Jodorowsky's Dune – Official Trailer HD (2014) | Hacker News Reader

Jodorowsky's Dune – Official Trailer HD (2014)

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56 pointsaurelien38 comments

I have a personal anecdote about the documentary.

I am a huge Dune fan. Book 4 is my favorite of all time. I also grew up in France, loving Bilal and Jodorowsky's work.

At the time io9 was the only outlet regularly covering the progress on the documentary. It was just a super niche sci-fi documentary. Before the movie released, io9 organized a little screening, which they mentioned on their blog. I had to be there! Sent an email to the staff, explaining how important it was that I would see this film. I'd sit on the stairs if I have to.

The team was super cool and told me I could go with a friend. We saw it and it was awesome. They organized a little get together after the screening and we talked about the movie. I think the whole thing was put together by Charlie Jane. It was such a cool experience, I really loved that. Thanks io9 for helping this documentary!

Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare. The costuming would have been really cool, but the story would have been totally changed to be incoherent, and it would have become an infamous scandal at changing a movie away from the book storyline.

I was so intrigued by this documentary, and how amazing it might be, until I went and actually watched ‘El Topo’. It was probably the worst movie I’ve ever watched… To this day everyone I asked to watch it with me will bring up how bad and weird,incoherent, and gross it was.

Doesn't sound terribly different than how I perceived the actual movie. I often describe Dune as a 3 hour trailer. I didn't hate it due to the visuals and the immersive sound at the theater but I would have probably been pretty upset with my wasted time if I saw it at home.

A part of me did laugh out at the thought of you naively sitting down with a group of friends to watch a Jodorowsky movie. Having watched The Holy Mountain, El Topo and Santa Sangre I could only imagine how awkward this was.

Regarding the creative process of creating Dune, Jodorowsky has this to say in the documentary:

> "if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to... to rape the bride."

Which is a horrifying choice of words considering Jodorwsky "claimed in a 1970 interview to have raped his co-star Mara Lorenzio on camera" [0].

[0] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/films/0/director-bragged-on-came...

> Which is a horrifying choice of words considering Jodorwsky "claimed in a 1970 interview to have raped his co-star Mara Lorenzio on camera" [0].

I can't read the article you linked as it seems limited to members, but it seems there is more to this story than that. More information about it here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alejandro_Jodorowsky#Criticism...

He said he wanted to shock people and that he didn’t really do that, but there are multiple ways to prove that, one of them was to bring people from the production or even Mara Lorenzio to speak. I tried to search for Mara Lorenzio on the net to see if there is anything on her and it is impossible to find. I’m not sure if her name was that….

On the other hand, how likely is it that someone could get raped on a set where there are at least 20 other people all standing around and staring into the scene? Would none of those people try to stop it if they saw it? Would they not share the story afterwards?

>Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare.

Yeah, it would've been great. El Topo is awesome. Holy Mountain is probably even better.

> Have you actually watched Jodorowskys movies? Because if you go and watch one, you know that his Dune would be have been an absolutely incomprehensible nightmare.

I have seen one of his movies, and it's the only movie I've ever walked out of. Now, granted, it was a midnight showing where the theater would show older movies, but man alive was whatever movie it was an incomprehensible trainwreck.

El Topo is my all time favorite movie. Different strokes for different folks.

Would have loved to have seen a Jodorowsky rendition of Dune.

Jodorowsky is a fairly acclaimed film maker. Putting it the way you did is only telling on yourself.

Much of the original planning and ideas of Jodorowsky's Dune was eventually used in Jodorowsky and Mœbius' "The Incal" series[1]. Two years or so ago Taika Waititi and Jodorowsky announced they're working on a movie version of that[2]. I really really hope that one will get made.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incal

[2] https://www.theincalmovie.com/

We have three Dunes at this point, suggesting the attention may be shifted somewhere else. Hyperion, anyone? Or perhaps some Vernor Vinge?

You could also obvious film Barrayar space opera. So surprising why it was never done. It's so now it makes contemporarity feel like fake.

Don't forget John Harrison's Dune miniseries. That was definitely not the greatest production, feeling like sort of the anti-Villeneuve in terms of scale. But I did get a kick out of how Baron Harkonnen ended each of his scenes with a rhyming couplet.

I would also recommend its often forgotten sequel, Children of Dune, which covers both books 2 and 3. Fans agree its a wonderful and faithful adaptation. James McAvoy as Leto II is just perfect.

It just have been a decade since I've read Hyperion and I'm still scared of the Shrike.

What is the third Dune? Are you referring to films or the two films plus the book(s)?

Two films plus miniseries.

Ah, I see. I didn't realize there was a miniseries. Such a long and detailed book could probably benefit from a miniseries as opposed to films.

They also have second book miniseries so definitely worth a look!

The sequel miniseries covers the 2nd and 3rd books, covering Children of Dune as well.

> What is the third Dune? Are you referring to films or the two films plus the book(s)?

https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0142032/

I would nominate Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun. Although it would require a steady auteurish hand to adapt it properly. Someone like David Lowery could probably do it. Would work best as a TV miniseries.

I saw that documentary when released and to be honest, I didn't believe many stories Jodorowsky tells about that project, in some cases he sound like my old uncle adding a bunch of lies to his stories to make it more interesting. Of course he has storybooks and many stories I'm sure are true.

Difficult to say how the movie would have actually turned out though (I watched the documentary before). It could also easily have been a huge mess.

Easily one of my favourite documentaries.

Ditto. The Orson Welles story always cracks me up: https://youtu.be/c6xQd0vJGkg?si=uJe1Z9BtNkM1Ycso

If you like that https://youtu.be/TpqwY7QL7r8?feature=shared

Never understood where he got the clown-like colourful chequered spaceships from. There is nothing like that in the books & it just feels out of place

After seeing Jodorowsky's concepts, I can imagine the producers actually found Lynch's vision to be the more fiscally conservative.

Only if

The material should be fed into ChatGPT et al, and see what we get to watch. There could be many versions that vary by the feeding/prompting process.

I think there are actually sketches from the preproduction phase in the documentary. H.R. Giger was involved at the time.

The extent of material is what made me think it would be enough input to get useful something out.

There were also Midjourney images generated for 'Jodorowsky's Tron[0].

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N3Yfv4kedD8

Do you know if any of the storyboarding or concept art was ever published?

Parts of it yeah

There are some Google drive links with compiled art of the movie

2 years ago or so there was a push by an nft group with fair amount of money to purchase a copy of the dune storybook by jodo that they released to studios....

But it was not meant to be, you might be able to read of it on the web

You can find a video of the whole book, page by page on the Internet Archive:

https://archive.org/details/dune-bible-viewing-alejandro-jod...

Unfortunately most video players don't let you expand the picture to larger than the screen, zoom in, or crop the image, and the image of the book only fills about half the screen so the words are not very readable. A little post processing in a video editor might solve that. Might need same AI resolution enhancement.

Just found you can play it in the Chrome browser and zoom in, but it doesn't help, the data is just not there to be able to read the text. May AI could recover it, maybe the world has to wait for a properly scanned official version.

FYI the whole manuscript was bought a couple of years ago. There's a whole story there, but it's out there :)

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