This year’s much-anticipated touchdown of Denis Villeneuve’s third Dune film coincides with the 50th anniversary of the most valiant yet doomed attempt to bring Frank Herbert’s science-fiction epic to the screen.
asserted
touchdown → anticipate → screen
This earlier quixotic quest eclipsed even the interstellar ambitions of Villeneuve and his team.
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quest → eclipse → Villeneuve
In the 1970s, Chilean-French auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky embarked on an unhinged mission to shoot a Dune film equivalent to an acid trip.
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Jodorowsky → embark → trip
His assembled cast included Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson and Mick Jagger; Pink Floyd were on soundtrack duties; French illustrator Moebius and artist H.R. Giger (of Alien fame) designed the psychedelic visuals.
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Moebius → assemble → visuals
Even surrealist grandmaster Salvador Dali signed on, demanding an hourly rate of $100,000.
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Dali → sign → 100,000
Jodorowsky’s script was 14 hours long, and the production “bible” he created stretched to almost 300 pages (a rare copy sold for $4.3 million – 110 times the expected figure – at Christie’s in 2021).
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copy → create → 2021
The film was too ludicrous to manifest in reality but it did spawn Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), a wildly entertaining documentary tracing the making of a film that wasn’t made.
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that → manifest → film
Has there ever been another unrealised pipe dream so tantalising in its promise that other films have been made about it?
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films → make → it
As it happens, yes.
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it → happen → ?
Jon Schnepp’s The Death of ‘Superman Lives’: What Happened? (2015) offers a glimpse of the monstrosity that might have been had Tim Burton directed his Superman movie with Nicolas Cage as the Man of Steel.
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Burton → live → Steel
Christopher Walken, Courteney Cox and Sandra Bullock were picked for supporting roles, the script was penned by Kevin Smith (Mallrats) and the whole fiasco was produced by Jon Peters, a former hairdresser who insisted that his Man of Steel wasn’t allowed to fly or wear the red-and-blue outfit, and that the film end with Superman fighting a giant spider.
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Superman → pick → spider
These non-existent movies are just two of the countless unrealised projects that are like cinema’s dark matter: you’ll never see them but their sheer volume holds everything else together.
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everything → see → them
Miles Davis is alleged to have said that great music is about the notes you don’t play; the films a director doesn’t make might be as important as those they do.
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they → allege → those
For most of his life Stanley Kubrick maintained an obsessive drive to create a film about Napoleon, even enlisting the support of 50,000 members of the Romanian People’s Army to re-enact battles.
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Kubrick → maintain → battles
For every Basic Instinct or Starship Troopers Paul Verhoeven has directed, there are dozens of films he’s had to abandon: Tom Cruise as Houdini, the early years of Adolf Hitler, a take on the life of Jesus.
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he → direct → Jesus
And who wouldn’t pay to see Luca Guadagnino’s American Psycho?
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who → pay → Psycho
In an alternate timeline all of these exist.
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all → exist → these
But history is haunted by the spectres of films that don’t.
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that → haunt → films
Some are the victims of overreaching ambition, while others are vanity projects best left unrealised.
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others → leave → ambition
A depressing number find themselves wallowing in “development hell”, the industry term for productions that sink into an eternal cycle of script rewrites, studio changes and funding sinkholes.
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that → find → rewrites
Jon Peters – the aforementioned hairdresser-turned-producer (and one-time Barbra Streisand squeeze) – is the kind of colourful Hollywood character who can pave the way to development hell.
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who → turn → hell
After he attained the rights to Neil Gaiman’s classic Sandman series, he offered up what the author described as “quite easily the worst script I’ve ever read”.
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I → attain → script
Again, there was the inexplicable inclusion of a giant spider (a dream Peters finally realised on 1999’s Wild Wild West, a film critics lambasted).
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critics → be → West
Some of the greatest hits (or likely misses) we can only imagine: Stanley Kubrick’s Lord of the Rings with Paul McCartney as Frodo and John Lennon as Gollum; Sofia Coppola’s The Little Mermaid, reportedly too dark and risky to finance; indie darling Lynne Ramsay’s unlikely foray into western territory on Jane Got a Gun, which was completed to lukewarm reviews by Gavin O’Connor; Spike Lee’s remake of Bruce Lee’s Enter the Dragon with comedian Ken Jeong in the kung fu king’s role; disaster master Roland Emmerich’s entry in the James Bond franchise
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which → imagine → franchise
The list of off-kilter choices to direct Return of the Jedi is enough to induce whiplash.
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list → direct → whiplash
Terry Gilliam would likely have spun off the series in an odd direction but just imagine what Davids Lynch or Cronenberg would have done had they said yes to the job.
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they → spin → job
And picture the iconic Wolverine played not by Hugh Jackman but by the notably less ripped Bob Hoskins, who was originally slated for the role in the first X-Men adaptation, then to be directed by Kathryn Bigelow.
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who → picture → Bigelow
Bigelow’s own filmography illustrates how the films that don’t get made are as illustrative as those that do.
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that → illustrate → those
In the 1990s she headed up a string of genre classics, from erotic thriller Blue Steel to surfer heist caper Point Break.
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she → head → Break
Post-9/11, though, she took a hard shift towards serious, politically provocative films such as The Hurt Locker and Zero Dark Thirty.
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she → take → Locker
Her catalogue of unrealised projects since that point drives home this career turn, full of titles such as Held by the Taliban, Mogadishu Minnesota and The True American.
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catalogue → drive → Taliban
Australian directors might struggle to get projects up here but the difficulty can scale up exponentially when they arrive in Tinseltown.
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they → struggle → Tinseltown
Jocelyn Moorhouse’s adaptation of Murray Bail’s Eucalyptus was production-ready in 2005, featuring a dream team of Nicole Kidman and Russell Crowe, before Fox Searchlight canned the project.
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Searchlight → feature → project
Fellow Australian Peter Weir’s filmography may include Picnic at Hanging Rock, Dead Poets Society, The Truman Show, Witness and Green Card but many subsequent projects failed to gain traction and he eventually announced he was quitting the game.
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he → include → game
Studios won’t pander to an up-and-comer whose ideas don’t wash but when a Kubrick or a Spielberg has a passion project, they’re not so easily dismissed.
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they → pander → project
Ordering endless rounds of casting changes and screenplay revisions is a way to keep the big earners appeased without actually committing to their financially dubious hobby horses.
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Ordering → order → horses
Francis Ford Coppola’s Megalopolis spent almost half a century in development hell; he ultimately financed the production himself, the result a sprawling mess that earned less than 10 per cent of its $120 million production budget.
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that → spend → budget
Sometimes a dream is better left that way.
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dream → leave → ?
Zack Snyder’s bombastic Hollywood fare – 300, Man of Steel, Justice League – has been box-office dynamite but after decades in development hell he finally self-produced his dream project, The Last Photograph.
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he → produce → project
It debuted at the recent Toronto International Film Festival, with critics dubbing it “supremely indulgent auteur gunk”, “boring, bloated, brutally violent” and “an utter disgrace from start to finish …
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critics → debut → finish
…and 17 more, not listed.
The Aporia
