Of course, that never-filmed surrealist comedy is not the only, nor the most famous, unproduced movie with which Dalí was associated. That title would have to go to Chilean-French director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s epic plan to adapt Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel Dune in the early 1970s, the subject of Frank Pavich’s new documentary. The documentary’s title, Jodorowsky’s Dune, not only distinguishes the never-made film from the Dino De Laurentiis-produced bomb from 1984, but also underscores how the film would have been, first and foremost, through and through, a Jodorowsky production, an explosion of bizarre imagery, warped storylines, and messianic pretensions that could only come from the artist behind Fando y Lis (1967), El Topo (1971), and Holy Mountain (1973), the latter two of which were huge cult hits in the early 1970s and all but invented the concept of the midnight movie.

What makes the idea of Jodorowsky’s film version of Dune all the more tantalizing and frustrating is that we have a literal roadmap for what it would have been (or at least what Jodorowsky planned it to be; many of the effects and images and ideas were arguably far advanced of the special effects technologies of its era). Before a camera was ever set to roll, Jodorowsky went about compiling a massive book that mapped out the entire film—storyboards of every scene, costume and production designs, and copious notes about how everything would look, what it would sound like, and what it was all supposed to mean (at least as far as Jodorowsky could articulate his ideas in words). He and producer Michel Seydoux put together some twenty of these massive bound books—which look like they weigh about 20 pounds—and distributed them to all the major Hollywood studios in hopes of securing the final $5 million of financing they needed to make the film. Alas, none of the studios bit, mostly because they were concerned that Jodorowsky was too eccentric, too unpredictable, too “out there” to be entrusted with what, at the time, would have been the most expensive science fiction film ever made (remember that this was the early 1970s, before Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind elevated the genre from the dustbin of drive-in B-movie purgatory to blockbuster status).

Director Frank Pavich, who has produced and co-produced a number of documentaries and worked on various reality TV shows, interviews virtually everyone who would have contributed to the film, those whom Jodorowsky deemed his “warriors”: producer Michel Seydoux, who spent years trying to put the project together; Jodorowsky’s son Brontis, who would have played the messianic lead and spent two years learning martial arts for the role; Chris Foss, a renowned sci-fi illustrator who translated Jodorowsky’s ideas into a complete storyboard of the entire film; Christian Vander, the drummer of the European prog-rock bank Magma, which along with Pink Floyd and several other bands would have supplied the film’s soundtrack; and H.R. Giger, the dark-minded artist who laid out the film’s production design. Special effects designer Dan O’Bannon’s widow offers her reminiscences of her husband selling all his belonging and moving to Paris to work on the film, while Dalí stories are shared by fashion model Amanda Lear, his constant companion and “muse” at the time. Pavich also provides some outsider context from filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn (Drive), who talks about having dinner at Jodorowsky’s house and then sitting while the director took him through the entire Dune book, and Star Wars producer Gary Kurtz, who explains why the film was destined to be rejected by the Hollywood establishment.

Pavich does all he can to bring the unmade film to life, particularly via three-dimensional animatics that turn the static storyboards for several of the film’s key sequences into motion pictures. Pulsing and fluid, these animatics are the ultimate tease, bringing us as close to possible to something that will never be (although Jodorowsky, who has worked in comic books since the 1960s, offers the tantalizing suggestion that someone might take his production book and use it to make an animated film version). The cumulative impact of Jodorowsky’s Dune is curious because, despite the detailed plans laid out for the film, it is difficult to ascertain what the film would have really been like. Jodorowsky, who has by far the most screen time, talks at length and with great passion and intensity about his ideas, plans, and intentions, some of which are more coherent than others (although they are always fascinating, even when muddy). However, there is no way of telling how they would have actually translated to the silver screen had he and Seydoux managed to secure financing. His plans were so grandiose, so ambitious, so (some might say) delusional that it is hard to imagine he could have pulled it off with mid-1970s production techniques and special effects.

Interestingly, despite the fact that the film was never produced, Jodorowsky’s Dune makes a good case for Dune’s extensive impact on the film industry, from specific visual ideas eventually making their way into other films (specifically Jodorowsky’s idea of a single, unbroken shot taking us through the entirety of the galaxy, which showed up decades later in Robert Zemeckis’s Contact), to various costumes and production design ideas present in 1980s films like Flash Gordon (1980) and Masters of the Universe (1987). Most telling is the fact that Jodorowsky’s three key “warriors”—Chris Foss, H.R. Giger, and Dan O’Bannon—later collaborated on Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), a film that did have an enormous impact on both the science fiction genre and Hollywood as a whole and now stands as perhaps the most unlikely testament to just how profoundly game-changing Jodorowsky’s unmade epic would have been.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © Sony Pictures Home Entertainment