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 inventive thrives Lynch grafted onto Frank Herbert’s sprawling Machiavellian narrative of warring house dynasties have earned it true cult traditional standing. Today, followers of the movie, which earned a paltry $30 million on the field workplace and really bruising critiques upon its launch, nonetheless marvel what Lynch would have completed if given the chance to adapt the subsequent 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 (enjoying 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 word 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’ goals, 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 concerning the materials, lending new significance to minor particulars within the ’84 movie. He additionally cracked a option to inform the complicated 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) instead of a conventional hero’s journey. It might 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, via 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 largest 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 useless physique nonetheless floats on the ground, buzzing and sparking.
From out of the shadows emerges a well-recognized face: the Baron’s Doctor (Leonardo Cimino). Thought to be the one talking half created particularly for Dune by Lynch, we be taught this Doctor was truly Scytale, a shape-shifting “face dancer” essential to the plot of Herbert’s second e book. Going again to Dune ’84, chances are you’ll not have observed Cimino’s Doctor accompanied Baron Harkonnen through 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 greatest.
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 complete 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 major antagonist, in contrast to Herbert’s e book the place myriad conspirators work in opposition to 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.”