This blurb was forwarded to me by a close friend that recently came to town for a spell - family business - and I was too buried under deadlines to hang out. Instead of sending an e-mail detailing how much of a shitty friend I happen to be, he played into my love of what’s semi-defined in the title line. This post is not to imply that I will ever revisit Jodorowsky’s four faves of the 19 - 25 art school student set.

“In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the rights to the movie from APJ. The director this time would be Alejandro Jodorowsky. In 1975, Jodorowsky tried to film the story as a ten hour feature, in collaboration with Orson Welles, Dan O’Bannon, Salvador Dalí,Gloria Swanson, Hervé Villechaize and others (nicknamed by him as “his seven samurais”). The music would have been done by Pink Floyd. Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris that consisted 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 started designing the Harkonnen Castle based on Moebius’ storyboards and Dali was to play the role of the Emperor for a reported $100,000 an hour. Jodorowsky also hired Dan O’Bannon to head the special effects department. Dali and Jodorowsky began quarreling over money and just as the storyboards, designs, and the script were finished, the financial backing dried up. Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that two million dollars of the 9.5 million budget were already spent in pre-production and that the Jodorowsky’s script would result in a 14-hour movie (”It was the size of a phonebook” Herbert recalled). Although Jodorowsky took several creative liberties with his novel, Herbert stated that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship.”

 

 

….slightly different Wiki-Take:

“Jodorowsky began working in 1975 on an adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune. The project was intended to involve his son Brontis (Paul), Orson Welles as the Baron, Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Mick Jagger as Feyd Rautha, Alain Delon as Duncan Idaho, Geraldine Chaplin as Lady Jessica, Dan O’Bannon for the script, Chris Foss, Pink Floyd, H. R. Giger and Jean Giraud (Mœbius). Ultimately, its funding evaporated, but Jodorowsky claimed it was sabotaged by the major studios in Hollywood because it was too French, a strange claim considering that Jodorowsky, while a naturalized citizen of France, has never identified with any particular country or culture (although the funding and his producer, Jerome Seydoux, were French). Many people close to the project claim that the set designs later turned up in Star Wars. Several of the people working on Jodorowsky’s version of Dune later worked on Alien with elements (specifically those designed by Giger) similar to that of the failed Dune project. Whatever the opinions, Jodorowsky was the person who persuaded artist Mœbius to begin drawing science fiction at the beginning of the seventies, instead of “limiting himself to the Western genre.” That decision triggered a “domino effect,” which led to a massive revolution in science fiction design on both sides of the Atlantic. Director Ridley Scott credits the influence of a few French artists of that time for his decision to bring science fiction to the screen. In the early 1980s, David Lynch would later make the first film adaptation of Dune.”