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yankyo · 4 years

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Commission by @witchyrem-ains

No warnings here, just pure fluff and some Beej pining

Falling in love for the first time was never easy - especially when you were a millenia old demon with a strenuous relationship with the phenomena known as emotions to begin with. But here lay Beetlejuice, completely and uncontrollably twitterpated with no real clue of what he was supposed to be doing here. He knew how to scare breathers, hell he was a straight up genius when it came to making breathers run for the hills, but he didn’t want her to run from him. He wanted her laughter, not her screams, her smile instead of her shrieks. Fuck, he really had it bad for this human. The last time he made her laugh at one of his stupid jokes, he damn near melted into a happy, pink puddle at her side. Remington. The name was enough to get his hair turning pink these days, enough to make his unbeating heart all but leap out of his chest. The demon groaned aloud, rolling from his place up on the roof to instead slither back into the house - he could and has spent hours out here staring at the stars and imagining what it would be like to call her his. To run his fingers through her long, soft hair, to kiss her full lips, to feel her body against his…. hearing her calling him Lawrence. Fuck. Bad thoughts, bad thoughts, he didn’t need another problem that would result in him curling up with the odd pieces of clothing she had left behind, or those odd pieces he had swiped from her home to stuff in the slowly growing nest in his room… he really had a problem here, didn’t he?

It wasn’t like he wasn’t trying to keep his infatuation a secret. He flirted up a storm whenever he was in her direct vicinity, but her responses were always playful, never taking his propositions seriously - but fuck she was so cute that he couldn’t even be frustrated with her, not when she would turn to him with those pretty eyes of hers shining with mirth, her cheeks pink with laughter and his innards would do somersaults and his brain would just straight up shut down. And she would head home, not knowing that she was leaving with his heart in her hands. But what was he supposed to do? He flirted, he left little gifts for her - sure usually he was leaving rats and the odd bug he personally found interesting, but they were gifts nonetheless, and he knew she enjoyed his company too. At least, he was pretty sure she did…Barbra insisted the real reason Rem kept coming around was for him after all and Barbra couldn’t lie to save her ass. That and Barbra had to know something about relationships, despite how utterly boring it was, she and Adam had been in a pretty happy relationship for a good stretch of time. Beetlejuice usually saw couples dissolve after death, unable to handle the strain the change caused, but the Maitlands were still going strong and everyone was uncomfortably aware of just how enamored the Deetz couple were with one another. He had played creepy voyeur to the Maitlands for years, but even he hadn’t been prepared to turn a corner and spy Charles with his tongue halfway down Delia’s throat and his hand obviously going up er dress. And how many times did he have to whirl around and protect the young Lydia from such a scarring sight? They certainly had to know what they were doing here, right? For someone as emotionally constipated as Charles to be so clearly happy with his new wife meant he had to be doing something right, right? And Rem got along quite well with both couples, didn’t she?

Beetlejuice’s stomach twisted at the thought, but he crept through the house anyways, quickly finding himself idling by the stairs up to the attic, his hands fidgeting with the hem of his suit. How was he supposed to ask for their help? Yeah, their relationship had come a long way, but was he relationship advice close?

“Hey BJ, do ya need something?” The voice from behind him made him jolt and whirl around, coming face to face with Adam himself. They were getting pretty good with their scares and while he would usually be proud to be taken by surprise, or would immediately be all over the other man, but this time Beetlejuice just stood there, fumbling over his words as he tried to find the best way to phrase this question. “Beetlejuice?” Adam stepped forwards, placing a hand on his shoulder with a concerned look.

“Howdoyouaskoutagirl?” The question left him in one breath, his entire body a light, embarrassed pink. Adam blinked, surprised, but a slow smile spread across his face as the words registered.

“You’re finally going to ask out Remmy?” His voice was far too loud, but before Beetlejuice could even attempt to try and shush him, Babra stuck her head through the door,

“He’s asking her out?” She exclaimed, quickly phasing through the door to rush down the stairs. “I told you it was going to happen, Adam was beginning to fear you weren’t going to!” She took his hands in hers, her eyes glittering in excitement. “Don’t you worry, we’ll get you all done up for Remmy!” before he could even think to respond, she was dragging him down the hall, calling for Delia, Adam at his side with an encouraging look.

Beetlejuice found himself awkwardly standing in the middle of the room, fidgeting with his fingers as Delia and Barbra fussed over him.

“We need to do his hair,” Delia brushed her nails through his hair as if trying to find the right style,

“Perhaps get him a nice new suit? Oh one of Adam’s old shirts would look nice, right?” Barbra was examining his old suit as if trying to guess his size.

“A bath would probably be a great first step. We should take him to the porch and hose em down.” A sardonic voice spoke up from the doorway. Lydia gave him an amused look as she strolled into the room. “Dad, you owe me twenty bucks. I told you he’d come for help.“

“You made bets?” Beetlejuice watched in shock as Chuck presented his daughter with a crisp twenty dollar bill, the girl taking it with a smug smile and a shrug.

“Everyone saw the little song and dance Rem and you have been doing around one another, we all wondered who was gonna figure it out first and how it would go down. I bet you would realize it and get frustrated enough with Rem’s obliviousness to come asking for help. Delia bet you wouldn’t realize and Rem would get tired of you messing around and would pounce.” The idea wasn’t the worst, though he definitely couldn’t see Rem pinning him down… that was a thought to enjoy later in his nest.

“You all seem pretty certain she likes me, she could just see me as a dead guy she hangs out with.” The looks every single person in that room gave him seemed to be a varying degree of ‘are you joking’, only for each to see just how serious Beetlejuice was and sigh.

“We’ve certainly got our work cut out for us.” Delia gave an anxious laugh, to break the awkward silence. “Come on, let’s see what clothing we can get for you."

----------

"Are yall sure about this?” Beetlejuice gave his appearance a skeptical look. After a good few hours of prepping, in which Lydia made good on the comment of hosing him down and Barbra found clothing that somewhat fit him, Beetlejuice looked… well he looked like a bloated rat that was half drowned and was dressed by an old, depressed farmhand.

“Now, remember, you want to give her flowers when she comes.” Delia had been coaching him the entire time, bouncing off of Barbra as the two women instructed him on how to talk to women. No inappropriate compliments, no coarse language, no dirty jokes, no gross humor, no taking off his head, no eating bugs, no oversharing. Listen to her, compliment her nicely, ask her about her day. He had summoned some pretty flowers to give to her, soft yellow flowers he had often seen blooming outside just beyond his reach. He assumed it was a good choice, when he had shown them off no one had said they weren’t good, in fact they had given him the look one would give an especially endearing kitten. That was probably a good sign, right?

Lydia had been tasked with calling up Remmy, inviting her over for dinner and as the hour drew nearer, Beetlejuice found himself pacing the floor nervously. After his last disastrous attempt at cooking, he had been permanently banned from the kitchen, so dinner had been prepared by Barbra and Adam while Delia had set up his room nicely for the ‘date’. Beetlejuice had hidden away the trinkets he kept of Remmy’s and had made sure his treasures were well away from the garbage can as he helped Delia clean up and light some nice candles - the basement was looking quite good if he did say so himself, a nice little table set up already for them. Everything was ready, everything was prepared, but when there came a knock at the door, Beetlejuice was just about ready to hurl himself headfirst into the mouth of the nearest sandworm. Instead, he hid behind a wall as Lydia answered the door and gave her halfhearted line of:

“Oh dear, a friend of mine from school needs help with whatever, gotta jet.” On her way out the door. Behind her was Charles and Delia, their excuses for why they had to leave something about work and Barbra and Adam had already hopped out into the Netherworld, leaving the house empty save for Beetlejuice and Remington.

“H… hey.” Beetlejuice greeted, already sweating buckets as he held out a fistful of dandelions. “Dinner is… it’s ready and downstairs.” Remmy gave the flowers a look, a soft, amused smile spreading across her face as she took him in.

“Are you wearing Adam’s old clothing?” She asked with a soft laugh. “It looks like the buttons are about to go flying."

"They probably are.” The demon replied, with a glance down. His belly was quite a bit rounder than Adam’s were and he commended the old shirt for it’s attempt at wrapping around his midsection. He led the way downstairs, going over his instructions in his head over and over again.

“I’ve never been down here, I didn’t know they made it your room.” Remington commented, glancing around interestedly. “Is that… is that a coffin?” She asked, her eyes shimmering with interest.

“Yeah. It’s my bed.” She gave him another look, but instead of the judgement he was expecting, she looked rather excited instead.

“Really? You actually sleep in it?” Her excitement made him chuckle, following after her as she made her way through the room. All this time doing up the room and she focused on the coffin, satan or god, whoever is listening, I love this girl. He followed after, unable to help the fond look on his face.

“I don’t exactly sleep no, but I do lay in it at nights sometimes. It’s pretty comfortable.” He pulled open the lid, revealing the black and white striped plush lining and an array of stuffed animals he had collected through the years.

“Can… can I lay down inside?” She asked and Beetlejuice couldn’t help the shiver that crept down his spine at the question.

“Be my guest.” She… she would lay in his coffin. It would smell like her. He almost vibrated with excitement as she settled down inside, stretching out comfortably before she glanced up at him, a soft smile on her face,

“Come join me.” Beetlejuice almost choked, but stumbled forwards, unable to deny her. Her body was too close, her scent enveloping him as he stiffly laid down next to her. Unfortunately, or rather thankfully she didn’t seem to notice his growing problem and she scooted forwards to lay her head on his chest. “Hey Beetlejuice?” He grunted softly in response, not trusting himself to try and speak. “Is… is this a date?” Her voice was soft, disbelieving. “Lydia said something but… I don’t want to just expect anything without actually…. you know."

"I was… well, I was hoping it would be. If, uh, if you aren’t ok with that, I mean, it could just be a dinner..” His voice was a soft, embarrassing squeak, his entire body practically glowing pink. She lifted her head, hazel eyes meeting green, so close he could swear if he leaned in just a hair he could kiss her.

“I… I’m ok with it being a date.” Her cheeks were a soft, pretty pink. So beautiful he couldn’t help but raise a hand and cup her cheek, his thumb brushing over the warm skin.

“You’re ok with… me?” He knew he didn’t have to explain what he meant, he knew exactly what he was. For such a pretty breather to actually have interest in him and want him as he was was a fantasy he didn’t typically indulge in. Remmy leaned in, her hands coming up to cup his cheeks as she gave him a soft kiss.

“What’s not to be ok with?” The smile she gave him would have stopped his heart if it hadn’t already stopped beating so many years ago. “You’re perfect.” Beetlejuice all but melted, leaning in to kiss her this time, the kiss soft and lingering. He knew the dinner was getting cold at the table, but he couldn’t give it another thought. Not with his girl in his arms. He’d steal some take out later and give her a real Beetlejuice date. As soon as he could reassemble the liquidated remains of his brains and pull himself away from her welcoming arms.

#beetlejuice #beetlejuice x self insert #beetlejuice musical #betelgeuse #commisionwork #yan's first comission #Yan writes #fluff

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ciathyzareposts · 5 years

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Controlling the Spice, Part 1: Dune on Page and Screen

Frank Herbert in 1982.

In 1965, two works changed the face of genre publishing forever. Ace Books that year came out with an unauthorized paperback edition of an obscure decade-old fantasy trilogy called The Lord of the Rings, written by a pipe-smoking old Oxford don named J.R.R. Tolkien, and promptly sold hundreds of thousands of copies of it. And the very same year, Chilton Books, a house better known for its line of auto-repair manuals than for its fiction, became the publisher of last resort for Frank Herbert’s epic science-fiction novel Dune. While Dune‘s raw sales weren’t initially quite so impressive as those of The Lord of the Rings, it was recognized immediately by science-fiction connoisseurs as the major work it was, winning its year’s Nebula and Hugo Awards for Best Novel (the latter award alongside Roger Zelazny’s This Immortal).

It may be that you can’t judge a book by its cover, but you can to a large extent judge the importance of The Lord of the Rings and Dune by their thickness. Genre novels had traditionally been slim things, coming in at well under 300 pocket-sized mass-market-paperback pages. These two novels, by contrast, were big, sprawling works. The writing on their pages as well was heavier than the typical pulpy tale of adventure. Tolkien’s and Herbert’s novels felt utterly disconnected from trends or commercial considerations, redolent of myth and legend — sometimes, as plenty of critics haven’t hesitated to point out over the years, rather ponderously so. At a stroke, they changed readers’ and publishers’ perception of what a fantasy or science-fiction novel could be, and the world of genre publishing has never looked back.

In the years since 1965, almost as much has been written of Dune as The Lord of the Rings. Still, it’s new to us. And so, given that it suddenly became a very important name in computer games circa 1992, we should take the time now to look at what it is and where it came from.

At the time of Dune‘s publication, Frank Herbert was a 45-year-old newspaperman who had been dabbling in science fiction — his previous output had included one short novel and a couple of dozen short stories — since the early 1950s. He had first been inspired to write Dune by, appropriately enough, sand dunes. Eight years before the novel’s eventual publication, the San Francisco Examiner, the newspaper for which he wrote, sent him to Florence, Oregon, to write about government efforts to control the troublesomely shifting sand dunes just outside of town. It didn’t sound like the most exciting topic in the world, and, indeed, he never managed to turn it into an acceptable article. Yet he found the dunes themselves weirdly fascinating:

I had far too much for an article and far too much for a short story. So I didn’t know really what I had—but I had an enormous amount of data and avenues shooting off at all angles to get more… I finally saw that I had something enormously interesting going for me about the ecology of deserts, and it was, for a science-fiction writer anyway, an easy step from that to think: what if I had an entire planet that was desert?

The other great spark that led to Dune wasn’t a physical environment, nor for that matter a physical anything. It was a fascination with the messiah complex that has been with us through all of human history, even though it has seldom, Herbert believed, led us to much good. Somehow this theme just seemed to fit with a desert landscape; think of the Biblical Moses and the Exodus.

I had this theory that superheroes were disastrous for humans, that even if you postulated an infallible hero, the things this hero set in motion fell eventually into the hands of fallible mortals. What better way to destroy a civilization, society, or race than to set people into the wild oscillations which follow their turning over their judgment and decision-making faculties to a superhero?

Herbert worked on the novel off and on for years. Much of his time was spent in pure world-building — or, perhaps better said in this case, galaxy-building — creating a whole far-future history of humanity among the stars that would inform and enrich any specific stories he chose to set there; in this sense once again, his work is comparable to that of J.R.R. Tolkien, that most legendary of all builders of fantastic worlds. But his actual story mostly took place on the desert planet Arrakis, also known as Dune, the source of an invaluable “spice” known as melange, which confers upon humans improved health, longer life, and even paranormal prescience, while also allowing some of them to “fold space,” thus becoming the key to interstellar travel. As the novel’s most popular and apt marketing tagline would put it, “He who controls the spice controls the universe!” The spice has made this inhospitable world, where water is so scarce that people kill one another over the merest trickle of the stuff, whose deserts are roamed by gigantic carnivorous sandworms, the most valuable piece of real estate in the galaxy.

The novel centers on a war between two great trading houses, House Atreides and House Harkonnen, for control of the planet. The politics involved, not to mention the many military and espionage stratagems they employ against one another, are far too complex to describe here, but suffice to say that Herbert’s messiah figure emerges in the form of the young Paul Atreides, who wins over the nomadic Fremen who have long lived on Arrakis and leads them to victory against the ruthless Harkonnen.

Dune draws heavily from any number of terrestrial sources — from the Old Testament of the Christian Bible, from the more mystical end of Zen Buddhism, from the history of the Ottoman Empire and the myths and cultures of the Arab world. Nevertheless, the whole novel has an almost aggressively off-putting otherness about it. Herbert writes like a native of his novel’s time and place would, throwing strange jargon around with abandon and doing little to clarify the big-picture politics of the galaxy. And he shows no interest whatsoever in explaining that foremost obsession of so many other science-fiction writers, the technology and hardware that underpin his story. Like helicopters and diving suits to a writer of novels set in our own time and place, “ornithopters” and “stillsuits,” not to mention interstellar space travel, simply are to Dune‘s narrator. Meanwhile some of the bedrock philosophical concepts that presumably — hopefully! — unite most of Dune‘s readership — such ideas as fundamental human rights and democracy — don’t seem to exist at all in Herbert’s universe.

This wind of Otherness blowing through its pages makes Dune a famously difficult book to get started with. Those first 50 or 60 pages seem determined to slough off as many readers as possible. Unless you’re much smarter than I am, you’ll need to read Dune at least twice to come to anything like a full understanding of it. All of this has made it an extremely polarizing novel. Some readers love it with a passion; some, like yours truly here, find it easier to admire than to love; some, probably the majority, wind up shrugging their shoulders and walking away.

In light of this, and in light of the way that it broke every contemporary convention of genre fiction, beginning but by no means ending with its length, it’s not surprising that Frank Herbert found Dune to be a hard sell to publishers. The tropes were familiar enough in the abstract — a galaxy-spanning empire, interstellar war, a plucky young hero — but the novel, what with its lofty, affectedly formal prose, just didn’t read like science fiction was supposed to. Whilst allowing what amounted to a rough draft of the novel to appear in the magazine Analog Science Fiction in intermittent installments between December 1963 and May 1965, Herbert struggled to find an outlet for it in book form. The manuscript was finally accepted by Chilton only after being rejected by over twenty other publishers.

Dune in the first Chilton edition.

Those other publishers would all come to regret their decision. Dune took some time to gain traction with readers outside science fiction’s intelligentsia; Herbert didn’t make enough money from his fiction to quit his day job until 1969. But the oil embargoes of the 1970s gave this novel that was marked by such Otherness an odd sort of social immediacy, winning it many readers outside the still fairly insular community of written science fiction, making it a trendy book to have read or at least to say you had read. For many, it now read almost like a parable; it wasn’t hard to draw parallels between Arrakis’s spice and our own planet’s oil, nor between the Fremen of Arrakis and the cultures native to our own planet’s great oil-rich deserts. As critic Gwyneth Jones puts it, Dune is, among other things, a depiction of “scarcity, and the kind of human culture that scarcity produces.” It was embraced by many in the environmentalist movement, who read it it as a cautionary tale perfect for an era in which we earthbound humans were being forced to confront the reality that our planet’s resources are not infinite.

So, Dune eventually sold a staggering 12 million copies, becoming by most accounts the best-selling work of genre science fiction in history. And so we arrive at one final parallel to The Lord of the Rings: that of a book that was anything but an easy read in the conventional sense nevertheless selling in quantities to rival any beach-and-airport time-waster ever written. Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose was famously described at the height of its 1980s popularity as a book that everyone owned and almost no one had ever managed to get all the way through. Dune may very well be the closest equivalent in genre fiction.

Herbert wrote five sequels to Dune, none of which are as commonly read or as highly regarded among critics as the first novel.1 One might say, however, that the second and third novels at least — Dune Messiah (1969) and Children of Dune (1976) — are actually necessary to appreciate Herbert’s original conception of the work in its entirety. He had always conceived of Dune as an epic tragedy in the Shakespearean sense, but reading the first book alone can obscure this fact. That book is, as the science-fiction scholar Damien Broderick puts it, typical pulp science fiction in at least one sense: it satisfies “an adolescent craving for an imaginary world in which heroes triumph by a preternatural blend of bravery, genius, and sci.” It’s only in the second and third books that Paul Atreides, the messiah figure, begins to fail, thus illustrating how a messiah can, as Herbert says, “destroy a civilization, society, or race.” That said, it would be the first novel alone with which almost all media adaptations would concern themselves, so it will also monopolize our attention in these articles.

Dune‘s success was such that it inevitably attracted the interest of the film industry. In 1972, the British producer Arthur P. Jacobs, the man behind the hugely successful Planet of the Apes films, acquired the rights to the series, but he had the misfortune to die the following year, before his plans had gotten beyond the storyboarding phase.

Yet Dune‘s trendiness only continued to grow, and interest in turning it into a film remained high among people who wouldn’t have been caught dead with any other science-fiction novel. In 1974, the rights passed from Jacob’s estate to Alejandro Jodorowsky, a transgressive Chilean director who claimed to once have raped one of his actresses in the name his Art. Manifesting an alarming obsession with the act, he now planned to do the same to Frank Herbert:

It was my Dune. When you make a picture, you must not respect the novel. It’s like you get married, no? You go with the wife, white, the woman is white. You take the woman, if you respect the woman, you will never have child. You need to open the costume and to… to rape the bride. And then you will have your picture. I was raping Frank Herbert, raping, like this! But with love, with love.

The would-be rape victim could only look on in disbelief: “He had so many personal, emotional axes to grind. I used to kid him, ‘Well, I know what your problem is, Alejandro. There is no way to horsewhip the pope in this story.’”

Jodorowsky planned to fill the cast and crew of the film, which would bear an estimated price tag of no less than $15 million, with flotsam washed up from the more dissipated end of the celebrity pool: Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, Charlotte Rampling, Salvador Dali, Mick Jagger, Alain Delon. But, even in this heyday of Porno Chic, no one was willing to entrust such an erratic personality with such a budget, and the project fizzled out after Jodorwsky had blown through $2 million on scripts, concept art, and the drugs that were needed to fuel it all.

In the meantime, the possibilities for cinematic science fiction were being remade by a little film called Star Wars. Indeed, said film bears the clear stamp of Dune, especially in its first act, which takes place on a desert planet where water is the most precious commodity of all. And certainly the general dirty, lived-in look of Star Wars, so distinct from the antiseptic futures of most science fiction, owes much to Dune.

In the wake of Star Wars, Dino De Laurentiis, one of the great impresarios of post-war Italian cinema, acquired the rights to Dune from Jodorowsky’s would-be backers. He secured a tentative agreement with Ridley Scott, who was just finishing his breakthrough film Alien, to direct the picture. Rudy Wurlitzer, screenwriter of the classic western Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, wrote three drafts of a script, but the financing necessary to begin production proved hard to secure. Thus in 1981 the cinematic rights to Dune, which Herbert had sold away for a span of nine years to Arthur P. Jacobs back in 1972, finally reverted to the author after their extended but fruitless world tour.

Yet De Laurentiis remained passionate about his Dune film — so much so that he immediately entered into negotiation with Herbert to reacquire the rights. Having watched various filmmakers come close to doing unspeakable things to his creation over the previous decade — even Wurlitzer’s recent script reportedly added an incest plot line involving Paul Atreides and his mother — Herbert insisted that he must at least be given the role of “advisor” to any future film. De Laurentiis agreed to this.

He was so eager to make a deal because Dune had suddenly looked to be back on, for real this time, just as the rights were expiring. His daughter, Raffealla De Laurentiis, had taken on the Dune film as something of a passion project of her own. She was riding high with a brand of blockbuster-oriented, action-heavy fare that was quite different from the films of her father’s generation. She was already in the midst of producing Conan the Barbarian, starring a buff if nearly inarticulate former bodybuilding champion named Arnold Schwarzenegger; it would become a major hit, launching Schwarzenegger’s career as Hollywood’s go-to action hero over the next couple of decades. But the Dune project would be a different sort of beast, a sort of synthesis of father and daughter’s priorities: a big-budget film with an art-film sensibility. For Ridley Scott had by this time moved on to other projects, and Dino and Raffealla De Laurentiis had a surprising new candidate in mind to direct their Dune.

David Lynch and Frank Herbert. Interviewers were constantly surprised at how normal Lynch looked and acted in person, in contrast to his bizarre films. Starlog magazine, for example, wrote of his “sculptured hair [and] jutting boyish features,” saying he was “extremely polite and well-mannered, the antithesis of enigma. Not a hint of phobic neurosis or deep-seated sexual maladjustment.”

David Lynch was already a beloved director of the art-film circuit, although his output to date had consisted of just two low-budget black-and-white movies: Eraserhead (1977), a surrealistic riot of a horror film, and The Elephant Man (1980), a mournful tragedy of prejudice and isolation. He would seem to stand about as far removed from the family-friendly fare of George Lucas and Steven Spielberg’s new Hollywood as it was possible to get. And yet that mainstream of filmmakers saw something — something having to do with his talent for striking, kinetic visuals — in the 36-year-old director. In fact, Lucas actually asked him whether he would be interested in directing the third Star Wars film, Return of the Jedi, whereupon Lynch rather peremptorily turned the offer down, saying he wasn’t interested in making sequels to other people’s films. But when Dino De Laurentiis approached him about Dune he was more receptive. Lynch:

Dino’s office called me and asked if I had ever read Dune. I thought they said “June.” I never read either one of ’em! But once I got the book, it’s like when you hear a new word. And I started hearing it more often. Then, I began finding out that friends of mine had already read it and freaked out over it. It took me a long time to read. Actually, my wife forced me to read it. I wasn’t that keen on it at first, especially the first 60 pages. But the more I read, the more I liked. Because Dune has so many things that I like, I said, “This is a book that can be made into a film.”

Lynch joined screenwriters Eric Bergen and Christopher De Vore for a week at Frank Herbert’s country farmhouse, where they hammered out a script which ran to a hopelessly overlong 200 pages. As the locale would indicate, Herbert was involved in the creative process, but kept a certain distance from the details: “This is a translation job. I wouldn’t presume to be the person who should translate Dune from English to French; my French is execrable. It’s the same with a movie; you go to the person who speaks ‘movie.’”

The script was rewritten again and again in the months that followed, the later drafts by Lynch alone. (He would be given sole credit as the screenwriter of the finished film.) In the process, it slimmed down to a still-ambitious 135 pages. And with that, and with the De Laurentiis father and daughter having lined up a positively astronomical amount of financing from Universal Pictures, who were desperate for a big science-fiction franchise of their own to rival 20th Century Fox’s Star Wars and Paramount’s Star Trek, a real Dune film finally got well and truly underway.

Raffealla De Laurentiis and Frank Herbert with the actors Kyle MacLachlan and Francesca Annis on the set of Dune, 1983.

Rehearsals and pre-production began in the Sonora Desert outside of Mexico City in October of 1982; actual shooting started the following March, and dragged on over many more months. In the lead role of Paul Atreides, Lynch had cast a 25-year-old Shakespearean-trained stage actor named Kyle MacLachlan, who had never acted before a camera in his life. Nor, at six feet tall and 155 pounds, was he built much like an action hero. But he was trained in martial arts, and he gave it his all over a long and difficult shoot.

Joining him were a number of recognizable character actors, such as the intimidating Swede Max von Sydow, cast in the role of the Fremen leader Kynes, and the villain specialist Kenneth McMillan, all but buried under 200 pounds of fake silicon flesh as the disgustingly evil — or evilly disgusting — Baron Vladimir Harkonnen. Patrick Stewart, later to become famous in the role of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s Captain Jean-Luc Picard, played Paul’s martial mentor Gurney Halleck. In a bit of stunt casting, Sting of the rock band the Police, deemed “biggest band in the world” by any number of contemporary critics, took the role of one of the supporting cast of villains — a role which would, naturally, be blown out of all proportion by the movie’s promoters. To a person, everyone involved with the shoot remembers it as being uncomfortable at best. “I was taxed on almost every level as a human being,” says MacLachlan. “Mexico City is not one of the most pleasant spots in the world to be.” The one thing they all mention is the food poisoning; almost everyone among cast and crew got it at one time or another, and some lived with it for the entirety of the months on end they spent in Mexico.

Universal Pictures had given David Lynch, this young director who was used to shooting on a shoestring budget, an effective blank check in the hope that it would yield the next George Lucas and/or the next Star Wars. Lynch didn’t hesitate to spend their money, building some eighty separate sets and shooting hundreds of hours of footage. Even in Mexico, where the peso was cheap, it added up. Universal would later claim an official budget of $40 million, but rumblings inside Hollywood had it that the real total was more like $50 million. Either figure was more than immense enough to secure Dune the title of most expensive Universal film ever. (For comparison’s sake, consider that the contemporary big-budget blockbusters Return of the Jedi and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom cost approximately $40 million and $30 million respectively.)

The shoot had been difficult enough in itself, but the film first began to show the telltale signs of a doomed production only in the editing phase, as Lynch tried to corral his reams of footage into a finished product. He clashed repeatedly with Raffealla De Laurentiis and Universal, both of whom made it clear that they expected a relatively “clean,” PG-rated film with a coherent narrative through line for their money. Such qualities weren’t, of course, what David Lynch was known for. But the director had failed to secure final-cut rights to the film, and he was repeatedly overridden. Finally, he all but removed himself from the process altogether, and Raffealla De Laurentiis herself cobbled together much of the finished film, going so far as to shoot her own last-minute bridging scenes whilst layering clumsy voice-overs and internal monologues over the top, all in a (failed) effort to make the labyrinthine plot comprehensible to a casual audience. Meanwhile Universal continued to spew forth a fountain of hype about “Star Wars for adults” and “the end of the pulp era of science-fiction movies,” whilst continuing to plaster Sting, looking fetching in his black leather, across their “Coming Attractions” posters and trailers as if he was the star. Dune was set for a fall.

And, indeed, the finished product, which arrived in theaters in December of 1984, provided a rare opportunity for every corner of movie fandom and criticism to unite in hatred. The professional critics, most of whom had never read the book, found the film, even with all the additional expository voice-overs, as incomprehensible as Raffealla De Laurentiis had always feared they would. Fans of the novel had the opposite problem, bemoaning the plot simplification and the liberties taken with the story, complaining about the way that all of the thematic texture had been lost in favor of Lynchian weirdness for weirdness’s sake. And the all-important general audience, for their part, stayed away in droves, making Dune one of the more notorious flops in cinematic history. Just like that, Universal Pictures’s dream of a Star Wars franchise of their own went up in smoke.

Whatever else you can say about it, David Lynch’s Dune is often visually striking.

Seen today, free of the hype and the resultant backlash, the film isn’t as bad as many remember it; many of its scenes are striking in that inimitable Lynchian way. But it doesn’t hang together at all as a holistic experience, and its best parts are often those that have the least to do with its source material. Many over the years have suspected that there’s a good film hidden somewhere in all that footage Lynch shot, if it could only be freed from the strictures of the two-hour running time demanded by Universal; Lynch’s own first rough cut, they point out, was reportedly at least twice that long. Yet various attempts to rejigger the material — including a 1988 version for television that ballooned the running time to more than three hours — haven’t yielded results that feel all that much more holistically satisfying than the original theatrical cut. The film remains what it was from the first, a strange hybrid stranded in a no-man’s land between an art film and a conventional blockbuster, not really working as either. At bottom, the film reflects a hopeless mismatch between its director and its source material. What happens when you ask a brilliant director with very little interest in plot to film a novel famous for its intricate plot? You get a movie like David Lynch’s Dune. Perhaps the kindest thing one can say about it is that it is, unlike so many of Hollywood’s other more misbegotten projects, an interesting failure.

Lynch disowned the film almost immediately. He’s generally refused to talk about it at all in interviews since 1984, beyond dismissing it as a “sell-out” on his part. The one positive aspect of the film which even he will admit to is that it brought Kyle MacLachlan to his attention. The latter starred in Lynch’s next film as well, the low-budget psychological-horror picture Blue Velvet (1986), which rehabilitated its director’s critical reputation at a stroke at the same time that it marked the definitive end of his brief flirtation with mainstream sensibilities. MacLachlan would go on to find his most iconic role as the weirdly impassive FBI agent Dale Cooper in Lynch’s supremely weird television series Twin Peaks.

The Dino de Laurentiis Corporation had invested everything they had and then some in their Dune film. They went bankrupt in the aftermath of its failure — but, in typical corporate fashion, a phoenix known as the De Laurentiis Entertainment Group soon emerged from the ashes. Just to show there were no hard feelings, one of the reincarnated production company’s first films was David Lynch’s Blue Velvet.

Surprisingly in light of the many readers who complained so vociferously about the liberties the Dune film took with his novel, Frank Herbert himself never disowned it, speaking of it quite warmly right up until his death. But sadly, that event came much earlier than anyone had reckoned it would: he died in 1986 at age 65, the victim of a sudden blood clot in his lung that struck just after he had undergone surgery for prostrate cancer.

Dune did come to television screens in 2000, in a rather workmanlike miniseries adaptation that was more comprehensible and far more faithful to the novel than Lynch’s film, but which lacked the budget, the acting talent, or the directorial flare to rival its predecessor as an artistic statement. Today, almost half a century after Arthur P. Jacobs first began to inquire about the film rights, the definitive cinematic Dune has yet to be made.

There is, however, one other sort of screen on which Dune has undeniably left a profound mark: not the movie or even the television screen, but the monitor screen. It’s in that direction that we’ll turn our attention next time.

(Sources: the books The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn and Frank Herbert by Timothy O’Reilly; Starlog of January 1983, May 1984, October 1984, November 1984, December 1984, February 1985, and June 1986; Enter of December 1984; the online articles “Jodorowsky’s Dune Didn’t Get Made for a Reason… and We Should All Be Grateful For That” and “David Lynch’s Dune is What You Get When You Build a Science Fictional World With No Interest in Science Fiction” by Emily Asher-Perrin.)

As for the flood of more recent Dune novels, written by Frank Herbert’s son Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, previously a prolific author of X-Files and Star Wars novels and other low-hanging fruit of the literary landscape: stay far, far away. ↩

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/controlling-the-spice-part-1-dune-on-page-and-screen/

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