David Lynch’s 1984 sci-fi epic Dune is—in some ways—a misbegotten botch job. Still, as with quite a lot of ineffectively bold movies earlier than it, the creative prospers Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian narrative of warring area dynasties have earned it true cult basic standing. Today, followers of the movie, which earned a paltry $30 million on the field workplace and actually bruising critiques upon its launch, nonetheless surprise what Lynch would have achieved if given the chance to adapt the following two novels in Herbert’s cycle: Dune Messiah and Children of Dune.
Franchising was the plan earlier than the primary movie crashed and burned, with Lynch and star Kyle MacLachlan (taking part in Paul Atreides) set to shoot each Dune sequels back-to-back in 1986. Miniature spaceship fashions, costumes, and props from the primary movie had been positioned in storage by producer Dino De Laurentiis to be used on these follow-ups, whereas the director hammered away on a Dune II script. “I wrote half a script for the second Dune. I really got into it because it wasn’t a big story,” he says in Lynch on Lynch, “more like a neighborhood story. It had some really cool things in it.”
During the 2 years I spent placing collectively my e book A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History, I had no luck uncovering Lynch’s script for Dune II, regardless of Frank Herbert telling Prevue journal in December 1984 that he possessed a duplicate and was advising Lynch on it. “Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays,” Herbert informed the publication. Then, in July 2023, throughout the Frank Herbert archives at California State University, Fullerton, I got here throughout a slim folder with a sticky be aware declaring “Dune Messiah script revisions,” addressed to the second ground of VFX man Barry Nolan’s workplace in Burbank the place Lynch supervised the ultimate results shoots and enhancing on Dune.
Inside the folder lay the stuff of followers’ desires, by no means made public till now: 56 pages dated “January 2nd-through-9th, 1984,” matching Lynch’s “half a script” assertion. Complete with penned annotations by Herbert, the Dune II script exhibits Lynch was nonetheless enthusiastic in regards to the materials, lending new significance to minor particulars within the ’84 movie. He additionally cracked a option to inform the advanced story of Herbert’s 1969 novel Dune Messiah, simply the least cinematic e book within the sequence resulting from its emphasis on palace intrigue over motion, together with the interior turmoil of a reluctant dictator (Paul Atreides) rather than a standard hero’s journey. It could ring of sacrilege to some, however Lynch’s Dune II would have bested Herbert’s e book—and been one hell of a film.
While penning this piece I reached out to Lynch for remark, since his Dune II script had by no means been mentioned intimately publicly. He said, by an assistant, that he “sort of remembers writing something but doesn’t recall ever finishing it.” As Dune is “a failure in his eyes and not a particular time that he likes to think of or talk about,” he politely declined to talk to me.
The Lynch Touch
“I’m writing the script for Dune II. Dune II is totally Dune Messiah, with variations on the theme. … Dune Messiah is a very short book, and a lot of people don’t like it, but in there are some really nifty ideas. I’m real excited about that, and I think it could make a really good film. It starts 12 years later, and this creates a whole new set of problems. … It should have a different mood. … It should be 12 strange years later.” —David Lynch, Starburst #78 (January 1985)
Of the numerous variations between Dune Messiah in novel type and David Lynch’s script, the most important lay within the opening pages, which element what occurs within the aftermath of the scene within the first Dune film when the Harkonnens bombed the Atreides’ fortress in Arrakeen, the capitol of the desert planet Arrakis. In the hallway the place Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan) was shot within the head, his shielded lifeless physique nonetheless floats on the ground, buzzing and sparking.
From out of the shadows emerges a well-known face: the Baron’s Doctor (Leonardo Cimino). Thought to be the one talking half created particularly for Dune by Lynch, we study this Doctor was really Scytale, a shape-shifting “face dancer” essential to the plot of Herbert’s second e book. Going again to Dune ’84, you could not have seen Cimino’s Doctor accompanied Baron Harkonnen in the course of the Arrakeen assault. The Doc is absent after that, even because the Baron yells creepily, “Where’s my doctor?” That’s as a result of Doc/Scytale absconded with Duncan’s physique. This Easter egg is Lynchian world-building at its finest.
Scytale’s 12-year odyssey reanimating “dead Duncan Idaho” into the ghola named Hayt on the nightmarish Bene Tleilax world (talked about by Paul in Dune) constitutes the whole opening 10 minutes of the script. Lynch calls the planet Tleilax “a dark metal world with canals of steaming chemicals and acids.” Those canals, Lynch writes, are lined with “dead pink small test tube animals.” Initiating Dune II with a concentrate on Scytale foregrounds him to main antagonist, not like Herbert’s e book the place myriad conspirators work towards Paul.
“Lynch’s favorite set during production of Dune was Giedi Prime, with machinery and flesh alterations fitting his artistic sensibilities,” says Mark Bennett, founding father of the DuneInfo web site, after studying the unearthed script. “For Messiah, Lynch decided that Bene Tleilax could be co-opted for his style, since it isn’t described in the novel.”