The Hook. Today’s “random film of the day” turned out to be The Holy Mountain (1973) by Alejandro Jodorowsky — a psychedelic art film about Christ stumbling into an esoteric school of magicians. But The Holy Mountain isn’t even the strangest thing Jodorowsky ever conceived. In the mid-seventies, he assembled a producer, Pink Floyd, Salvador Dalí at $100,000 an hour, Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Swiss artist Giger, Frenchman Moebius, and a young American fresh off Dark Star — and tried to adapt Frank Herbert’s Dune. The film that was never made influenced Alien, Star Wars, Blade Runner, The Terminator, The Fifth Element, and indirectly — The Matrix. This is, perhaps, the most paradoxical counterfactual in cinema history: a work that never existed, yet defined everything that came after.
The Investigation.
December 1974. A young French producer, Michel Seydoux (26 years old, a nobody in the film business — his company, Camera One, had only distributed El Topo and The Holy Mountain in Europe), flew to Jodorowsky with a blank check: “Do whatever you want. I’ll finance it.” Jodorowsky himself, in his own essay for Métal Hurlant #107 (1985), describes it like this:
“One night, the Divine agreed to speak to me in a lucid dream: ‘Your next film must be Dune.’ I hadn’t read the novel. I got up at six in the morning and, like an alcoholic waiting for the bar to open, stood by until someone unlocked a bookstore. Read it in one sitting — didn’t stop to eat or drink. Finished at exactly midnight. A minute later, I called Michel Seydoux in Paris from New York…” (duneinfo.com)
What followed was filmmaking as ritual. Jodorowsky rented a castle to write the script. The rights to adapt the novel were bought cheap — Hollywood, after two failed attempts in 1972–1973 (producer Arthur P. Jacobs died before production could start), considered the book “unfilmable and uncommercial.” Out of the $9.5 million budget, Jodorowsky had already spent $2 million on pre-production alone — mostly on what would later become legend under the name “the Dune book.”
Jodorowsky called his collaborators “spiritual warriors” and recruited them not by résumé, but by chemical affinity. Over two and a half years in Paris, a team formed that would later be dubbed the Dream Team of science fiction, though none of its members were known in the genre at the time.
Jean “Moebius” Giraud — a French comic artist, creator of the Western Blueberry. Jodorowsky dictated the script to him frame by frame, and Moebius worked at “superhuman speed,” turning the entire screenplay into 3,000 drawings. The documentary by Pavich (BBC Culture, 2019) emphasizes: the entire previsualization technology that Hollywood considers an invention of the 1990s had already been done by Moebius on paper in 1975. “Jodorowsky wanted to shoot the film on paper before filming even began. No one was doing that at the time,” writes Nicholas Barber in BBC Culture (2019).
H.R. Giger — a Swiss artist whose catalog Dalí showed to Jodorowsky. Giger was to create the visuals for the Harkonnen planet — and, in the director’s own words, “touched metaphysical horror.” Four years later, that same Giger would design Alien — because, as EL PAÍS puts it, “in the airbrush paintings Jodorowsky commissioned from the artist, one can easily recognize the style later recreated for Alien.” (El País, 29.02.2024).
Chris Foss — a British sci-fi cover artist. Jodorowsky gave him instructions in the style of his own poetic manifesto: “I want jewels, animal-machines, soul-mechanical things… womb-ships-brothels, antechambers for rebirth into other dimensions… whore-ships propelled by the seed of our passionate eruptions… dragonfly-ornithopters flying to drink the ancient nectar of dwarf stars, granting us the juice of eternity…” Foss agreed, moved to Paris, and drew spaceships Hollywood had never seen before — organic, sexual, non-rectilinear. His style would later migrate into Superman (1978), Alien (1979), Flash Gordon (1980).
Dan O’Bannon — a twenty-year-old American who had just made the sci-fi film Dark Star with John Carpenter. Jodorowsky tracked him down after seeing Dark Star at a Los Angeles fan theater, rolled a joint with him, and said: “Sell everything you own and come to Paris. Your life will change.” O’Bannon was in charge of special effects. After the project collapsed, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital, then spent another year writing twelve screenplays — all rejected. The thirteenth became Alien (1979), and the credits listed Giger, Foss, Moebius, and O’Bannon — the entire Dune team.
Pink Floyd — at the time of signing, the band was mixing The Dark Side of the Moon at Abbey Road. Jodorowsky describes the meeting: “I didn’t see a group of great musicians creating their masterpiece. I saw four young guys devouring steak and fries. We stood before them, waiting for their insatiability to be satisfied.” Enraged, Jodorowsky stormed out — but David Gilmour ran after him, apologized, and agreed to record a double album for Dune.
Magma (French zeuhl-prog-rock) and Tangerine Dream with Virgin Records were also on board — each assigned their own “planetary theme.” Seydoux brought in Virgin as a potential soundtrack publisher.
For the lead roles: David Carradine (the star of the then-popular Kung Fu), Mick Jagger, Gloria Swanson, Orson Welles (who was promised his favorite Parisian chef would be flown to the set every day), and Brontis Jodorowsky, the director’s twelve-year-old son, who spent two years training in knife fighting, karate, and archery. For the role of Paul Atreides — a child who would later play Nicolas Flamel in Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018).
The most insane chapter — negotiations with Salvador Dalí, who was to play the mad Emperor of the galaxy on a golden artificial planet. Jodorowsky found him in the lobby of the San Régis Hotel in New York. The talks lasted three days across two locations (New York, then Paris), with Amanda Lear (Dalí’s official companion at the time) and a bizarre entourage: “a dealer, models, young beauties, a lady called the King, a massive Dutch woman whose pubic hair Dalí combed, a man claiming to be the grandson of a petomane” (a performer who, in the 1900s, played music with his buttocks).
Dalí laid out his conditions. He wanted:
Jodorowsky returned to the hotel for one night and pulled the “Hanged Man” card from the Tarot — the arcana where a man hangs upside down, a golden stream flowing from his mouth. He wrote Dalí a letter: “I can’t pay $700,000, but I’m ready to offer $300,000 for three days.” Dalí accepted the card as a contract and honored it — because, in Jodorowsky’s words, “Dalí loves aristocracy, and like any noble spirit, he respects his given word.”
After signing, Jodorowsky made a brilliant move: he cut Dalí’s role down to one and a half pages of script and filmed him for exactly one hour. The rest of the Emperor’s lines were delivered by the plastic stand-in. Dalí received his record-breaking check and became “the most expensive actor in cinema history” without uttering an hour’s worth of dialogue in the film.
Jodorowsky himself recounts this story in the essay “The Film You Will Never See” (Métal Hurlant #107, 1985). The English translation is archived on duneinfo.com — one of the best texts on filmmaking written in the 20th century, yet virtually unknown to the general public.
By 1975, Jodorowsky and Seydoux had printed “the Dune book” — a hefty tome the size of a brick (30×22×9 cm), containing: Jodorowsky’s script, Moebius’s 3,000 storyboards, designs by Giger and Foss, character and spaceship concepts. According to various sources, between 10 and 20 copies were produced (Christie’s later clarified — around 20). The book weighed 28 pounds (≈12.7 kg). It was with this book that Seydoux and Jodorowsky flew to Los Angeles to secure the final $5 million for production.
And here’s what Seydoux himself says in Pavich’s documentary (quoted in BBC Culture, 2019): “Everything was perfect — except for the director.” Hollywood said no. Several reasons converged:
The head of MGM called the project a “Concorde” — “a magnificent aircraft that will never fly over our lands.” Disney, Universal, Warner Bros. — all rejected it. Ironically, a year after the project’s collapse, Star Wars (1977) cost Hollywood just $11 million and proved that space opera was a money-printing machine. Jodorowsky was a decade ahead of the market.
BBC Culture (Barber, 2019) and EL PAÍS (Bas, 2024) trace the same astonishing chain. After the project’s collapse, the Dune book was sent to every major studio. This means that literally every production designer of the 1980s’ biggest franchises held it in their hands:
Pavich sums it up: “I think without Jodorowsky, who hired these people and brought them together in Paris for two years, the landscape of modern cinema would be completely different. Let’s start with the obvious — Alien. Everyone from that team later worked on Alien with Ridley Scott.” (NPR, 22.03.2014).
Jodorowsky didn’t give up. In 1980, he and Moebius began publishing The Incal (L'Incal) — a series of graphic novels that directly used Dune concepts. Paul Atreides became John Difool, a class-R (lowest grade) private detective. The spice melange became the Light of the Incal. The sandworms became nameless entities of the Lower Calyx. The series concluded in 1988 and is considered one of Moebius’s greatest works and a key sci-fi comic of the 20th century.
Later, Jodorowsky wrote Before the Incal (a prequel) and After the Incal (a sequel), totaling 18+ volumes. In 2024, EL PAÍS reported that Taika Waititi (director of Jojo Rabbit) is preparing a film adaptation of The Incal. Jodorowsky, then 95, observed calmly: “It no longer belongs to me.”
After the project’s collapse, Jodorowsky sold the Dune rights to Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis. In 1984, he released David Lynch’s Dune — starring Kyle MacLachlan, Sting, and Patrick Stewart. The film flopped at the box office, and Lynch spent years disowning his version. But Jodorowsky’s Dune book made its way to Lynch — through studio libraries, through production designers’ assistants. By general consensus, the design of the ornithopters and the Harkonnen uniforms in Lynch’s film echo Giger’s work.
Jodorowsky, according to Pavich, watched Lynch’s film with his children: “When I sat in the chair, I nearly cried. As the story unfolded, I broke down, because it was ‘shit.’” (quoted in EL PAÍS, 2024). Present at the screening of David Lynch’s film was Léa Seydoux — the great-great-granddaughter of Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky’s producer; she would later star in Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021, 2024).
In 2021, Villeneuve released his Dune with Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Rebecca Ferguson, Javier Bardem, Oscar Isaac, Josh Brolin, Charlotte Rampling, and Jason Momoa. The film grossed $401 million and won six Oscars. Jodorowsky publicly bristled in an interview with IndieWire: “When the 1984 film came out, they used my name in the ad campaign: ‘The film Jodorowsky couldn’t make,’ they said. Now — no. They don’t call me, because they think I’ll hog all the press. But really, by doing that, they’re saying: ‘Now we’ll make that mammoth picture Jodorowsky didn’t make! It’ll be amazing! The director is a genius!’ No, in Hollywood, no one can be a genius. Because it’s pure business.”
And in November 2021, Christie’s in Paris auctioned off one of the copies of the Dune book. The starting estimate was €25,000–35,000. It sold for €2.66 million ($2.9 million) — an American collector outbid a European rival. This set a world record for the price of storyboards (France24, 22.11.2021; Fine Books Magazine, 23.11.2021). Director Nicolas Winding Refn (then in his 50s and friends with the 95-year-old Jodorowsky) flew to Paris for a private viewing and later told EL PAÍS: “If you follow the trail, it often leads to Jodorowsky. Everything is part of a chain: without Alien, there’d be no Blade Runner… and without that, no William Gibson, and no The Matrix.”
In January 2023, director Frank Pavich (the same one who made the 2013 documentary) published an essay in The New York Times about what AI art means for lost masterpieces (NYT, 13.01.2023). Meanwhile, Johnny Darrell in 2022 generated frames in Midjourney showing what Tron (1982) would have looked like under Jodorowsky’s direction. EL PAÍS concludes its 2024 article with: “We wish Jodorowsky could live to 120, to see him bring to the screen all the fantasies that once seemed impossible.”
This story has one big philosophical lesson, and it’s not about cinema.
Jodorowsky’s Dune is a pure case of optimizing a goal detached from market metrics — creating a work that doesn’t exist, but without which nothing else would exist. Jodorowsky didn’t optimize for profit or box office; he optimized for the fullness of the artistic vision — 14 hours of screen time, $100,000 an hour for Dalí, two years of training for a child actor, 3,000 storyboards before the first camera rolled. A system that doesn’t make films but builds a complete visual work before shooting was something Hollywood couldn’t evaluate or sell. And so they rejected it.
But precisely because this work was “detached from optimizable metrics,” it became the infrastructure for the next thirty years of the genre. The Dune book was sent to studios — and became the implicit canon for 1980s production designers. Giger designed the Harkonnens, then Alien. Moebius storyboarded Dune, then The Fifth Element. O’Bannon had a nervous breakdown after the collapse, then wrote Alien. From a project that never happened, an entire generation of visual sci-fi grew.
There’s a direct parallel with software architecture. When an engineer builds a system “optimized for metrics” (latency, throughput, cost per request) without regard for the main function (helping the user achieve their goal), they get a perfectly tuned mechanism that does nothing useful. When Jodorowsky built a system “optimized for the fullness of the vision,” he got 3,000 drawings that cost more than any frame but became training material for the entire industry. Metrics ≠ goal. The goal is what the metrics exist for.
And one quieter thought. In 1976, when Michel Seydoux returned from Los Angeles with rejections from every studio, he could have abandoned the project and tried to recoup his investment. Instead, he sent the Dune book to Hollywood — to his competitors. He gave away what was worth millions, for free, to everyone. And that decision made Jodorowsky’s Dune the most influential non-existent film in cinema history. When you can’t sell your vision — give it to the world, and let the world finish it. That, by the way, is the same principle by which preprints spread in modern science, and open source in IT.
Jodorowsky didn’t make the film. But without his Dune, half the science fiction that raised generations wouldn’t exist. This isn’t “the story of a failure.” It’s the story of a phantom that proved stronger than reality.