dan O'Bannon took H.R. Geiger with him to work on a movie that O'Bannon wrote called Alien. And that's how we ended up with the alien creature.

Oh, wow. Further, the Dune Illustrated screenplay, it was all the drawings that Mobius had done, plus the screenplay that was passed around Hollywood, started to influence a ton of sci-fi works that would follow. Most specifically, the fifth element is the big one that pulls a ton, because obviously Luke Bezon French, he grew up with Mobius comics. Well, Blade Runner, too.

Right, and The Terminator and Blade Runner, of course. There's actually a great documentary that I recommend that you guys should watch called Yoderowski's Dune. You can see it online. It's an amazing documentary about what some people consider to be the greatest movie never made, which is his version

of Dune. I'm going to leave it there on that version so we can keep trucking forward to David Lynch. Move it along. At the end of the 1970s, a new and I would say somewhat unexpected producer

steps into the fold and purchases the rights. And again, purchases the original option, so the option is now changing hands again from the French consortium. And this is Dino de Larentes. And I'm sure most of you have heard Dino de laurences' name, or you've seen his company logo ahead of a movie. He was an Italian

producer. He had grown up selling spaghetti made by his father's pasta factory. No joke. And then World War II broke out, and a few years later, he fell into film production. So in 1946, his company Delarentris Cinematographica got into film production, and he had a number of early successes, including La Strada and Knights of Cabiria. Those are both Felini films. So in the 1970s, he made a number of movies that solidified him as kind of a real player in the Hollywood scene. A few of them that I've seen, Serpico, Death Wish, Mandingo, Three Days of the Condor. Of course, he had done a lot of Schlockier Fair. He did Orca, that killer whale horror movie. Oh, not familiar. Yeah, and he did Flash Gordon. And of course, the 19th.

177 remake of King Kong. And this is a quote that I found, I got this from Roger Ebert. So this is apparently what Dino Delerentis said about Barbara Streisand and why he didn't cast her in King Kong. And I'm going to have to do an accent because it's written with an accent. But quote, It's a no good have two monsters in one movie.

Listen, what we've heard about Babs, he ain't wrong. Yeah. So that did make me like Dino de Lerentis a lot from that, from that one quote. So in 1976, DeLarentis renegotiates the option, buys it from the French Consortium, and agrees to let Frank Herbert take a crack at writing the screenplay. Is that 18 hours long?

Well, yeah, it was 180 or so pages, and apparently just didn't. Even Frank Herbert admitted it didn't work. It just didn't work. Now, not as long as I would have feared. Yeah, that's a lot shorter. Yeah, it just didn't work. So in 1979, there's kind of an interesting,

Twist of Fate. Because of Yodorowski's Dune, Ridley Scott's Alien gets released. Or at least because of Yoderowski's Dune, this specific version of alien. It looks the way that it does. Yeah. It looks the way that it does. So Ridley Scott now explodes onto the commercial sci-fi scene with this film. It made $80 million against an $11 million budget. Yeah, it does. And that was in the United States alone on its, you know, first run. So DeLerantis moves quickly. He offers Scott the chance to direct the next great sci-fi epic. Remember, Star Wars had just come out two years before. Scott agrees, and according to one source, he initially tried to hire prolific sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison to write the script. And if you don't know who Harlan Ellison is, he is most known for writing this very

famous Star Trek episode, I would say most famous within film and television, called The City on the Edge of Forever, which is considered to be the greatest Star Trek episode ever made for the original series. He also wrote hundreds of novellas and short stories and teleplays, but he turned Ridley Scott down. I mentioned his name because he will come up again at the end of this episode. So then Rudy Worletzer was brought on to write the script. He had just written Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid for Sam Peckinpah. And much like Denis Villeneuve eventually wanted to, Scott's intent was to split the book into two films. I mean, you have to. Like I don't... You have to. Yeah. Exactly. So this production got pretty far down the road. Scott actually moved to Pinewood Studios in England to begin working on the project. They brought H.R. Geiger back onto the project to do storyboards while Wurlitzer wrote the script. So in August of 1980, they shared the script with Frank Herbert. Herbert didn't like it. He felt the plot had been oversimplified. And it's kind of like, dude, your script, your book is 800 pages long. We have to simplify it. Stuff's going to get cut. Exactly. So at the end of

1980, they had done two more drafts of the script, including one that had an incestuous relationship between Paul and his mother, Jessica, which like, TBH and the Deney version, come on, you know Timmy and Rebecca Ferguson are like... It's, there are undertones for sure, although... They got the huts for each other. Yeah. I mean, it would be more viable in David Lynch's version, considering they are the same age. They're actually not.

They're 11 years apart. They're actually exactly same distance apart in age as Rebecca Ferguson and Timothy Shalame. Really? I think it's just because Shalameh looks so much younger. He's actually a little older than Kamal Glockland was when he shot the 1984 Dune. The primary reason this all falls apart, because obviously we didn't get to see Ridley Scott's Dune. Right. We actually talked about in our Blade Runner episode. Right.

Ridley Scott's brother died unexpectedly of cancer, and it seems like it freaked Ridley Scott out. And so here's the quote from Paul Salmon's book, Ridley Scott, The Making of His Movies, quote, but I also realized that Dune was going to take a lot more work, at least two and a half years' worth. And I didn't have the heart to attack that because my brother, Frank, unexpectedly died of cancer while I was prepping the picture. Frankly, that freaked me out. So I went to Dino and told him the script was his. My guess is that he really just felt like it was going to take a lot more work to get the script into place. I mean, there are just so many huge elements in this story, folding space and time, the guild navigators, sandworms. You know, it's so abstract and it's so huge.

I could just imagine if you go through a family tragedy, you're just like, I need to go make something. There's no way, yeah. This is not the thing that you take on in that situation. No. So he left to go make Blade Runner. And that's why we have Ridley Scott's Blade Runner. And go listen to our episode of Blade Runner.

And that also nearly killed Ridley Scott making that movie. So, you know, it cuts both ways in these instances. In 1981, the original option that Arthur Jacobs had signed came to an end. So De LaRantus negotiates a new contract with Herbert, and he bought the rights to the book and all of its sequels, both written and unwritten. So he's doubling down on Dune. He's like, I'm not out of the Dune picture. And so this is where things take, in my opinion, like a really unexpected turn,

because I feel like everybody up until this point actually has made a lot of sense who they've gone after, right? Totally. Okay. So for the prior few years, beginning with the film Hurricane, which if you haven't seen it, don't. Dino DeLerantis had begun to introduce his daughter, Rafael de Lerentis, to the family business.

So she was 23 during the filming of Hurricane, which they shot in Bora Bora, and there was not sufficient housing on the island for the cast and crew. So Dino sat her down and said, you're going to build me a hotel for us to stay in. And so the 23-year-old oversaw the construction of a $3.5 million hotel, which she successfully completed, and it housed the cast and crew. Wow.

The movie was panned upon its release, but her work with her father was just beginning. And she was clearly very ambitious and very competent. There was a New York Times profile in the making of Dune that came out in 1983. And in it it says how, you know, she speaks five languages, English, Italian, French, Spanish, and Tahitian. And she would end up using four of those on a consistent basis. while on the set for Dune because it was an international production. And so the point is, from what I've read, she was a very smart and it seems like well-liked, if inexperienced producer.

Sure. And Dino basically handed her the reins of Dune. So from 1980 through 1987, he and his company produced basically five big films a year, which was too many for him to be boots on the ground for across the board. So he was like, all right, you're doing Dune. and she was, I think, 27 years old at this point in time. So, in what would be her first producerial recommendation, what I've read is that it was she who recommended the boyishly young-looking David Lynch

to take over directing duties. He seems like such an odd choice. Even if you look at the rest of his filmography now, Dune stands out in such an odd way, right, compared to the rest of his films. Yes and no. I can understand why he might be someone that she would reach out to, especially knowing who had previously been attached and had now passed on the project. It's not like there was a Ridley Scott floating around who was an obvious choice to make this. And I also feel like David Lynch, like he had not taken on anything to the scale of this before and really wouldn't after either, I don't think.

but he does have quite an eye for detail and is like huge on world building. Well, you're seeing exactly what she saw. Yeah, I don't think it's that crazy. You're smarter than me because at first I was like, wait. What? But that's exactly what they saw. And what I forgot is that at the time, he was the scrappy, hot shot young director and he had just been nominated for Best Director for his work on The Elephant Man,

which I totally forgot about. So he was an Academy Award nominated director coming off of what in retrospect was probably his most conventional movie, The Elephant Man. You know what I mean? So it's like he could do weird with Eraserhead and he could also do something a little more down the middle. Quick primer on Lynch. He was born in Missoula, Montana in 1946.

He was a very talented artist from a young age. Contrary to what you might think watching his films, he was really social and very popular. And if you listen to interviews with him, he's very funny. He's very charming. He is. He's kind of a goofball. he attended the school of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, which is now part of Tufts. He was there for a year, but he dropped out.

He and his best friend, future production designer Jack Fisk, who would go on to marry Sissy Spaceic and be the production designer for Terrence Malick's first eight films. So they had traveled to Europe, and they were like, we're going to roam Europe for a year, but after two weeks they were disillusioned with that, so they moved back to the U.S., just disillusioned with everything. He eventually makes his way to Philadelphia. He goes to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. He meets Peggy Reevee.

She gets pregnant. They get married because she's pregnant. This is important to his filmography. They have their first and only child together, a girl named Jennifer, and they move to a very high crime area of Philly because it's all they can afford. And if you know those details and you know about his first film Eraserhead, it all makes sense. Eraserhead is about this very anxious guy whose girlfriend abandons their mutated baby for him to watch who's living in like an industrial wasteland high crime area.

And it feels like David Lynch's subconscious put on the big screen. Again, he got into film basically by accident. He was a painter by training. And one day he wanted to see his paintings move. So he kind of did some crude animation. And then he got into 16 millimeter camera. He bought a 16 millimeter camera, started making short films. He made this really weird one called The Alphabet.

It's just a video of his wife saying the alphabet to a series of horses before she hemorrhages blood on a bed and dies. Sounds right. And the sound and the soundtrack is just a distorted recording of his daughter crying in the background. And he just made this and he sent it to AFI and they were like, great. And they gave him some money and he made another movie. And it's about two boys who grow a grandmother from a seed.

Sounds great too. So AFI was like, you got to come over here. And so he moves with his wife and daughter to L.A. He attends AFI. Again, he gets disillusioned. He threatens to drop out. But they convince him to stay when they agree to help support him make. a racerhead, which is like a 21-page treatment. Again, we'll do a whole episode on a racerhead,

but suffice to say, this movie took five years to make. Again, as I mentioned, it follows Henry, a quiet man with a very strange haircut, who lives in an industrial wasteland, and he has left to care for a deformed baby after his girlfriend disappears. It is disturbing. It is, especially as a new parent, it's very hard to watch. So he started shooting it in May of 1972, didn't finished until 1976. He supported himself by delivering newspapers, the Wall Street Journal. He made $50 a week. The movie got rejected by Cannes, the New York Film Festival, but it became a midnight cult movie, and specifically Mel Brooks eventually saw it and loved it and said, kid, whatever you want to do next. And that became the elephant man. Oh, wow. And so in five years, Lynch went from a

paper delivery man making an experimental film to an Academy Award nominated director. And one important thing to realize and remember is he had never worked in the studio system in any way and everything he'd ever made he had had complete control over. Yeah. Eraserhead because he financed it and the elephant man because Mel Brooks effectively gave him final cut over the project. Also because neither of those are anywhere near the scope of Dune. Yes.

So he was actually given the chance to direct a different space epic before Dune. Any idea what that might be? Are there other space things other than alien and Star Wars? Star Wars, Return of the Jedi. Oh, it is Star Wars. Okay, that's my guess then, Star Wars. Great, you got it right. So George Lucas offered him the chance to direct Star Wars Return of the Jedi.

George Lucas had directed. Man, that might have been a better idea because he might have had somebody there who could have reined him in a little bit and helped him. Maybe. Yeah. So George Lucas famously didn't like directing. He didn't direct Empire Strikes Back and he didn't want to direct Return of the Jedi. He had also gotten into a dispute with the DGA over how credits were handled with the title crawl. The DGA basically was saying, well, if you're going to do the Lucasfilm logo up there,

the director's name has to also go at the front of the film. He only wanted it to say Lucasfilm, then Star Wars, then the title crawl. So he wanted to hire a director that wasn't in the DGA to direct Return of the Jedi. David Lynch was brand new. He was not yet in the DGA. So, hence why he was so interested in David Lynch. He also asked David Cronenberg to direct it. And eventually a young British director, Richard Marquand, directed Return of the Jedi. We'll do that as a separate episode. Back to Dune. Dino de Laurentis reaches out and goes, David, do you want to direct a Dune? And Lynch goes, June? David Lynch literally thought he was talking about a movie called June. Lynch, though, then figured out that he was talking about Dune. He read the book. He loved it. He met with Dino and Raphaelah, who, according to later interviews, said he really liked them as well. He agreed to take on the project without final cut.

Dino de Laurentis was never going to give up final cut, and David Lynch took the project anyway. Things started off positively. Lynch moved into an office on the universal lot in May of 1981, started working on the script in June, with the collaborators Eric Bergen and Christopher DeVore. they had co-written The Elephant Man with him. Universal Sid Scheinberg and MTA had picked up the project when Dino DeLerantis had optioned it. So they were the distribution company for it. So they spent six months writing the script and at the end of six months they had a 200-page first draft because nobody can get this movie short.

Eventually Bergen and DeVore left the project. It's unclear if they were fired or if David Lynch just didn't want to keep working with them. But Lynch would go on to work on the script for another year. finally the sixth draft was greenlit in December of 1982 and it was 135 pages long, which just, again, seems impossible to me. It's an 896 page book, the version that I have. And it's not like Harry Potter pages, you know, it's like dense, difficult to, you know, understand, intentionally obscure. According to Lynch, though, he'd already started to compromise, even at this point, because he didn't have final cut on the project, right? It means,

he doesn't have final cut on any decision before he gets to the end of the project as well. Because they're not going to green light a script that's that long, that's that long, he just has to keep cutting the movie down and down and compromising and finagling it to get it to the point where he thinks it can get made. Now, what should have been becoming quickly apparent to all of them was that Dino de Laurentis talked a big game about how expensive his movies were, but in fact, he was a very, very cheap producer. This is not as bad as Battlefield Earth, but it is.

similar to what happened with Battlefield Earth. Check out our episode on that movie. So according to a 1987 LA Times expose of the Delarentis Entertainment Group, he was an early pioneer of the process of pre-selling the ancillary rights for a film in order to secure its production funding. Basically, this is where you have an independent film, so it's not backed by a studio, and you need to get financing for the production. And Delarentis would go to foreign territories, you would go to Japan,

you would go to Eastern Europe, et cetera, and he would say, I have this hot package, Conan the Barbarian. It's this Arnold Schwarzenegger guy, sword and sorcery, and you can buy the rights to screen this movie in your territory when it's ready in a year or 18 months for $2 million. And he would do that and rack up these contracts, and once he'd sold enough of them, he would have enough money to cover his production budget

in order to make the film. So he wouldn't have to go get studio backing. He wouldn't have to get a bank loan. He just had to be able to pitch the movie and then he could also sell, you know, VHS rights, you know, etc. The television rights, the ancillary rights. The real important consequence of this is that his producing fee is included in the production budget. So he's paid and in the black once the movie pre-sells.

He doesn't need the movie to do well in order for him to cover his overhead. Got it. So unfortunately, that means from a... And I'm not accusing him of anything, you know, It just means from a purely fiscal incentives perspective, he's not incentivized to ensure that the film makes money. He's only incentivized to ensure that the production costs don't exceed the amount secured through the whole, through the pre-sale process.

Right. He's basically incentivized to make sure that it's distributed, but not that it actually performs. Yeah, he's, his only goal is I have to have a releasable movie that doesn't cost me any more than my product, than what I've raised. Yeah. If what I've already sold it for. Exactly. So while Lynch is like, I need to spend as much as I can to make the best movie possible. Delarentis is saying, I need to spend as little as possible to make a releasable movie.

Right. And so the desire to keep cost low is felt throughout this movie. First, the shooting location for the film. So according to an article in Sinifantastic Magazine about the production, Lynch scouted the entire world. North Africa, England, Tunisia, India, Australia, the Sahara Desert. And apparently to the point where it actually took him away from writing to an almost detrimental degree. And the sad thing is they were never going to shoot any of those locations. Because the only place that they could afford was Latin America.

And specifically, De Laerentis had been shooting in Mexico City. He shot Conan the Barbarian 2 there. And it became their top choice for three reasons. One, it did have the topography that they needed. It has sand dunes and volcanoes and ocean. Two, it's extremely cheap. Labor is super cheap there because of the exchange rate between the peso and the dollar.

And three, Estudios Chudobuscos was the largest self-contained filmmaking center soundstages in South America, and it was the one set of sound stages they found that were large enough to accommodate a film this size for the requisite duration that they could afford for the year that they needed it for filming. Makes sense.

Now, Lynch did put together some heavy hitters for the crew. Tony Masters, the art director for 2001 Space Odyssey, came on and was promoted to production designer for this film. I got to say, I loved a lot of the production design in this. Oh, I think actually you see a lot of it influencing the Villanou one that comes later. I agree. Well, and I wondered, like, how much of that is because the visuals in the book are so strong, but 100% there is a visual identity between the two.

Yeah, I think a lot of it was. taken from this in a lot of ways. Yeah. Yeah, so Bob Ringwood, who had just done X-Calibur, came on to design the costumes, most famously the still suits that the Fremen wear, which I do think they're a resemblance. They look very similar to the next generation. Bob Ringwood would go on to do the bat suit for Tim Burton's Batman. Nice. A few years later. Super talented. Mentor Huber and George Jensen, who had been the storyboard artists on Blade Runner and Return to the Jedi, respectively, came in

a storyboard artist. Freddie Francis came on to shoot the film. He had shot the Elephant Man for David Lynch, and he'd actually won an Oscar for his work as cinematography on 1960s sons and daughters. And then he'd spent like 15 years directing. So he also had a directing background. And David Lynch had nothing but good things to say about the crew, and the crew had nothing but good things to say about David Lynch. Let's talk about casting really quickly, a few things. So Brad Dorif, I read was the first person cast in the film. He's great. He was actually teaching a directing course at the time, and he didn't know who David Lynch was, but all of his students were obsessed with David Lynch because they were all obsessed with

Eraserhead. Right. And then he got to be in his movie. For anyone who doesn't know, by the way, Brad Dorff, probably most famously plays Wormtong in the Lord of the Rings series. Princess Irulan originally was supposed to be played by Helena Bonham Carter. Yeah, that makes sense. She would have just done Lady Jane, maybe?

Yeah, she was actually shooting a room with a view at that point in time. And so there was like a slight overlap between the productions. So then they hired Australian actress and Louise Lambert, who had just done picnic at Hanging Rock. But then I don't know why she dropped out, but she did leave the project. And then Virginia Madsen was eventually cast. She was a no name at the time.

And she says David Lynch chose her based on a Polaroid that was sent to him where she was wearing a white mini dress, lace stockings, and a really weird hairdo that she had based on Star Wars. And he just saw the Polaroid and was like, she can do it. Great. And then she ended up having a much bigger part than expected because they added all that voiceover that she does towards the end.

Yeah. Gurney Halleck, who's played by Patrick Stewart, was originally supposed to be played by Aldo Ray, who's kind of like a veteran character actor who had then become a leading man. He was a Columbia player. He had in the 1950s, though, been opposite Rita Hayworth in Miss Sadie Thompson. And so he'd kind of become a leading man. and then he had a steep decline due to alcoholism and multiple divorces. In fact, he had appeared in a porn film in a non-sexual role at this point.

And so this movie actually was kind of a comeback opportunity for him. What was the non-sexual role? I don't want to get into a tangent, but was he the pizza man or something that came in the middle of it? Something like that. He said he like even had a big quote about it. He's like, I wasn't even there for the sex scenes. Like they shot those all when I was gone. What?

What was your part? I don't know. His wife, though, was the casting director on Dune, his ex-wife. You know, she was like, God, please give him something. That's not the pizza guy and the porno. And he was a really good actor, but his drinking was such a problem that he quietly left the production at the last minute. And they brought Patrick Stewart in at the last second to take the role. Sting was offered the role of Fade Routha. So funny. He didn't want to be in the movie, but because it was David Lynch, he agreed.

he was like David Lynch is a madman. I will work with David Lynch. He was not into the cod piece, apparently, and was very embarrassed by it. And there are some funny clips of him on British talk shows where all they do is show him in the cod piece and, like, needle him about it. You know what's funny is that shot is like less than 10 seconds. And it's the only thing I remembered about Sting being in this movie. Like in, because I think maybe I had seen pieces of this when I was much younger.

I know I've never seen the whole thing. But like the only memory I have of it is staying. in his weird, like, eagle diaper. And then it's, like, barely there. Also, he's not really in this movie that much. There is a very funny story that Patrick Stewart tells on stage that I will paraphrase. Patrick Stewart did not know who Sting was at the time. So Patrick Stewart shows up to set.

He's sitting with Patrick Stewart. They're, like, in makeup. And Patrick Stewart's like, oh, hey, you know, how's it going? And Sting's like, you know, I'm good. And he's like, so what else, like, you know, what have you been doing? What else have you been in? And Sting's like, well, I'm a musician. And he's like, oh, what, you know, what instrument do you play?

Patrick Stewart doesn't care. And it's things like the bass. And he's like, oh, he thought he meant like a bass cello. And he's like, oh, how do you carry? And he's carried that big thing all around all the time. And he's like, no, no, no, bass guitar. And he's like, oh, that's good. So you're in a band or something?

And he's like, yeah. And he goes, oh, what is your band called? And he's like, the police. And he goes, oh, you're in a police band? Jesus Christ. He didn't know who the police were. Someone just hand Patrick Stewart the pug so he can run away. It was so funny.

He totally, he was so embarrassed. Patrick Stewart says, too, that he had a very fond time and he remains very close friends with Kyle McLaughlin, amongst other cast members on the film. It seems like, honestly, people had a very good time making this movie and that everything I've read is that David Lynch is an incredibly compassionate director to work with, especially as an actor. You have to expect that he's not an asshole because these people keep working with him over and over and over again. Yes, he loves to, I mean, even Jack Nance, who. is the lead in Eraserhead plays one of the Harkonans in this movie. Well, there's also, there's a massive amount of Twin Peaks crossovers between this and Twin Peaks. Tons of people who came back.

Well, and Blue Velvet, too. Like, once he had worked with a number of these actors, he took them forward in a lot of the movies that he ended up making. So a couple of the casting things. Jürgen-Prushnow was cast as Duke Lido at Trades. So as you mentioned, Lizzie, he seems very close to Carmel Glockland's age. He's 14 years older than Kyle McLaughlin. I looked it up.

He is a German actor, and he was fresh off Das Boot, Wolfgang Peterson's U-Boat epic, that had just garnered six Academy Award nominations and was maybe the most successful German war film ever made at the time. My dad loves it. It's great. And again, point being, this is a very international cast. Which was cool.

Of course, Kyle McLaughlin is the real find of this film. So he's 24-year-old. years old. He is fresh out of the professional actor training program at the University of Washington, which, again, David Bowman, our producer, alum, not of that specific program, but of Udub. Also, my sister Stephanie went there. I'm in Seattle recording this episode right now. Yeah, for all you, for those of you who are not Patreon subscribers, you cannot see that Chris is in his sister's childhood bedroom, but he is. Yes, not the one that went to Udub, but the other one.

Dune was Kyle's first feature film. Really? In fact, it's his first non-stage acting role ever. He does a pretty good job. He does do a pretty good job. Now, of course, this had kind of been done before. Mark Hamill was a relatively unknown TV actor, but he had acted on camera when he was cast as Luke Skywalker in Star Wars.

So McLaughlin was living in Seattle working on a play. He gets a call from a casting director who wants him to tape for the movie. comic lock, and turns out huge Dune fan. That tracks. So he tapes. They send it to David Lynch. David Lynch likes him. They fly him to L.A.

His first time in L.A., he does a screen test. David Lynch walks him through the screen test. Apparently, he would give him directions like, Kyle, calm down. A little more like Elvis this time. Or just, Kyle, think about the wind. Or apparently sometimes he'd just walk up and he'd be like, we wouldn't say anything.

David would just look at the ground. We'd kick some rocks. And then we just look at each other and nod. And I'd know what I had to do. They had this, like, spirit animal, like bond between them, which sounds very lovely. Rounding out the cast, one other person I want to mention, Jose Ferrer, he plays the emperor. He was perhaps the most celebrated Hispanic actor working at the time. He was the first Hispanic actor, he's Puerto Rican, to win best actor for his role as

Cirano de Bergerac in the 1950 film, Serenot de Bergerac. Again, just amazing cast. And, of course, you have Max von Siddow, Paul Smith and so many other great actors we don't have time to get into. March 30th, 1983, production begins. It's massive. 80 sets, 16 sound stages, months and months and months of construction. The budget was set at $45 million.

Rafael told the New York Times that in Hollywood, the film would have cost over $75 million to make, but making it in Latin America, that saves them almost 50%. A quick point of reference on the budget. Return of the Jedi was budgeted at 32 and a half. million dollars. However, that film benefited from having a smaller cast and an in-house visual effects team, Lucasfilm owned ILN. Right. That makes sense. And so they saved a lot of money in the sense that they had been working together for years and years and years, and they knew kind of what they were doing going into it. So what does $45 million buy you? It buys you 53 speaking

roles in the film. That's crazy. Yes. 20,000 extras, 900 crew members, including a team of 200 Mexican laborers that were responsible for clearing out every piece of cactus, scorpion, and snake that could be found on a three-mile square patch of desert that would act as the planet Aracas where nothing could grow. It took them two months to clean this part of the desert out. Wow. And all those cast and extras, they need costumes. As Bob Ringwood, the costume designer said, basically there are about 10 fundamental styles of clothing, which covers people from all four planets from these basic patterns will make about 4,000 costumes. Not 4,000 riffs on 10 costumes, 4,000 unique costumes across 20,000 people. That's crazy. Now shooting in Mexico

caused a number of problems. They didn't have consistent electricity. They could not run the sewing machines or the fax machines at certain times because the grid kept going out. And everybody got Jardia. Sure. According to Raphaela, 15% of the crew was in and out of the hospital for the first six weeks in the country. The food poisoning hit the cast as well. Virginia Madsen, in some of her scenes as a princess, had to be propped up on a stool underneath her giant dress because she was so exhausted from diarrhea, that she could not stand up. And so they would just put a stool underneath her giant skirt, and she would just sit there looking zoned out, like the princess.

It actually got so bad that Raphael. brought in a private chef from Italy and opened her own restaurant on the studio's premises to feed the cast and crew. But unfortunately, the 1,000 pounds of spaghetti that were brought with the chef ended up stuck in customs for three months. Now, to her credit, she was actually spoken of quite reverently by a number of the crew members. After the fact, Tony Masters, production designer told the New York Times, she is a mother to us all.

You only have to catch a cold, and she'll send you to Los Angeles for an X-ray. This does not sound like a film where people were being forced into horrible conditions constantly. Rainstorms almost every day between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. plagued the shoot. Remember, it never rains on Iraqis. They can't shoot during the rain. And of course, they had enormous special effects, not the least of which were the sandworms. Which look pretty good. Look really good. And that's because Carlos Rambaldi was brought in to create them and he had just done ET. Okay. Yeah. The sandworms, I think, hold up better than any other part of the film in terms of special effects. The other special effects are questionable.

The sandworms are great. They're bad for a specific reason. So the sandworms, they spent over $2 million on them. So here's a quote from Rambaldi after the fact. The longest ones were 20 feet long. They were capable of opening their mouths, revealing multiple rows of teeth, as well as craning their bodies up and down and from side to side. Then there were medium-scale worms that could do some gyrations, and then there were about a half-dozen small worms only meant for background action.

The problem was that when they're shooting these worms as miniatures, because even the 20-foot one is not 200 feet, which is what it's supposed to be, they could use force perspective, they could use miniature sets, but no matter what they did, you cannot hide the fact that as humans, we know what sand looks like. And so when you see anything next to sand, you actually get a sense of its scale immediately, because sand grains are actually pretty big.

And so they couldn't use sand for the sandworms. So they used what's called microspheres or microballoons. And basically this is like tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny, micro millimeter thick glass spheres. It's circular asbestos, basically. Yeah, I was going to say, this seems like a health concern. It is. So the cast and crew, when they were working around this, had to wear like tons of PPE. But the problem is it's so small that it can actually get through your PPP.

And it can actually get into your skin and irritate your skin and get into your bloodstream. So it was really nasty. I don't think they allow people to use this on movie sets to create dust anymore. No, it's caused so many problems. Yeah. So other issues, the volcano where they shot some of the Fremen scenes. Turns out it was the place where locals disposed of dead dogs. So it was actually the location was renamed the Dead Dog Dump.

Jesus Christ. Yeah. David Lynch liked a lot of takes, which slowed them down, and he was actively rewriting the script during production. They just had new pages constantly as they were trying to figure out a way to make the story make sense. The casting crew were constantly covered in dust and sand. They suffered coughing fits, and the temperatures often exceeded 110 degrees Fahrenheit. Adding insult to injury was the fact that everybody out in the desert had to wear these still suits, which the still suits in the book, recycle your water and keep you cool. In real life, they are giant condoms that are making you sweat everything out of your body.

Yeah, this sounds horrible. Yeah, apparently Francesca Anas weighed herself at the beginning of a day and then at the end of the day and she had sweated out three pounds of water. And she looks like she probably weighs 97 pounds to begin with. That's not good. Paul Smith, who plays Rob on the Beast. Yeah, yeah, the big one of the two nephews. Exactly, yeah.

He said that there's the scene where he climbs up the side of the sand dune and he's like, we will, you know, conquer this planet. He said it was miserable, and that then when they were shooting his close-ups, he started sinking into the sand, and so the camera operator was having to tilt the camera to follow his head because he was sinking down the sand dune. So it just caused all sorts of problems. Now, you mentioned the special effects. I think the matte paintings look great.

I think the miniatures look great. I think sandworms look great. Anything that requires more sophisticated visual compositing, it's a little rough. The shots of the ornithopter, the shots of the ornithopter, the shots. of the spaceships moving. Those look years behind Star Wars. I know. And it was blowing my mind because, like,

I kept pausing it and going back to check the year this came out. Because I was like, wait, this looks like shit. Like, why does this look like this? Like the, I'm sure we're going to get to this, but the horrible block shield suits, just nightmare town. And the way that the ships moved, I was like, it all just looks like two-d pieces of paper, like moving around. What, almost 10 years after the first Star Wars?

Seven, yeah. I mean, it looks like it came out 20 years before it. Like, it does not look right. So what I've pieced together, John Dykstra was one of the founding members of ILM. He had come on to be the VFX supervisor early in the process. He apparently had some sort of disagreement with Dino Delerreirene, I think it was over budget because what they were trying to do was expensive. Delerentis probably didn't want to pay for it.

Right. And so he left the project midway through production. Looks like it. They didn't hire a new VFX company to do the VFX for the project. Instead, DeLerentis hired a bunch of different people from different countries to come in and they kind of piecemealed a new VFX. they built an in-house VFX team that then handled all of the effects work in Mexico. But they did not have the experience with or access to the level of equipment

that ILM had been developing for like the last 10 to 15 years. So they really cheaped out on special effects. Brad Dorff actually in a later interview said that it really broke David Lynch and like broke his heart because the things that he wanted to do and that John Dykstra had said he would be able to do, simply were not possible with this new team. That's not a knock on the new team. They were given an impossible task.

But there's two big problems with this movie. This is one of them. That it just does not look very good. I think it probably didn't look very good at the time. It's not even something that, like, didn't hold up that well. No, critics at the time said it looked cheap in a lot of its sequences. Production design, everything beautiful. Costumes beautiful.

Yeah. But VFX just like shockingly not good. And then the other one, I'm sure we will get to, but it is the pacing of the second half of this movie. Yes. We'll get there. One or two other small things in production. They hired the Mexican Army to provide 3,500 soldiers as extras only for the army members to show up to set one week early. No one was there to film them.

I couldn't find confirmation of this fact. So take this with a grain of salt, but I'm 99% sure this is. true. Lynch and DeLorentis were constantly arguing over the lighting of the film. Specifically, DeLerentis wanted the film to be lit brighter for VHS release, because when you played a VHS on your home TV, the image is much darker than when you see it on a big screen at the theater. And Delerentis was more concerned with the VHS release and the ancillary markets that he had sold than he was with the theatrical. So again, another just clash of visions and intense. Principal photography for Dune ended in September of 1983, so it ran from May to September.

Second unit and effects photography continued on since they did in-house effects and concluded in January of 1984. I'm not going to get into music a ton, but Toto, we brought in to do the film's score. I kind of liked it. I thought the score was great. Obviously, Furie Frederick's and their lead singer did not participate. Brian Eno, if you'll notice, is credited. with one track, the prophecy theme.

I didn't get a chance to deep dive this, but I did read that it's rumored that Brian Eno had done an entire first pass at the score for the film. I mean, that would make sense. Yeah, and that they only kept one track and then they brought Toto in to redo the other stuff

that they didn't like. You have to imagine that Brian Inos was just way too weird. I mean, I would love to have heard what it was, but Toto is a much more conventional choice to bring up. A lot of electric guitar. running through her toto during it, exactly.

There's a lot of like, Brian Ere! Oh, is that going up to sand dunes, which I like. Again, I couldn't find confirmation of that fact, but it, like Lizzie said, it would make sense. It's unusual that Brian Eno's brought in only for like one obscure, you know what I mean,

one theme. That's, doesn't normally happen. Of course, okay, we're getting to the, what you keep bringing up, Lizzie, and it's the biggest issue. And that is the film, bonkers. The film's running time.

So, so the first cut of the film was over four hours. hours. And then David Lynch's preferred cut, what I guess you would call as director's cut, ran just over three hours long. Which, again, we have covered a book of this length before. It's gone with the wind. And that movie runs, what, three hours and 40 minutes long? And they cut a shitload out of that book. And that is nowhere near as detailed a universe as this is. So Universal and Delarentis said that the longest the movie could be was two hours and 17 minutes. because that's the longest runtime that wouldn't cause them to lose a screening time slot with the theatrical release.

We've talked about this on Titanic before as well. Lizzie, yeah, why don't you go ahead and explain it? Well, so it's a gamble with a longer movie, and it's part of the reason that they had concerns about Titanic's runtime is because you are essentially, if you think about, obviously, movie theaters are only open a certain number of hours each day. So the longer your movie is, that means the fewer number of times it can be. played per screen each day. So you're potentially losing ticket money because not as many people can see the movie in a 24-hour span. Exactly. So you can feel the cuts in this movie. Yeah,

they make no sense. The first hour of the movie, I think more or less tracks. It does. Especially if you've read the books. I've read the books. I read the book, the first one. It was a while ago, but I've read it, so I'm familiar with the world. I had seen the Denis Villeneuve film twice. I had no idea what was happening in the back half of this movie. So as someone who has not read the book and has only seen the Denisvonev version, I was shocked at how long they spent on what is essentially Dune part one, what we saw Denis Villeneuve cover. that is literally the first hour and 20 minutes to 30 minutes of this movie.

I was going to say hour and a half. Yes, is just what's covered in this. And then all of us, and I was like, well, what the shit? Like what's going to happen in part two? It cuts to what becomes like a multi-year. It becomes like a best of montage of two. For 45 minutes. Which I mean, I was sort of tracking what was happening.

but then I was also like, Jessica's pregnant with a demon baby and it's showing up and now how did it get to the emperor? None of it makes any sense. It's pretty wild. Like it becomes like an experimental music video for the last 45 minutes of this thing. All right. So Lynch cuts the movie down to the exact mandated runtime of two hours and 17 minutes. The only way they can do this is if they add some new photography to flesh out the montages

and more importantly, they bring Virginia Madsen in to do all this voiceover and direct camera addressing to explain what's happening in the movie. And so in the end, David Lynch finds himself in the exact position he'd wanted to avoid when he turned down Return of the Jedi. He wasn't making his movie. He was making the Laurentis' movie.

It doesn't make any sense. There was one last insult to injury. According to Harlan Ellison, Universal effectively killed the film just before its release. So this is a quote from Harlan. It was widely rumored in the gossip underground that Frank Price,

chairman of MCA Universal's motion picture group and one of the most powerful men in the industry, had screened the film in one or another of its final workups. So this is right before it was going to get released. Yeah. And had declared, vehemently enough and publicly enough

for the words to quickly have seeped under the door of the viewing room and formed a miasma over the entire universal law. this film is a dog. It's going to drop dead. We're going to take a bath on it. Nobody will understand it.

End quote. I mean, not wrong. Like, if you're trying to make something that's even remotely accessible for people that don't have any experience with Dune, this is not it. Like, I came in at least with the precursor of having seen a movie version of this

that makes sense. If I didn't have that, I don't know that I would have even been able to like maintain attention throughout this. Although it looks great. So maybe I would. Yeah. Regardless, people at Universal freaked out.

They canceled all of the scheduled review screenings in advance of the release date, which of course just pissed off the critics that wanted to see the movie. So anybody that was going to give it at the benefit of the doubt is now going to hate on it. Dune was released on December 14th, 1984.

It grossed $31 million in North America during its initial run. that's against a budget of $45 million. Now, it should be said that despite being considered a flop, David Lynch has publicly said that the budget was far lower than $45 million, that the $45 million, similar to Battlefield Earth, is just what Dino DeLerantis said it was. I believe that.

And the movie was largely not marketed. DeLorentis felt that they could get by with the fact that it was a well-known book and that David Lynch was a well-known director. So they probably didn't spend a ton on marketing either. So it was a flop, but I don't think it was as big a flop as we've talked about from a pure numbers perspective. Critics were very derisive of the project. Siskel and Ebert said it was the worst film of 1984.

The New York Times said, quote, several of the characters in Dune are psychic, which puts them in the unique position of being able to understand what goes on in this movie, which I thought was a pretty good burn. The film was also hammered for being homophobic, associating homosexuality with all of Baron Harkinens most of, vile traits, including psychopathy and bloodlust. So...

What? Yeah, Baron Harkinen is gay. Oh. In the book, it's more that he's like a pedophile. Is that why he, because he's kind of like leering at sting. He, that's right. Okay. He's, yeah, he leers at young men.

In the book, it's implied, like, pubescent young men, like Paula Trades. Because Paul Atreides is 15 in the book. And it's implied that the baron. is sexually attracted to him. And the book was criticized for the same thing. I think Defenders of the book try to make the point that it's not that he's gay, it's that he's a pedophile. But Dennis Altman, an Australian academic and gay rights activist,

I think made a very good point where he criticized the choice to portray the one gay character in the film as suffering from an open wound skin disease during the height of the AIDS epidemic. So again, I don't think David Lynch intended any of this, but it was not a great look. And it's on top of the movie. being great, you know, it doesn't feel like a very thoughtful choice. I didn't even get that. So I, yeah, that went way over my head. But I did wonder why he was staring so much at Sting in his little wings diaper. So that tracks, I guess. A longer version of the film was released for television a few years later. Ironically, this is the

version that David Lynch had his name removed from. So people sometimes say David Lynch had his name removed from Dune. He didn't, not the original one. He did have it removed from the longer version because he was not involved in the re-edit. Gotcha. So he's credited as Alan Smithy, which is what the DGA uses when a director doesn't want their name on a project. Contrary to persistent online rumors, there is no director's cut of the film floating around. There's no like better David Lynch version.

As he says, he's like, there's other versions that have more stuff, but it's still the same flawed movie. As we mentioned, he was never working toward a final cut that he could control. so he fails in retrospect that every decision he made was flawed going into the movie. Dino de Laurentis and David Lynch would ironically go on to make Lynch's next film, Blue Velvet, together, because they had a contract where Lynch had to make another movie. Oh, wow. However, Blue Velvet was the smallest film that Laurentis was making at the time,

budgeted at a mere $6 million, so Lynch was left entirely alone to do whatever he wanted. There you go. And he had final cut, so he had a wonderful time. Yep. Delarentis took his film group public in 1986. He raised $240 million in the process. Raphaelah left the company in 1987, a move that apparently deeply pained Dino. They then had a string of flops and were bankrupt in 1988.

Interesting. Delerentis's producing output plummeted in the 90s and 2000s. Across those two decades, his name was only on 19 films, but he had produced over 500 across his 40-year career. Wow. He died in 2010. Oh, wow. Raphaelah went on to produce Dragonheart, among many other films. She's still active today, though none of her recent credits approach the scope or scale of Doom.

Okay. Of course, David Lynch went on to continue to work with many of the cast and crew from Dune, most notably Kyle McLaughlin, collaborating on Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks. But, of course, others as well, Everton McGill. Many others, yeah. He does not like to speak of Dune during Emanuel. interviews, and he considers it his one true failure. And so, Lizzie, I'd like to end by sharing with you, David Lynch, on the importance of Final Cut, to conclude this episode.

Doom, it wouldn't be fair to say it was a total nightmare, but maybe 75% nightmare. And the reason is, I didn't have Final Cut. I had such a great time. in Mexico City, the greatest crew cast. It was beautiful. But when you don't have final cut, and I knew this already, but why did I do it? I don't know.

But when you don't have final cut, total creative freedom, you stand to die the death. Die the death. And died, I did. Oh, I love David Lynch. So, Lizzie, that is a very truncated, but still long, much like Dune. Yeah.

Episode on What Went Wrong on Dune. Lizzie, I think that brings us to our favorite section. What Went Right? Well, What Went Right is the one thing that I can't fucking believe you didn't talk about, which is that Pug. Audience, I will do a follow up. I'm going to figure out the Pug did not come up during my research. I, of course, noticed the Pug while watching. It's so.

research. I will figure out what the hell is up with the pug. We were watching it and David was like, did David Lynch just hedge his bets that this could just be like a cult comedy in case it was a total shit show? And I was like, I don't know because I loved that thing. So obviously number one, pug. But number two, I would say like the visual identity of this movie, visual effects aside, the production design, the costumes are great. It looked great. And that clearly has carried through into this next version that we're now seeing a little bit as well. So yeah, overall, I didn't hate it. My what went right is Kyle McLaughlin in the sense that I think he's fine. Yeah, he's fine. I think he gets better in his career as he goes on, as we all should.

He's a little too weird for this. Yeah, but cast more unknown actors in lead roles. So I had this horrible nightmare the other day that, well, it was actually kind of funny. Tom Cruise died in like a space accident, but they were not done making Tom Cruise movies, so they just decided they were going to have an AI. Oh yeah, don't need him.

Yeah, you know, replace Tom Cruise and hire an actor to play him in all these different movies. And it made me realize, like, oh, we actually might not need any more movie stars. And that the, with AI and everything, the future of movies is, of course, just going to be like, would you like to watch this film with, Tom Cruise is the lead or would you like to watch it with Tom Hanks as the lead? Or it's going to be me saying I want James Dean. It'll be me saying I would like to see Gone with the Wind starring Jennifer Lawrence and they'll be like,

you got it kid, you want a rocket ship in it? And I'll be like, yes, I do. And so there will be no need to cast new and unknown and therefore financially risky people in any of these movies, which I think is a terrible travesty. So I just like that they took a chance on someone. And that broke Kamaglachlan in, and we should do that with more people and not just, you know, not just white dudes from Seattle. Yeah. Not that there's anything wrong with those guys being one of them.

So I'll go with Kamaglachlan cast unknowns from time to time. Yeah. All right, guys. That concludes our coverage of Dune. Thank you, as always, for taking this journey deep into the heart of Iraqis together. I apologize for the many things that I pronounced incorrectly. If you write me a review that takes me to Tathouse. about it, I will probably make fun of you in the next episode. Lizzie, any house cleaning before we go?

No, I just want to tease what we do have coming up in terms of the next episode because I am, I don't know that I've ever been this excited about an episode that we are doing. Friends, I am going to be going down possibly the darkest hole I have gone down on this podcast so far. And that's mommy's hole? Is this what we're saying? I am covering Mommy Dearest. The movie based on the memoir written by Joan Crawford's daughter, Christina, starring Faye Dunaway. And my God, it is a mess beyond just what you see on the screen to a degree that I had no idea. So I'm very excited.

Very excited. Guys, make sure you watch Mommy Dearest. I have not seen it. I'm very excited to see it. You've never seen it? I've never seen it. Oh my God. I'll leave you with this, possibly my favorite line from the movie. Christina, bring me the X.

Great. I will watch that with my wife. It'll be a great night. She's going to love it. She is going to love it. Do you want to give a shout out to our full stop supporters? I do. Tom, Kristen, and Soman Chianani. Thank you so much, full stop for supporting us on Patreon. we just posted last week a great interview with Phil Blade, the Production Sound Mixer Academy Award-winning production sound mixer of Darius Martyr's Sound of Metal starring Riz Ahmed. Guys, if you sign up for our Patreon, you can check out that interview with a whole lot of other great content.

Yeah, he was great. We're also going to do another, actually we will have already launched it, another opportunity for you to vote on what episode Chris covers next. was the result of one of those, as was The Mummy. And I got some good ones for you guys to pick from. So pretty excited about that. What's in this poll this time? Well, let's just say one of them features the greatest song of the 2000s,

All Star by Smash Mouse. Oh, Shrek! Yes. And I hope that Shrek wins, because it's a doozy. So, guys, check out our Patreon, vote for your next film. Send us your recommendations. Slide into our DMs, guys. Please do.

And with that, we'll talk to you in two weeks. Okay. Bye. Use the voice. I get it. What went wrong is a Sad Boom podcast, presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman with cover art from Euthonouis.