"It would be very easy to make a bad film of Dune…" –Ridley Scott, South Bend Tribune, 1979
This week marks the 40th anniversary of David Lynch's Dune. A $40 million box office disaster upon release, it has slowly gained an enthusiastic cult following in the four decades since it opened on December 14, 1984, especially in stark stylistic contrast to Denis Villeneuve's recent two-film stab at Frank Herbert's vaunted novel. Renowned oddball Lynch was announced in the press to direct Dune for mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis in May of 1981, shortly after Blade Runner and Gladiator legend Ridley Scott dropped out of the project.
Little detail has trickled down about the version Scott spent seven or eight months developing for De Laurentiis prior to Lynch… until now. Thanks to the efforts of T.D. Nguyen, a 133-page October 1980 draft of Scott's scrapped Dune film written by Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop, Walker) was discovered within the Coleman Luck archives at Wheaton College and passed on to this author.
When Scott boarded the project shortly after the success of 1979's Alien, Dune author Frank Herbert had already written a massive two-part screenplay adaptation that was both slavishly faithful and violently un-cinematic, as Wired and Inverse covered previously. Scott read that script and identified some seven or so scenes he might want to use, but ultimately (after Harlan Ellison turned the gig down) brought in Wurlitzer to do a top-down page-1 rewrite in London as preliminary pre-production work began at Pinewood Studios. Like Herbert's and eventually Villeneuve's versions, it was clearly intended as part one of two.
"The Dune adaptation was one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever done," Wurlitzer told Prevue Magazine in 1984. "It took more time to break it down into a working outline than to write the final script. I believe we kept to the spirit of the book but, in a sense, we rarefied it. We interjected a somewhat different sensibility."
"We did a script, and the script is pretty fucking good," Scott told Total Film in 2021.
There are myriad reasons why Ridley Scott's version of Dune fell apart, including emotional fallout over the death of his brother Frank, his reluctance to lens the movie in Mexico (as demanded by De Laurentiis), the budget coming in north of $50 million, and Filmways' Blade Runner project seeming more viable for the hot filmmaker. However, a key reason was described by Universal Pictures executive Thom Mount in this author's book A Masterpiece in Disarray – David Lynch's Dune: "Rudy’s version of the script did not receive unanimous, glowing enthusiasm."
Was Wurlitzer's adaptation a poor cinematic execution of Herbert's sprawling story? Or simply too dark, violent, and/or political to have been a commercial studio blockbuster? You can read our detailed script dissection with expert analysis and decide for yourself.
Rudy Wurlitzer (age 87) was contacted for this article but reluctantly unable to participate. Ridley Scott was also contacted but opted not to comment.
A Wilder Shade of Paul
The October 1980 draft of Dune begins with an impressionistic dream montage of hot deserts whose white dust vapors transform into legions of "apocalyptic armies burning and pillaging their way across the universe." This signals Paul's "terrible purpose" right from the get-go. Ridley Scott's cinematic compositions often display the visual density of an 88-layer cake, and descriptions like "birds and insects become a whirling hysteria of motion" have the propulsive power only an artist of his caliber can manifest. That power is present on the page all the way through.
As Scott told Total Film. “We did a very good take on Dune, because early days, I’d work very, very closely with the writer. I was always glomming the look of the film onto what he or she was writing."
This vision capped by a desert erupting into darkness is being dreamt by Paul Atreides, who wakes as rain pelts the windows of Castle Caladan. Paul is no hunky Timothée Chalamet, though… he's a 7-year-old with long blonde hair, about to be tested by the Reverend Mother with "the box." His intoning of the Litany Against Fear during the trial by pain is crosscut with his mother Jessica's own recital (revealing their psychic connection). As with Lynch's version we see visuals of a burning hand, flesh falling off bone… but of course that's not real.
After passing this test of will, little Paul heads to another part of the castle where he retrieves a sword from a guard using The Voice, then nearly kills a sleeping Duncan Idaho in his bed to test if "a true warrior never sleeps." This version of Paul possesses a "savage innocence."
"Rudy Wurlitzer’s version of Paul is far more assertive," opines Stephen Scarlata, producer of the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. "He actively takes charge. We even see a flash-forward of his growth spanning from age 7 to 21, where his relentless training leads him to surpass Duncan Idaho. Personally, I prefer Lynch’s depiction of Paul. There’s an added tension in believing Paul might defeat Gurney, only to realize he doesn’t. This vulnerability makes us feel more fear and concern for him, especially when Paul and Jessica are forced to escape."
The now 21-year-old Paul is a master swordsman, "handsome, charismatic, regal." Duncan (who takes the deleted Gurney's place) has become "broader with white hair and beard” and a characteristic humor similar to Jason Momoa's portrayal…
DUNCAN
It is a teacher's duty to have his
pupil someday surpass him.
(smiling)
But, don't think you can relax. This
is just one level you have reached.
There are other, more perilous,
methods to master. But, not now.
Now we are going to get properly
drunk.
Long Live the Emperor
We then cut to a rock garden outside the castle near where Jessica is crossing a bridge during the daytime. This leads to a crucial twist, as recounted by contemporary Hollywood screenwriter Ian Fried, who wrote Legendary's Spectral and a recent unmade modern version of The Island of Dr. Moreau.
"I absolutely love the moment of Jessica looking out across the castle at the gardener raking white pebbles into patterns," Fried told IGN. "Then all of a sudden it starts raining and the gardener falls to his knees, prostrates himself, looks up at the sky and says, 'the Emperor is dead.' I get chills just saying that. On the other hand, that's not at all from the book. There's so much material in Dune that to be adding new stuff is probably not what most people would have wanted or would want now. That was a really, really interesting part of the script, that the catalyst for everything is the Emperor dying."
That darkness then presents itself in the form of Leto's cousin Baron Harkonnen, who (via Feyd-Rautha) invites the Duke to a discussion where he offers to split Arrakis' spice production duties in order to avoid conflict. The Duke rejects this. One bit of dialogue pops in this scene because it is 95% similar to a famous Dune '84 Baron line: "He who controls the spice controls the universe"…
BARON
(to DR. YUEH)
Understand the position well
before you leave. Who controls
Dune controls the Spice, and
who controls the Spice controls
the Universe. Without me, your
Duke controls nothing.
"Normally I have credited Lynch with this great line," Mark Bennett of DuneInfo told us. "Given that this was a De Laurentiis project script, I wonder if Lynch read it and borrowed that line, or came up with it independently?"
Flight of the Navigator
Another similarity to the Lynch version comes up during the scene of the Atreides family leaving Caladan aboard a Guild Heighliner: We get to see a Navigator. The spice-mutated creature – not revealed in the books until Dune Messiah - is visualized as "an elongated FIGURE, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned, membranous hands, floating in a transparent outer container, like a loose, flexible skin; a fish in a strange sea with eyes of Total Blue." The Navigator takes a pill, falls into a coma, and plots out the Heighliner's course by uttering long musical intonations to "Engineers," a nod to Scott's eventual 2012 film Prometheus.
Adds Fried, "I absolutely loved that they were able to show the Navigator. Even though I love the Denis Villeneuve movies, I'm really disappointed we didn't get to see his take on that. A missed opportunity."
The family arrives on Arrakis. Descriptions of the Atreides' Arakeen fortress - with its dark chambers and massive fireplaces - echoes the aesthetic of Scott's 1985 fantasy Legend. The overall tone of the world feels very medieval, with a great emphasis on swords, feudal customs, and fealty. Bosch-like Dew Collectors use scythes to gather moisture in the castle gardens. This rampant medieval-isation of Herbert comes as no surprise, considering Scott was also developing a fantastical/dragon-filled Dark Ages "cowboy" version of Tristan and Isolde for Paramount around this time, titled "Tristan," "The Sword," or simply "The Knight."
At a weather station Liet Kynes introduces his daughter Chani to the Duke and Paul. The ecological aspect is emphasized through various dissected native creatures on display, with Kynes explaining how spice harvests "ravage everything and give nothing back." The Duke asks if it's possible to return balance to nature. Chani accompanies them on their Ornithopter trip through the desert, saying little with only a few furtive looks with her father. Their flight through the smoky chimneys of a massive factory ship echoes the hellish cityscapes later found in Blade Runner. As a worm attacks the ship, Kynes and Chani offer to make their own way in the desert on foot so the last two factory workers can escape on the Duke's 'Thopter.
This is intercut with the scene of house servant Shadout Mapes – who has three breasts for some reason, pre-dating Total Recall by a decade - gifting Lady Jessica with a crysknife. Jessica then hears city dwellers outside her castle window begging for water.
The streets of Arakeen are described as squalid urban "ghettos" with homeless peddlers, dilapidated vehicles, families vying for shelter away from the hot sun, and piles of skeletons in the streets. Class disparity, emphasized by a moment where dehydrated townspeople throw themselves at a plate of water thrown by a merchant, is given voice in a way it never is in either extant movie version. This aspect was inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film The Battle of Algiers.
One new scene (seemingly inserted to generate more action) finds Paul and Duncan following a Harkonnen agent through the city streets into a trading post where they get into a big ’80s-style bar fight. Duncan swings an axe like Conan the Barbarian. Paul kills a man by poking him in the throat with his rigid finger.
DUNCAN picks up the axe.
DUNCAN
(looking at it)
Nasty little instrument.
Not very well balanced, but it will
have to do.
With a short snap to his wrist he
throws it at BURLY MAN coming
towards him holding a long iron
bar. The axe strikes him in the
chest, splitting him in two.
"That feels like a bar brawl you’d find in a Burt Reynolds or Walter Hill action movie," says Scarlata. "The fight scene feels out of place because it makes Paul seem too invincible too soon. His journey is about growth - learning to survive, adapt, and lead. If he’s already effortlessly beating enemies, we lose the tension/fear for his safety key to making his transformation meaningful."
This brawl is also where they meet the stoic Fremen leader Stilgar, dressed in a burnoose and described as, "A man whose smallest gesture knows no compromise." Paul and Duncan follow Stilgar to a smuggler's market, where a crowd of Fremen surround the lone Harkonnen… whom Stilgar decapitates.
Cut to the Bene Gesserit Jessica levitating like a turn-of-the-20th-century magician as she meditates. She and the Duke decide to create a child that night, made explicit in her dialogue to him: "When you release your seed it will be like sacred oil poured into an altar fire."
Baron Wasteland
After receiving a secret message from a blinking insect, Dr. Yueh shares a tender moment of veiled regret with Paul before sending him away from the castle for a night of freedom in the city. This includes Paul following a young homeless boy into a Fremen Spice Den for some illicit drug use, inhaling blue spice vapor. Turns out hot boxing Spice gives you visions! Specifically, visions of his unborn sister Alia intoning "Maud'Dib." He makes his way to a weird pit with a red ball and a tiny snake-like sandworm in it overseen by an Old Crone. Paul contorts his hands into mudras to hypnotize the baby worm, holding the thing before dropping it into a conch shell. Wild.
After poisoning/killing Thufir over a chess game (again, shades of Blade Runner), the traitor Yueh deactivates the house shield, allowing five four-foot-tall Harkonnen Death Commandoes to enter the castle. After having a horrifying vision of the castle on fire, Paul returns from the slums to the fortress where in his quarters he is attacked by a Hunter-Seeker, which – rather than the tiny floating stinging machine of the book and films - takes the form of "a bat-like creature with a cobra's head." As Jessica enters the room, Paul manages to decapitate it with one movement.
"The Hunter-Seeker scene is fascinating to me," Scarlata says of this script embellishment. "Introducing a biological twist to the usual mechanical device mirrors Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune from a few years earlier, where the Hunter-Seeker is a flying creature with a bomb strapped to its back… Paul slows his heart rate, disarms the creature, and throws the bomb out the window. Both versions experiment with an animalistic take."
Duke Leto manages to decapitate several Death Commandoes with his sword before Yueh shoots him with a dart. Duncan arrives to save his poisoned Duke from the last Commando, only to be stabbed by Yueh, whom Duncan cuts in half. Yes, Yueh's only motivation is that he himself was poisoned by the Baron and needs the antidote to survive… no noble efforts to kill the Baron with "the tooth" nor to preserve Paul and Jessica. Instead, Jessica is the one to put the poison gas capsule in the dying Duke's mouth before bidding her love farewell. Duncan fends off a group of deadly Sardaukar, dying in the process, so Paul and Jessica can escape in a 'Thopter. A Harkonnen troop carrier drives over the bodies of 20 dead Atreides soldiers. The violence is graphic and most certainly R-rated.
The Deep Desert Controversy
Paul and Jessica's flight into the deep desert is also much more intense than previously filmed. Paul's piloting maneuvers are at such a speed that the G-force ripples their cheeks. After a wing is clipped, they crash-land as wind-driven sand quickly fills the cabin, the force of it quickly eroding away the fuselage. After waiting out the storm in a Stilltent, they put on their Stillsuits (explicitly with hoods over their faces and mouth filters in addition to the noseplugs) and journey the desert looking for Fremen. Akin to the Villeneuve movie, there is a scene of Paul standing before a massive sandworm "face-to-face," without fear.
Something is also missing from this draft that existed in previous versions… incest, specifically between Paul and his mother Jessica, resulting in baby Alia's conception. This provocative alteration incensed both Herbert and De Laurentiis, who demanded it be removed.
"He wanted to do an incest movie!" Herbert exclaimed to The Sacramento Bee in 1982. "Can you imagine the effect that would have had on the Dune fans?"
Confirmed Wurlitzer for Prevue, "In one draft I introduced some erotic scenes between Paul and his mother, Jessica. I felt there was always a latent, but very strong, Oedipal attraction between them, and I took it one note further. It went right in the middle of the film, as a supreme defiance of certain boundaries, perhaps making Paul even more heroic for having broken a forbidden code."
While no mother/son union resides in this draft, there is still a moment where Paul and Jessica "lie on top of each other" as they slide down a sand dune, losing their supplies in the process.
Eventually they hide out in an ancient cave whose entryway is the mouth of a giant worm carcass. Inside the dead worm, surrounded by other desert animals, they wait for morning. At dawn a group of Fremen desert warriors appear in a giant Sandsled, led by Stilgar. The warrior Jamis challenges Paul to a death duel, which Paul eagerly accepts without hesitation. Jessica (not Chani) gives her son the advice about parrying, then hands him the crysknife gifted to her by Shadout Mapes, which blows the minds of the Fremen. She has announced her son as the Lisan al-gaib, a Bene Gesserit-seeded legend Paul knows he must now live up to.
The battle is brutal and swift, moving into the worm carcass where Paul puts an end to Jamis. A few of the Fremen take items from the fallen warrior's body, saying they were "a friend of Jamis," with Paul exclaiming that he has learned "when you kill… you pay for it." He sheds tears for his vanquished foe, which the Fremen marvel at. These beats are similar to the Jamis battle David Lynch filmed but excised from his theatrical cut of Dune.
At night the Fremen camp out and perform a Spice ceremony, passing the bowl around in a circle ala a "peace pipe." Jessica (like Bill Clinton before her) does not inhale, but Paul does. He is given the name Maud'Dib by an old-timer. Mother and son then confer with Kynes, who is very aware of the Lisan al-gaib legend and its dubious origins, but agrees to go along with it since it may "shorten the way" to transforming Arrakis via the vast underground water caches they have.
Paul also learns that the wife of Jamis – whose hand he earned in battle – is Chani (not Harah from the book/Lynch film). After the briefest moment of pure grief, Chani accepts her husband's death and Paul as her new mate, as well as Jessica as her new mother. Paul offers Jamis' water to Chani, who refuses, so he pours it into their vast reservoir… "to the tribe."
There is a moment straight out of Waterworld where Fremen carry their possessions to a Sundancer (a giant trimaran with colored sails), which will cross the great salt flats. Basically, "Saltworld." Kynes will take the Sundancer to unite all the tribes of Fremen behind the Lisan al-gaib legend. He encourages his daughter to keep in mind their ultimate purpose of terraforming Arrakis, and to stay close to Paul, "never show him your ambivalence." Chani assures him she is a believer, but is – deep down – frightened of Jessica (i.e. the uneasiness between her and her son). This all greatly mirrors Dune: Part Two. However, Chani's will is seemingly pounced on by a dictator-ish Paul, who proclaims…
PAUL
I ask for acceptance without
reservation, even for that which
you cannot understand.
CHANI
As we share the same purpose, I
withhold nothing from you.
"A true leader is never a clear model of Christian goodness," said Wurlitzer in 1984. "Many times he is ruthless, very determined, and willing to make sacrifices to serve certain ends. That doesn’t mean he has to be a consummate Machiavellian, only that certain shadings in his character make him a little dangerous, a bit abrupt. Even Christ drove the merchants out of the temple."
"I feel like Paul is almost a cipher," Fried says of this depiction. "He's too much of a perfect Messiah. It's very hard to relate to him. It's not clear, based on this take on the material, that Paul's even the main character."
The story climaxes with a Water of Life ceremony led by a seemingly female Shaman (accompanied by a bald female attendant whose lips are sewn shut). The Shaman takes off her robe to reveal three breasts and the genitals of a man, doing an erotic dance as her attendant has an epileptic fit. A 10-foot-long sandworm emerges from the sand and slithers around her (ala Zhora in Blade Runner), smoky vapor emitting from its mouth. The attendant aids the Shaman in guiding the anaconda-like worm towards a water ditch, where it dies and turns the water blue… the Water of Death. Jessica acknowledges the danger to her and her unborn child, then drinks the Water of Life. Both Jessica and the Reverend Mother's auras appear and merge into dark blue, the Mother's visible glowing skeleton showing her vital fluid flowing into Jessica. It's Dune by way of Carlos Castaneda.
Surviving the ordeal, Jessica proclaims herself the new Reverend Mother. All the Fremen now believe Paul is their Messiah. When Paul beckons Chani to join them Jessica says they don't need her, but Paul disagrees. All three stand before the Fremen as a new royal family. A conversation between Paul and Stilgar alludes to a feat Paul must perform to prove himself to the tribe. The script ends with a severe Jessica, now in a black cloak, using a thumper to call a giant sandworm, which presumably Paul will ride. It is strange that they allude to the ride but fall just short of showing it in this draft, as Herbert told The Vancouver Sun in June 1980 that Paul riding the worm was the one thing above all others he hoped to see in Scott's film.
"That's at the heart of the book," Herbert said. "The worm is the monster, the monster that lives under the surface, in your head, the monster that lives everywhere. I want that in the movie."
Conclusions
Frank Herbert's ultimate aim with his Dune novels was hammering home the idea that "superheroes were disastrous for humans." This idea of the negative consequences of cultures following charismatic leaders was ignored by Lynch but central to Denis Villeneuve's two-part adaptation, and will be – as Villeneuve confirmed to this author in March – carried through into his planned screen version of Dune Messiah. Although Wurlitzer's October 1980 script is either unfinished or intended as the first half of a two-parter, it presents Paul in an even more unflattering light. He's less a benign prince reluctantly swept into the role of brutal warlord and more a confident young man accepting of his destiny to become a universal dictator. Complicit actors like Chani and her father Kynes are willing to bolster Paul's trajectory to attain their own planetary ends.
While this script may seem wild, as well as wildly divergent from Herbert's material, it's important to remember this was being conceived around the dawn of what we think of as the modern science fiction movie instigated by Star Wars and Scott's own Alien. This may have been a case of the filmmakers expecting a little too much from their audience in terms of making a revisionist R-rated sci-fi movie with real-world concerns like ecological devastation and the exploitation of the populace in service to a larger commercial concern (i.e. spice). Zack Snyder faced similar headwinds with his adaptation of Alan Moore's Watchmen, which was deconstructing superhero tropes that may have been prevalent in ’80s comics but were only nascent on the big screen circa 2009.
As Scott told the Tribune in 1979, "For years sci-fi has been treated as underground material, yet there's always been a vast and enthusiastic readership for sci-fi novels. Dune has sold 10 million copies."
The very mature script also goes out of its way to introduce important relationships visually as opposed to long-distance. In Lynch's movie we never see Kynes and Chani together, nor does Chani meet Paul until the middle of the story. The Duke and Baron never meet until their final confrontation, and Paul and Feyd never come face to face until the climactic knife fight. All these problems are corrected. Instead of the Emperor's convoluted plan being the catalyst of the Duke's destruction, it is the chaos sown by the Emperor's demise. This makes some sense considering how little the Emperor actually does within the story (see Christopher Walken's wisp of a presence in Dune: Part Two). Also solid are tradeoffs like Gurney and Rabban's absence but much more Kynes.
It's interesting how the initial draft of the Lynch version by Christopher De Vore and Eric Bergren chose a cliffhanger end with Paul and Jessica fleeing from a burning Arrakeen castle while declaring revenge. Wurlitzer's script closes with the Water of Life ceremony as Paul and Jessica are accepted into the tribe, right before the book's two-year time jump. Denis Villeneuve essentially split the difference by ending his first film with the Paul/Jamis duel.
The fact that Wurlitzer's script was not universally loved at the studio level is not a surprise, given how grimdark and adult it is, making the Lynch version look as audience-friendly as Moana 2 by comparison.
"I don't think it would have made Dune fans happy," claims Mark Bennett, who has run his Dune fan site for nearly three decades. "Too many deviations from the novel and too much 'magic,' something that Herbert's novel avoids. A bit like the Lynch Messiah script, without the second half you don't know how things would have played off. I'm assuming that Part 2 would have been a guerrilla war with the Harkonnens, Paul and Feyd would have had their duel at the end, then Paul becomes Emperor… Who has ruled the Universe since the Emperor died?"
So what is the legacy of Rudy Wurlitzer and Ridley Scott's Dune? For one, H.R. Giger designed an exceedingly phallic sandworm (on-brand) for the production alongside some Harkonnen furniture that was, as the artist confirmed to The San Francisco Examiner, "made entirely from skeletons I have collected." Said chairs, table, and mirror now reside at the Giger Museum in Gruyères, Switzerland. Apocalypse Now DP Vittorio Storaro was earmarked to lens this version, then later fulfilled his dream as cinematographer of the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune. Scott and Dino De Laurentiis eventually made a film together, 2001's Hannibal, which made $350 million worldwide. Besides a few notable script moments ported over to Blade Runner, there are actually some startling similarities to the story beats of Scott's newest film Gladiator II, including…
- A royal council who ultimately betrays his king/kings.
- The very strong mother/son bond, with the mother using her power to aid her son’s fate.
- A royal heir thought dead who changes his name and proves himself in mortal combat in order to win over an oppressed people.
- Lots and lots of beheadings.
Wurlitzer's work here –which Scott himself referred to as "a decent distillation of Frank Herbert"– is arguably the only adaptation of the material for the big screen which gives the novel’s ecological, political, and spiritual aspects equal footing. Lynch’s was more concerned with the spiritual, whereas Villeneuve’s focused strongly on the perils of charismatic leaders.
"The ecological aspect of Dune is covered in this script in a way it's never been covered in any other piece of material," concludes Ian Fried. "That's one of the strengths of this adaptation: It feels like it's important to the story being told. It doesn't hit you over the head with it. It genuinely is a consequence of what man has done to this planet, the ecological issues that have developed around spice mining. There are a lot more clear motivations in the Ridley Scott Dune script for a larger variety of characters."
Perhaps decades from now another brilliant filmmaker can give us a new version of Dune more in tune to its ecological underpinnings. Given that Herbert's book will turn 60 next year, those themes of environmental decay, the dangers of fascism, and a need for sleepers to awaken are still as relevant today as they likely will be 60 years from now.
Cover image credit: Photo by Stanley Bielecki Movie Collection/Getty Images
