Before David Lynch’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert‘s epic novel Dune, where was another, wilder, almost insane film adaptation that came crazily close to being filmed before the plug was abruptly pulled.

The story of that undone film is, truly, as epic as Herbert’s masterpiece.

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 [Alejandro] Jodorowsky to direct a film version.

The film has received critical acclaim. Variety called the film a “mind-blowing cult movie” and said that director Pavich “happens upon a compelling theory: that even in its still-born form, the film manifested the sort of collective conscious that Jodorowsky was trying to peddle through its plot, trickling down to influence other sci-fi films that followed”.

The list of illuminaries successfully recruited for the aborted measure is frankly mind-numbing:

• The role of Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV was settled on as Salvador Dalí, the legendary painter – and sometime actor – who agreed only upon a fee of $1000,000 per minute of finished footage in the movie.
• For Baron Vladimir Harkonnen, Jodorowsky successfully signed on Orson Welles of the famous The War of the Worlds radio broadcast and Citizen Kane.
• Feyd-Rautha was agreed to be played by Mick Jagger. You know, lead singer of that little band known as The Rolling Stones.
• Pink Floyd was one of the bands recruited for the musical score.
• The set designs for the Harkonnen homeworld? H. R. Giger of Alien fame.
• Also of (much later) Alien fame came special effects master Dan O’Bannon, less well-known, but without whom we would all be missing the delicious alien-punching-out-of-the-stomach scene.

If that and the literally phonebook-sized script was not staggering to the senses enough, check out some of the LSD-inspired (no, really, Jodorowsky in a documentary on the effort talks about how he was trying to replicate the sensations of an LSD trip) visuals:

Via Wikipedia.