6 Golden Paths Not Taken

The earliest visions for cinematic Dune adaptations.

Fortune passes everywhere.

—Farad’n to the Lady Jessica

In the 1970s, on the planet Arrakis, it was the best of times and the worst of times. On one hand, 1976 saw the triumphant publication of Children of Dune; on the other, that was also the year of the utter dissolution of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s ambitious and troubled attempt to make the first novel into a film. Although nearly every aspect of Dune’s existence contains fascinating contradictions, these two parallel events take the spice cake. If you remain unconvinced that Dune moves in mysterious ways, worming itself into all aspects of pop culture, then the Dune history of the seventies should make the case clear. This is the decade when Dune was bigger than ever and simultaneously, at least in the arena of the movie business, became cursed. This was the decade when Herbert wrote what is probably the very best Dune book sequel, while two major attempts to adapt the first book for the cinema began a trend that cast a superstitious shadow over Dune movies for years. And throughout all these conflicts and contradictions, several science fiction phenomena were created by accident. If it hadn’t been for the topsy-turvy decade Dune had in the 1970s, the greatest sci-fi movie of 1979—Alien—would never have existed.

From 1971 to 1973, around the time that Herbert was trying to write this third Dune book, his first epic novel was in the process of getting turned into the next Planet of the Apes. Before Jodorowsky, before Lynch, the very first crysknife stab at turning Dune into a movie came from legendary producer Arthur P. Jacobs, who purchased the rights from Herbert in 1972, the same year the fourth Planet of the Apes film, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, was released. The projected budget for the APJ Dune film was fifteen million dollars, and by August 1972, Jacobs had approached David Lean—world-famous director of Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962)—to direct Dune. While the Lawrence of Arabia connection to Dune seems obvious enough, there’s an interesting roundabout David Lean connection to Arthur P. Jacobs, via Planet of the Apes. Lean’s Oscar-winning Bridge on the River Kwai was based on the 1952 novel of the same name by French novelist Pierre Boulle. The other big book of Boulle’s that was turned into a movie was his 1963 novel La planète des singes, known as Monkey Planet in the UK and Planet of the Apes in the United States. The fact that La planète des singes was published in 1963, the same year “Dune World” was first published in Analog, is also somewhat fitting. As novelists and prose stylists, Boulle and Herbert are pretty dissimilar. And yet, both Dune and Planet of the Apes spawned cult sci-fi followings, and both universes were created by authors capable of a variety of different literary ventures who later ultimately became known for only one novel. In the same way Herbert is forever remembered as the author of Dune, Boulle, to this day, is permanently associated with Planet of the Apes, even though several of his other books, including the collection Time out of Mind, are just as good.

Back in 1963, “Dune World” and La planète des singes both represented bold new archetypes of science fiction storytelling, the kinds of hyperbolic worlds in which the analogies and subtext of the works could be read as text, too. Fans love freaking out about apes on horseback and Fremen riding sandworms high on spice, but beyond that imagery, there’s a lot more going on. As novels, Dune and Planet of the Apes feel related—distant cousins, perhaps, but books with similar vibes. And so it makes a lot of sense that the producer in charge of the Apes film franchise would attempt to make Dune into a movie, too. While the 1968 film Planet of the Apes took several liberties with the Boulle novel,[*] the core philosophy of the book remained, and arguably is why the first film, and several of its sequels, became cult classics.

Although Herbert claimed that he had “no involvement at all with Arthur Jacob” in terms of developing the script, it’s very possible that had it all coalesced, the APJ version of Dune might have transmuted the fictional world of spice and sandworms into a series of 1970s sci-fi romps in the style of Planet of the Apes. Early in 1972, APJ wanted Robert Bolt (who also wrote the script for Lawrence of Arabia) to adapt Dune, essentially re-creating the David Lean/Robert Bolt dream team. While Brian Herbert implies Bolt and Lean were legitimately part of the project at one point,[*] other anonymous sources I spoke to claim both Lean and Bolt turned Jacob down flat. If Bolt did write a screenplay for Dune in the early 1970s, it has been buried in the sand and swallowed by shai-hulud. But two other fascinating screen treatments were written, and both give a glimpse of how the very first Dune movie might have shaken out.

In March 1972, a partial screenplay and treatment by Joe Ford and Bob Greenhut was written for APJ.[*] In this thirty-eight-page document, the basic sweeps of the first Dune novel are condensed, though not significantly changed. As in the novel, Emperor Shaddam IV asks Duke Leto Atreides to take over the spice production on Arrakis at the beginning of the film, but does so in person, addressing Leto and Duncan Idaho in a meeting at the top of the script. The fact that the emperor is conspiring with Baron Harkonnen is revealed quickly, and in this script, the Harkonnen heir, Feyd-Rautha, is the baron’s son rather than his nephew. Although the overall plot of the novel is (mostly) retained, there are interesting changes. Alia appears nowhere in this script, meaning she doesn’t kill the baron in this version. Rather, the baron is killed by a random Fremen agent of Paul’s, which, in the script, simply sets the stage for Feyd’s wanting to avenge the murder of his father. Although the original book introduced Feyd late in the game, this 1972 script makes his role much larger sooner, a tradition carried on in the 1984 David Lynch film and the 2000 John Harrison miniseries. The script also differs from the novel in its ending; here Paul initially resists becoming the emperor and worries that if he accepts his role as the Kwisatz Haderach, this will lead only to the downfall of the Fremen in the long run. The film would have ended on one of Paul’s grim future visions, in which we see “the sand reclaiming the moist Fremen Basins. A Fremen body, like a drowning man, sinks into the sand, it is STILGAR . . . then [fade to] BLACK.”

Like the pessimistic ending of Planet of the Apes, the ending of this 1972 Dune script would have been a kind of cautionary tale. Just as Dune Messiah ultimately finds Paul utterly disillusioned with everything he’s done, the ending for this unmade movie version would have essentially teased the same outcome: Arrakis is doomed. The savior is not the savior.

While producing a musical version of Huckleberry Finn, Jacobs became unsatisfied with this script at some point and hired Rospo Pallenberg to take another crack. By January 23, 1973, Pallenberg crafted a fifty-two-page treatment that at times seems to dumb down the novel, and at other turns makes intelligent narrative decisions that could have made aspects of the original novel more explicable. For example, in Pallenberg’s version of a Dune movie, the reason that the navigators need the spice melange would have been a mystery. Only at the very end of the movie, when Paul discovers his own prescience is boosted by the spice, does he connect the dots. “Mélange addiction gave them Prescience and a superhuman understanding of the abstract forms of Space and Time,” Pallenberg’s treatment reveals. “Now that Paul has power over the Navigators, the Emperor abdicates. . . . The Fremen claim Paul the ‘Emperor Mouse.’ ”

Pallenberg turned the spice into a kind of MacGuffin hiding in plain sight. Arguably, this kind of “mystery box” plot device could have worked if Dune were a different kind of novel. In the book, the only real mystery about the spice is its connection to the sandworms. In the Pallenberg version, we would have had a mystery at each end—the navigators and the spice, both shrouded in secrecy.

But while rendering the spice a double spoiler may have been clever, Pallenberg’s other major change in his Dune screenplay treatment is the opposite of smart. Throughout his version, Pallenberg treats the language of Dune as something to be simplified and made infinitely more boring. Paul is never referred to as “Muad’Dib” in this script, but rather as “Emperor Mouse,” which, yes, references the Fremen meaning of Muad’Dib, which is a desert mouse that Paul thinks is awesome, but doesn’t let us feel the awesomeness. Similarly, the Bene Gesserit sisterhood simply becomes “the Sisterhood” in Pallenberg’s script, who aren’t trying to create a super-being called the Kwisatz Haderach, but instead a “master race of noblemen.” All of Herbert’s carefully chosen words and memorable world-building are traded for the most generic nouns in the universe. If Pallenberg had been offered a chance to rewrite Star Wars a few years later, you can imagine him going in and changing “the Jedi” to just “the Knights” and renaming Obi-Wan Kenobi “Old Man Hero Robe.” It’s not that the Pallenberg screen treatment is bad per se, but the exclusion of the most Dune-ish words—including the fact that the name of the planet, Arrakis, appears nowhere in this document—is jarring. A Dune movie in which nobody says Bene Gesserit or Arrakis feels like it would have enraged hard-core fans and probably failed to capture new ones. In essence, Pallenberg missed that a big part of what makes Dune cool is its language.

With the Pallenberg script in hand in the spring of 1973, APJ intended to start filming Dune the following year. With David Lean out of the picture as the director, Jacobs wanted Terence Young—famous for directing the James Bond films Dr. No (1962), From Russia with Love (1963), and Thunderball (1965)—to helm the picture. But before that could happen, Arthur P. Jacobs had a heart attack on June 27, 1973. “He had the bad taste to die without consulting me,” Herbert quipped. Because Dune was essentially Jacobs’s personal passion project, his production company, Apjac International, let the option expire in 1974. In the larger story of Dune’s leap from the page to the screen, this moment may be more pivotal than fans have ever realized. Had Arthur P. Jacobs lived, it’s very possible there could have been a Dune film out in theaters in 1975, a full two years ahead of Star Wars. Self-styled film geeks will tell you that this also almost happened with Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, which was the attempt immediately following APJ’s. But when you think about how utterly mainstream the Jacobs version of Dune would have been (a Bond director!), and how effectively such a film would have been marketed, especially considering the widespread success of the Planet of the Apes franchise at the time, it’s possible the most interesting and controversial lost Dune is this version—the one that borrowed from Planet of the Apes, James Bond, and Lawrence of Arabia as much as it did from Frank Herbert. Somewhere out there in the multiverse is a bizarro timeline of the 1970s in which Arthur P. Jacobs lived and this Dune was made. Would it have been good? A cult hit like the Apes franchise? It’s tough to say. But because the 1970s were the decade in which the Dune novels became mega-popular, this unmade Dune movie certainly would have been remembered, regardless of quality.

Although the APJ failed attempt to make a Dune movie is tragically underdiscussed in the world of cinephiles who love discussing unmade movies, the other 1970s unmade Dune is perhaps the most famous unmade movie of all time. After the film option lapsed in 1974, it was immediately snatched up by French film producer Michel Seydoux[*] and his production company Caméra One. There are conflicting reports as to whether or not Herbert was happy about this at first. Seydoux tapped experimental art-house auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky to make an epic film version of Dune. According to Seydoux, Herbert agreed to sell the rights only because of Jodorowsky’s involvement. “Jodorowsky was not really well-known, but he was known by Frank Herbert’s circle,” Seydoux said in 2013. “They [Herbert’s reps] believed in us, they believed in our folly, they believed in our fire . . . in our love for the book.”

What happened next is unquestionably the most outlandish and spectacularly bizarre attempt to make a science fiction movie, ever. For decades after its failure, Jodorowsky’s take on Dune became mythical and legendary in science fiction and cinema circles. After Jodorowsky’s Dune, descriptions of subsequent Dune films were (and still are) often accompanied by a mention of this version, often in reverent or bemused tones. When the very first trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune was released on September 9, 2020, the action was set to a Hans Zimmer cover of Pink Floyd’s 1973 song “Eclipse,” a direct reference to the fact that Jodorowsky intended for Pink Floyd to compose the music for his Dune in 1975. Like the pre-born memories inside the minds of Alia, Ghanima, and Leto II, all of Dune cinema is haunted by the spirit of Jodorowsky’s Dune.

But why? And is the obsession with this specific unmade Dune warranted?

Thanks to Frank Pavich’s award-winning 2013 documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, this Dune has been dubbed “the greatest movie never made” and will likely never relinquish that crown, at least among certain folks who love director’s commentaries and in-depth podcasts about movies. Pavich’s documentary is so convincing that it’s easy to overlook the most staggering aspect of what Seydoux and Jodorowsky set out to do: make a Dune movie that utterly changed not only the story of the book, but also its philosophical meaning. If the scripts crafted by Ford, Greenhut, and Pallenberg were straightforward attempts to condense or flatten Dune into a boring Hollywood movie, Jodorowsky’s version intended to basically just write an entirely new story. Infamously, Jodorowsky admitted openly to the radical and drastic changes his version would have made to Herbert’s first book. “It was my Dune. . . . I feel like a thief,” Jodorowsky said in 2013. “The novel is one art . . . but picture [cinema] is another art . . . it’s not the same.”

Because it’s impossible to surpass the sheer amount of information in Pavich’s documentary, and also because countless thousands of words have been devoted to the Jodorowsky attempt, and because some versions of the script for this epic are longer than the book you’re reading (Frank Herbert called this script a “phone book”), the only way to discuss Jodorowsky’s Dune without losing your mind is to talk about three things that really matter about this unmade movie.

The movie would have drastically departed from the book.
The cinematic science fiction aesthetic of this unmade film created Alien.
Jodorowsky’s controversial statements—about Dune and other matters—are probably enough to convince Dune fans this movie wouldn’t have aged well.

The logistics of this Dune are flashy and unbelievable enough to quickly elucidate why the movie never got made. Mick Jagger was the first choice to play Feyd. The part of Emperor Shaddam IV was to be played by Salvador Dalí, for a salary of $100,000 an hour. To get around this budgetary problem, a robot puppet of Dalí was constructed, to be used in shots that didn’t require Dalí to be present. Jodorowsky’s own son, Brontis, who was thirteen years old at the time, was to play Paul. David Carradine, fresh from his success in the first kung fu TV series, was cast as Duke Leto. Orson Welles was apparently wooed to play Baron Harkonnen when Jodorowsky promised to get the chef from his favorite restaurant to cook for him every day. But the director of the documentary, Frank Pavich, didn’t set out to chronicle the making of a disaster, instead to capture the pain and triumphs of Jodorowsky’s take on Dune.

“When I was making the documentary, one of the things that Jodorowsky was really adamant about was that this was not a story of failure,” Frank Pavich tells me in 2023. “This was not a sad story. This was a story of something great being accomplished, of all these interesting people coming together. And it didn’t exactly work out, but look what did work out!”

Regardless of artistic merits, one thing Pavich’s documentary reveals is that Jodorowsky’s Dune would have been expensive as hell. Imagine if Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets had come out in 1997 instead of 2017 and starred Leonardo DiCaprio, and instead of that weird role for Ethan Hawke, Liam Gallagher was in the movie, and maybe Sean Connery, too. At a certain point, this unmade Dune becomes a monumental word salad of famous names, which, in terms of its legacy, isn’t necessarily a good thing.

Although Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn says that this Dune would have been “awesome,” the evidence suggests that there’s not an alternate universe where this movie could have ever been completed, much less released. And even if there were, there’s no universe where the movie would have made Dune fans happy. Of all the attempts to make Dune into a film, the Jodorowsky version is often regarded as a valiant and artistic failure because the movie was attempted by an art-house director fighting against the sensibilities of the American Hollywood system. And yet, at the risk of offending Jodorowsky fans, the script for this Dune is the least faithful to the novel by any metric.

“I want to create the prophet. To change the young mind[s] of all the world,” Jodorowsky said. “For me, Dune will be the coming of a god. Artistically, [and] cinematographically, a god.”

While it’s tempting to say Jodorowsky understood that the message of Dune was ultimately against the mixture of religion with politics, little about the ending of his script proves he grasped Herbert’s intended irony. In Jodorowsky’s script, after leading a Fremen crusade against his enemies, Paul is killed, but his spirit and consciousness immediately manifest in all his allies. From the super-baby Alia, to Stilgar, to Gurney, to Jessica and Chani, and all the Fremen, everyone begins to chant “I am Paul.” At the same time, the entirety of the surface of Arrakis is instantly transformed into a water-rich paradise, and we learn the planet itself is also imbued with Paul’s soul. Arrakis is now a “Blue Dune,” a living planet, with a hive mind, and apparently, thanks to all the spice, possesses the ability to move through space on its own, sort of like if the Death Star were actually the “Life Star.” The movie would have ended with this “Blue Dune” leaving the galaxy, presumably to spread the good word of Muad’Dib throughout the universe.

Now, imagine this idea came from Michael Bay and not Alejandro Jodorowsky. Is this still a good idea? Would it have worked? Maybe. Is this what Dune is about? Certainly not. Cinephiles tend to want to support the vision of an auteur, particularly one with as many trippy cult movies as Jodorowsky. But this ending feels a little corny, and not in the “high camp” way Herbert claimed to have intended.

Before he told producer Seydoux that he wanted to adapt Dune, Jodorowsky had not yet read the novel. “I didn’t read Dune,” he said. “But I have a friend who [said to me] it was fantastic. I don’t know why I [said] ‘Dune.’ I could have said ‘Don Quixote’ or ‘Hamlet.’ I don’t know anything. I say ‘Dune.’ ” While it’s clear (and has been confirmed by multiple sources) that Jodorowsky later did read the novel[*] and became enamored of it (“I compare it to Proust in French literature”), this somewhat flippant regard for the source material extended to other aspects of the production. Specifically, artist Chris Foss—legendary science fiction cover artist, both then and now—admitted that he had “no idea what the actual story is . . . none whatsoever.” As late as 2013, Foss said he “still hasn’t” read the book and his entire perception of the story of Dune came from what Jodorowsky said. “As far as I’m concerned the story of Dune is what Alejandro told me it was.”

Foss contributed extensive concept art for this project, and he’s one-third of a triumvirate who worked on Jodorowsky’s Dune and would go on to help craft an entirely different movie roughly three years after the Jodorowsky attempt failed—Alien. The other two pivotal figures who would cross over to work with Ridley Scott on Alien were special effects creator–turned–screenwriter Dan O’Bannon and outré artist H. R. Giger. Along with Jean Giraud (known as “Mœbius”), this creative team worked in Paris for well over a year in pre-production for Jodorowsky’s Dune.

The result of this labor is mostly in the form of concept art, a few sculptures, a handful of costumes, and, most famously, at least ten massive hardbound books that outlined the entire movie in storyboard format. Today, these books are the holy grail of all Dune ephemera, with copies being valued at between $46,000 and $3 million. If Hollywood wanted to make another movie based on Jodorowsky’s Dune, a heist movie in which criminals try to steal a copy of one of these storyboard books is probably the best bet. Can’t you just picture Brad Pitt pulling one of these massive Dune books out of a safe while Matt Damon cracks wise about the spice?

Frank Pavich calls this book the “art bible” and tells me that it’s important to remember that concept art, storyboards, and writing is all we have.

“They didn’t shoot one frame of film,” Pavich tells me. “There’s nothing that exists that points to failure because there’s not a day’s worth of shooting. If there were raw footage, people could point and laugh, because raw footage always looks horrible. But it never even reached that point. It finished at the perfect moment of that art bible. There’s truly no moment of failure.”

As Pavich points out, everything bewitching and seductive about this film version of Dune comes from the art created by this group of four men. A chunk of this sci-fi concept art would be repurposed for other films, but perhaps the most recent homage to the artwork created for this Dune was found in Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One, in which the Harkonnen stronghold of Giedi Prime is very reminiscent of Giger’s concept art for a Harkonnen city that would have appeared in Jodorowsky’s Dune.

There are several stated reasons the Jodorowsky movie never got made—personality conflicts, the inability of distributors to put faith into such an unwieldy project—but the notion of combined incompetence is seldom mentioned, even if it does seem to be the key factor. While everything about this production seems hilariously twee and outlandish in retrospect, Frank Herbert was furious. Jodorowsky had blown two million dollars on pre-production and Herbert was also less than pleased about the idea of a twelve-to-fourteen-hour movie. The length of the film, including Herbert’s reference to the “phone book” of the script, is often cited as the biggest reason why Jodorowsky’s version was unfilmable. And yet, in 1984, in an interview for the French film magazine L’écran fantastique, Jodorowsky himself said that the super-long version of his Dune was not what he planned.

“When you say that my version could not have lasted less than ten hours on the screen . . . you show your ignorance of the project,” Jodorowsky protested in a kind of open letter to Herbert. “I had signed a contract in which I promised to provide a screenplay from which we could shoot a three-hour film and a six-part series for television. The version for the big screen would have lasted three hours, no more!”

Bizarrely, in the twenty-first century, and thanks to the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune, Jodorowsky himself has seemingly contradicted his own contradiction. The legend of the twelve-to-fourteen-hour Dune has grown so much that nobody, not even Jodorowsky, seems to remember the promise of a three-hour version of this movie. So which is it? Frank Pavich says that it sort of depends on if we’re talking about the various screenplays or the complex storyboards.

“I’ve seen different versions of the screenplay,” Pavich explains. “Some that are like 150 to 200 pages. And that’s a very long movie in itself. But then, after he wrote the screenplay and started doing the storyboards with Mœbius, that’s when everything changed. They got even more creative. So there are wild scenes that weren’t necessarily directly from script. When they finished storyboarding the entire film, far as I know, he didn’t go back to rewrite the screenplay. And only through a screenplay can you really tell how long a film will be, and I think that he didn’t care at that point.”

So Jodorowsky’s claim that one script was a reasonable length seems true. And the existence of the massively detailed storyboards suggests a bigger version. From Pavich’s point of view, that’s where the contradiction exists: script versus storyboards.

Either way, there was no love lost between the Herberts and Jodorowsky in the end, and after Frank and Beverly visited Paris in October 1976, the Jodorowsky production was shut down simply because it had run out of money. The distributors were spooked by the skyrocketing costs, and the option was about to expire anyway. Still, despite all of this, Pavich thinks the decision to stop production on Jodorowsky’s Dune was more connected to the historical context combined with a lack of mainstream success from Jodorowsky, at least in the eyes of studio executives.

“I think the reason it didn’t get completed, a large part is the time,” Pavich tells me. “This was 1974 to 1976. So this is before Star Wars. Even when Star Wars was being made, the studios were going along with it. To them, George Lucas did a great job on American Graffiti, made them a lot of money, and they let him do his silly science fiction movie. But none of them got it. All the executives were like, they would watch test edits, and they were like, what the hell is this garbage? So once the movie was completed and released, it’s obviously this cultural sensation. But nobody could have predicted that. Jodorowsky was working on Dune a little bit before any of that happened, and without something like American Graffiti behind him.”

The attempt that was Jodorowsky’s Dune is fascinating to think about but, for some critics and experts, feels like a moment where Dune fans collectively dodged a hunter-seeker. In his admission to changing the book radically, Jodorowsky joked, “I was raping Frank Herbert. But with love.” Herbert clearly didn’t feel the love.

Although not present in the 2013 documentary, noted science fiction critic Emmet Asher-Perrin pointed out in 2017 that Jodorowsky’s very problematic use of the word rape is doubly problematic, because in 1972, in the book El Topo: A Book of the Film, Jodorowsky was quoted saying that he “really raped” his costar, Mara Lorenzio, in his film El Topo. Whether or not this statement was factual is not known, because Lorenzio never made a public statement about filming El Topo. But in the twenty-first century, Jodorowsky denies it, and instead has claimed his statement was one of intentional hyperbole.

In a 2019 statement to Artforum, Jodorowsky denied raping anyone while making his movies, saying that his previous statements were uttered in character, for publicity. “These words: ‘I’ve raped my actress,’ was said fifty years ago by El Topo, a bandit dressed in black leather that nobody knew. They were words, not facts; Surrealist publicity in order to enter the world of cinema from a position of obscurity. I do not condone the act of rape but exploited the shock value of the statement at the time.” Previously on his Facebook account in 2017, Jodorowsky also denied actual rape, noting that the simple fact that so many people were present proves that he couldn’t have done something like that, saying: “At the smallest hideout of royal violence, a group of men and women would throw themselves on me to immobilize me.”

The truth can’t be known, but the existence of the word rape in the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune exists, and Asher-Perrin’s negative review of the documentary was a voice in the wilderness in 2017. But by 2019, they weren’t alone. As Laura Jaramillo wrote in 2019, “New York’s Museo del Barrio canceled a retrospective of the Chilean multimedia artist Alejandro Jodorowsky due to public protest over his claim that he raped the lead actress in his 1970 film El Topo.”

From Jaramillo’s point of view, the problem with Jodorowsky’s cinematic style isn’t only that he may or may not have committed a serious crime on the set of El Topo; it’s that his treatment of women’s bodies in his films created a permissive cult of personality around Jodorowsky. In her view, the art itself is problematic.

“For decades, Jodorowsky’s film [El Topo] was synonymous with the cult spectatorship it inspired among its New York audiences, who attended screenings ritualistically,” Jaramillo wrote in 2020. In essence, she argued that Jodorowsky’s depiction of violence against women in his films was “central” to his cult following. Although Jodorowsky later claimed he made these statements on purpose, and that the sex scene in El Topo was consensual in real life, for feminist scholars like Jaramillo, it doesn’t really matter. And for Asher-Perrin, this connects to Dune because Jodorowsky’s art lionized rape, and that feels incongruous with the sensibilities of Frank Herbert. “Frank worshipped women,” Theresa Shackleford, Herbert’s surviving widow, tells me. “Anyone who thinks he was a sexist is wrong. He thought women should be running everything.”

As Asher-Perrin said, “It’s no great tragedy that Jodorowsky’s Dune never got made . . . we arguably got a better film out of it—because Dan O’Bannon, Mœbius, Chris Foss, and H. R. Giger all went on to create Alien.”

They have a point. Because the real legacy of Jodorowsky’s Dune is Alien. Although Jodorowsky recruited those four men, he obviously didn’t intend for them to end up working together on another film. But after the dissolution of Jodorowsky’s Dune, Dan O’Bannon was hospitalized for depression, and after writing over a dozen screenplays, he finally got one of those scripts green-lit, and that script became Ridley Scott’s Alien. Foss, Mœbius, and Giger were brought on to the production team of Alien, and the rest is history.

The look and feel of that movie—from the design of the Nostromo to the hideously iconic xenomorph—both, in a roundabout way, owe a debt to Jodorowsky’s Dune. This team of people would not have been brought together without Jodorowsky’s pushing them into new spaces of creativity. Ridley Scott may be credited as the visionary who made Alien the indisputably classic film that it is. But the script couldn’t have existed without Dan O’Bannon’s long and winding road from Dune, and the iconic creature is all thanks to the twisted mind of H. R. Giger, primed to make sci-fi movies uniquely horrifying, all because of his work on Dune. In this way, it might be healthier for film historians to view Jodorowsky as a step-uncle to Alien rather than as an estranged Dune co-parent. All of this means that the sandworms of Jodorowsky are indirectly responsible for the literal birth of the chest bursters in Alien. In 2012, Chris Foss credited the genesis of chest bursters to a bout of horrible food poisoning Dan O’Bannon had had while in Paris, in preparation to shoot Dune. While in the hospital, O’Bannon felt like “there was a monster inside of him.” Obviously, this later became one of the most famous scenes in horror movie and sci-fi movie history. But had O’Bannon not been in Paris and gotten sick at that exact time, could he have come up with Alien? Jodorowsky’s attempt to make Dune put O’Bannon in the hospital, even if by accident.

As we know, there are zero space aliens—chest bursters or otherwise—in the Dune-iverse. But, in 1964, John Campbell had asked Herbert to cook up a Dune sequel that would have pitted Paul against a race of aggressive aliens. Herbert gave that suggestion a hard pass, and as such, prevented Dune from becoming the kind of science fiction he didn’t want it to be.[*] And yet, without Dune, and without the failure of two Dune films, the greatest science fiction alien of them all could have never existed. This means the degree of separation between the amazing film career of Sigourney Weaver and the writings of Frank Herbert is basically just two steps. If you take away the popularity of the Dune novel, you can’t get Jodorowsky’s attempt. And if Jodorowsky’s failed attempt hadn’t ever recruited the artists behind Alien, then the entire landscape of science fiction cinema after 1979 would have crumbled. Even though Dune didn’t become a seventies movie, it accidentally gave birth to arguably the second (or third?) most important sci-fi movie of that decade. Star Wars (1977) is certainly the most influential sci-fi movie of the seventies, but this was also a big decade for sci-fi movies in general. Between A Clockwork Orange (1971), Escape from the Planet of the Apes (1971), Logan’s Run (1976), and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979, the same year as Alien), it’s tough to say which movie was the most important sci-fi movie (other than Star Wars) of that decade. Again, other than Star Wars, of all of those seventies sci-fi movies, Alien has probably aged the best, and because it spawned a franchise and helped solidify the careers of both Ridley Scott and, later, James Cameron (thanks to the 1986 sequel Aliens), its influence and larger cultural impact are massive.

The reception Jodorowsky’s Dune would have received in the seventies from fans of Dune and, more generally, sci-fi fans is unknowable. True believers seem to think cinema would have pivoted around this one project, but it’s also just as easy to argue that it would have been forgotten or misunderstood, like the 1974 sci-fi romp Zardoz, directed by another celebrated director, John Boorman. That film, which starred Sean Connery in a somewhat shocking diaper-ish outfit, complete with bandoliers and thigh-high boots, is, if you squint, not too far off from the concept art for some of the costumes for Jodorowsky’s Dune. None of the same people worked on the two sci-fi projects, but the point is simple: Just because something was a science fiction movie, crafted by an auteur, and possessed striking (or goofy) production design does not mean that movie was good.

Had Jodorowsky’s Dune been completed and released in the 1970s, it would have had stiff competition from movies that became bona fide classics. Many of those films, like Star Wars and Alien, couldn’t have existed without Frank Herbert or Alejandro Jodorowsky. But Dune’s biggest triumph of the 1970s wasn’t destined to happen in the movie theaters. Instead, Herbert was about to catapult the entire genre into an entirely new realm: the true mainstream.