Tuesday, March 8, 2011

Jodorosky's Dune & a greater degree of collaboration...

"In December 1974, a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon purchased the film rights to Frank Herbert’s epic 1965 science fiction novel Dune and asked Jodorowsky to direct a film version. Agreeing, he planned to cast the surrealist artist Salvador Dali as the Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV, who requested a fee of $100,000 per hour. He also planned to cast Orson Welles as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, who only agreed when Jodorowsky offered to get his favourite gourmet chef to prepare his meals for him throughout the filming.[22] The book's protagonist, Paul Atreides, was to be played by Jodorowsky's own son, Brontis Jodorowsky. The music would be composed by Pink Floyd, Magma, Henry Cow and Karlheinz Stockhausen.[citation needed] Jodorowsky set up a pre-production unit in Paris consisting of Chris Foss, a British artist who designed covers for science fiction publications, Jean Giraud (Moebius), a French illustrator who created and also wrote and drew for Metal Hurlant magazine, and H. R. Giger.[citation needed] Frank Herbert travelled to Europe in 1976 to find that $2 million of the $9.5 million budget had already been spent in pre-production, and that Jodorowsky's script would result in a 14-hour movie ("It was the size of a phonebook", Herbert later recalled).[citation needed]
Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. "

Whilst musing about a theoretical monster manual that grants the artists a greater creative stake in the proceedings, Jodorosky's Dune came to mind.

Now imagine an OSR RPG product produced like a movie, "jack does great monsters, Jill does great dungeon maps, Didier makes great NPCs", talented folks are comissioned by a "director/curator" to bring their individual strengths to bear on the individual elements of a project.

It could produce some "next level shit" or it could fall into the "design by committe" trap...

11 comments:

  1. Holy shit! I had never heard of this might-have-been. I'll be dreaming of that soundtrack alone for the rest of my days...

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  2. Or it might end up being a million-volume comic series too...

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  3. I'll do the part where I get $100,000 per hour.

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  4. Jodo's obsessive storytelling about messianic figures and his constant work back then with Jean Giraud made him a favourite of mine.

    The Jodo-Dune would have looked nothing like Dune, even less so than the Lynch version. But it would have been truly bizarre and probably bogglingly awesome while completely unmarketable.

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  5. As long as Magma does the soundtrack for the module it would be cool...

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  6. Pink Floyd AND Stockhausen working on the same score is borderline brain-splosive.

    Monster Manual thoughts: Half the creatures are submissions (stats, descriptions) by writers that artists interpret. The other half are creatures drawn by artists that writers interpret and stat up.

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  7. More info on Jodorowsky's Dune here:

    http://www.duneinfo.com/unseen/

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  8. I first scanned the title as:

    "JoeSky's Dune & a greater degree of collaboration"

    I think that would be most excellent, indeed! Plus, JoeSky is all about the collaboration, right?

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  9. @ B. Portly: Awesome, thanks for the link!

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  10. As a longtime fan of Jodorowsky and Dune, I've long been semi-obsessed with this lost film. A few years ago I started working on a "what if" soundtrack for the film in Ableton Live using samples from the various bands.

    I've also incorporated some of Magma's future myths into my Aos setting.

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