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Movies you may never see
  • Films in this category may include Terry Gilliam’s Don Quixote, Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon and Untitled Holocaust movie, and…

    Jodorowsky's Dune

    History

    In 1973, film producer Arthur P. Jacobs optioned the film rights to Dune but died before a film could be developed. The option was then taken over two years later by director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who proceeded to approach, among others, Peter Gabriel, the prog rock groups Pink Floyd and Magma for some of the music, artists H. R. Giger and Jean Giraud for set and character design, Dan O'Bannon for special effects, and Salvador Dalí, Orson Welles, Gloria Swanson, David Carradine and others for the cast.[1]

    Frank Herbert traveled 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). Jodorowsky took creative liberties with the source material, but Herbert said that he and Jodorowsky had an amicable relationship. The project ultimately stalled for financial reasons. The film rights lapsed until 1982, when they were purchased by Italian filmmaker Dino DeLaurentiis, who eventually released the 1984 film Dune, directed by David Lynch.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodorowsky's_Dune

    Jodorowsky's Dune Trailer

    Moebius Redux: Jodorowsky's Dune

    TIME review

    “What if the first film of that nature had been Dune and not Star Wars?” asks Drive director Nicolas Winding Refn. “Would the whole megabucks-blockbuster structure have been altered?” Having been shown the book of storyboards that put the whole project on paper, Refn says, “I saw Dune, and it was awesome.”

    Jodorowsky’s dream movie remained only a dream: producer Michel Seydoux, after getting rejections from every Hollywood studio, came up $5 million short on the $15 million budget. …….And nearly four decades later, Jodorowsky acutely feels the pain — not just of the crushing of his project but also of a business model that needs financing for a brilliant madman’s artistry. Still vital and charismatic at 84, the Chilean-born director opens old wounds as if they were fresh cuts and speaks in urgent broken English:

    “This system make us of slaves. Without dignity, without depth. With a devil in our pocket. The incredible money are in our pocket. [Pulls some bills from his trousers.] This money, this shit, this nothing. This paper who have nothing inside. Movies have heart — boom, boom, boom! Have mind [mimes lightning bolts from his brain]. Have power [points to his genitals]. Have ambition! I want to do something like that. Why not?” He looks anguished, spent. He might just have relived the yearlong fever of preparing Dune and the desolation of receiving the news that his beautiful child was stillborn.

    http://time.com/30500/jodorowskys-dune-movie-review-documentary/

  • 11 Replies sorted by
  • Another film about DUNE, from an old VHS:

    The Filming of Alejandro Jodorowsky's DUNE

    Rolling Stone Review

    http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/news/i-wanted-to-create-a-prophet-the-rebirth-of-jodorowskys-dune-20140319

    NY Times Review

    If Only Orson Welles Had Starred ‘Jodorowsky’s Dune,’ From Frank Pavich

    “You can’t have a masterpiece without madness,” the producer Michel Seydoux — one among many like-minded interviewees — declares, an opinion supported by a surreal tour of Mr. Jodorowsky’s back catalog . There’s nothing loony, however, about recognizing the box office wisdom of roping in Orson Welles, Mick Jagger and Pink Floyd, especially if one of your stated goals is to produce the cinematic equivalent of a hit of LSD.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/movies/jodorowskys-dune-from-frank-pavich.html

    NPR RADIO:

    Doomed 'Dune' Was Generations Ahead Of Its Time

    Film Website: http://jodorowskysdune.com/press.html

  • Seduced and Abandoned 2013

    James Toback and Alex Baldwin travel to Cannes to raise money for a non-existent film "Last Tango in Tikrit", interviewing movie producers, directors and actors about the nature of the film business.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seduced_and_Abandoned_(2013_film)

    10 Quotes from 'Seduced and Abandoned,' the New HBO Doc All Filmmakers Should Watch

    http://nofilmschool.com/2013/11/10-quotes-seduced-abandoned-james-toback-alec-baldwin/

  • Orson Welles' unfinished Don Quixote! ;)

  • @jleo good one!!!

    Welles, Kubrick and Jodorowsky are some important references for me.

    IMHO the case of Jodorowsky is of particular interest as his visionary/genius/enlighten concepts and experiments are/were interdisciplinary in the true sense of the word/action... you could even say that he transgressed genres and categorizations, i.e. Psicomagick (which was appropriated/integrated in therapy; BTW very powerful stuff), (theatrical) performances, film, writing, etc.

    Also of fundamental importance, he was born at the right time and with a crazy "enough" mindset... back then things still could be done without being the omnipresent rationalized profit measure the only (most important) sign of success. That doesn't diminish his achievements at all =)

    That Dune would have being somethin' je je

  • @maxr Thanks!

    I picked up an unusual filmmaking book in San Francisco back in the late 70's called "Seeing the Light" by James Broughton. Essential reading for filmmakers.


    Seeing The Light, James Broughton Excerpts

    The Initiation: some elementary questions ***

    If cinema is truly the super art of our century, its iconography unveiled before theater congregations around the world, then it is a calling to be embraced in responsible and solemn terms.

    At one and the same time we must ask the best of ourselves and of cinema itself. *
For the moment, look at cinema as a mystery religion.

    Going to the movies is a group ceremony. One enters the darkened place and joins the silent congregation. Like mass, performances begin at set times. You may come and go but you must be quiet, showing proper respect and awe, as in the Meeting House or at Pueblo dances. Up there at the altar space a rite is to be performed, which we are expected to participate in.

    Then comes the beam of light out of the shadows: the Projector, the Great Projector up there behind us!

    Turn out the little lights so that the big light can penetrate the darkness! Ah, behold the unreeling of the real reality of practically everything: our dreams, our idiocies and raptures, our nativity, passion and death.

    The Preparation ***

    Before you can be accepted as novice into the Brotherhood of Light, you must first renounce the world and its works. Specifically, the doctrines of the orthodox non-believing fathers: producers, distributors, exhibitors, critics, promoters, hacks, academics, executives, professional moviemen, and all those who condemn acts of vision as a form of heresy. They are terrified by visual phenomena, by personal statement, by the glory of creation, by anything marred by the touch of an artist's own hand. Have no traffic with them. They are the devil's agents who will tell you that you are mistaken, misguided, misbegotten, and a miserable misfit. Don't bother trying to enlighten them. Save your breath and slam the door. They are the enemies of art.

    For the Brothers of Light Cinema is:
 a high form of yoga discipline, a service of prayer and thanksgiving , a translucent mystery, 
a devotional agony
, a quest for ecstasy, a new creation of the world
, a society of explorers
, a fellowship of the inner radiance

    Huntsman, What of the Light ***

    Filmmaking is traditionally spoken of as an activity of shooting. If this is your occupation, aim at being a sharpshooter.

    Don't shoot the breeze or shoot the works.
Shoot straight and love the target. A crack shot is neater than a shot in the dark.

    Do you know what kind of a hunter you are? 1) Are you a big game hunter, leading an expedition to a pre-selected veldt where helpers will flush your elephant into the open? 2) Are you a trapper, who builds an artful snare in which to lure his quarry and then waits for the trap to spring? 3) Are you a solitary stalker, who carries his weapon in hand through jungle, desert and mudflat, primed to bag whatever prize he discovers? 4) Are you a trickshot, who wants to dazzle onlookers with dare devil feats of virtuoso marksmanship? 5) Are you a shooting-gallery hunter, who takes rapid-fire potshots at the same duck going by again and again? 6) Are you a trapshooter, who prefers clay pigeons to wild doves? 7) Are you a re-shooter, who likes to shoot over again what has already been shot, whether it's your own game or another's? 8) Are you a star-shooter, shooting into unknown spaces? 9) Are you (is anyone yet) a bodhisattva shooter, aiming to liber- ate all sentient beings from suffering, ignorance, and fear? 10) Or are you, like most people, just a potshot, more often hit by the target than hitting it?

    * The Alchemy of Cinema ***

    Chaplin told Cocteau that after making a film he 'shakes the tree.' One must only keep, he added, what sticks to the branches. People who like puzzles make good editors. An emerging film is a diagram-less crossword, a jigsaw without a known shape. Sometimes it is the trial and error of a labyrinth. As Leonardo da Vinci put it, 'You have to go up a tunnel backwards.'

    Wagner wrote of Beethoven: 'All the pain of existence is shattered against the immense delight of playing with the power of shaping the incomprehensible.'

    Broughton, James Richard, 1913 - Seeing the light. Bibliography p: 80 1. Moving-pictures-Philosophy. 2. Moving-pictures-Production and direction. I. Title. PN1995.B74 791.43'01 76-30681 ISBN 0-87286-090-6
  • @jleo very nice reading indeed, thanks.
    You can tell some of the guy's influences.

    I liked "Shoot straight and love the target" - almost zen; aiming, the bow, the arrow and the target are symbols used (also literally) in zen. It's a beautiful physical poem to detachment - gashô

    I wanted to be a "bodhisattva shooter" but it's really really hard (Ross talking)
    Ah, render it's done. Cheeers

  • L'enfer Henri-Georges Clouzot

    In the 1950s and ’60s, Henri-Georges Clouzot was one of France’s most acclaimed and successful filmmakers, a director who enjoyed massive international success with Le Salaire de la Peur (aka The Wages of Fear) and Les Diaboliques, and his gift for generating tension and suspense onscreen earned him the nickname “the French Hitchcock.” In 1963, Clouzot began work on a project called “L’Enfer” (aka “The Inferno”), a tale of jealousy that leads to madness, and the filmmaker was promised all the time and resources he needed for the picture. However, while the director was meticulously prepared when shooting began, after only three weeks the production was halted and never resumed; Clouzot would complete only two more films before his death in 1977.

    Filmmakers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea try to answer the question of what happened to a project so full of promise in L’Enfer d’Henri-Georges Clouzot (aka Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno), a documentary which looks into the shadowy history of this lost film. Including interviews with members of the cast and crew (among them production assistant Costa-Gavras, who went on to a distinguished career of his own) and excerpts from the surviving footage (seen by the public for the first time here), the film tells the tale of how a great director ran afoul of his own demons while making a movie about a troubled man.

    http://cinearchive.org/post/31536463805/in-the-1950s-and-60s-henri-georges-clouzot-was

    http://sensesofcinema.com/2011/cteq/l’enfer/

    The idea of the lost or broken film is central to cinephilia, but its implications are ambiguous. On the one hand, it allows the film lover to construct a neo-Platonic ideal of the perfect film. However, such dreams suggest a certain dissatisfaction with the cinema as it exists

    full film w/english subs

    http://docusoundsbest.blogspot.ca/2012/12/lenfer-dhenri-georges-clouzot-2009.html

  • I badly know Clouzot work but and with all it's inconsistencies, I LOVE Le Salaire de la Peur
    I'm totally going to watch this later. @jleo very interesting thread buddy =) Chen Kiu

  • That Inferno trailer looked damn good.

  • Le Salaire de la Peur- one of my favorites too! I saw the L'enfer documentary in the theatres when it was released. It points out the problem of doing too many camera tests and not "making the movie".Columbia Pictures allowed him to do camera tests for months, maybe up to a year. Although the camera tests are fascinating!

    A version of L'enfer was made in 1994 by Claude Chabrol

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0109731/

    The previously posted link to this quote didn't work,

    "The idea of the lost or broken film is central to cinephilia,...."

    so it's on this page. Click on colour photo of Romy Schneider:

    http://sensesofcinema.com/tag/henri-georges-clouzot/

  • After a 23 year absence from feature filmmaking, Jodorowsky returns with a new feature film: Dance of Reality;

    Although Jodorowsky condemns Hollywood filmmaking, " Jodorowsky 's Dune" shows how his ideas may have influenced the look of modern blockbusters from Raiders of the Lost Ark, Alien, The Fifth Element, Flash Gordon, etc. His massive "look book" for DUNE containing storyboards drawn by Moebius & H.R. Giger was sent to every studio in Hollywood. A montage cuts between film clips and drawings from his storyboards


    “Industrial Pictures Are Not Art”: Legendary Cult Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky on New Film ‘The Dance of Reality’ and How Hollywood Is Killing Cinema

    http://flavorwire.com/457870/industrial-pictures-are-not-art-legendary-cult-filmmaker-alejandro-jodorowsky-on-new-film-the-dance-of-reality-and-how-hollywood-is-killing-cinema

    JodorowskySXSW

    Jodorowsky at SXSW: my open letter to Alejandro Jodorowsky

    http://www.lafabbricadellarealta.com/2014/04/16/jodorowsky-at-sxsw-my-open-letter-to-alejandro-jodorowsky-special-bonus-full-video-of-his-panel/?utm_source=fbbr.co&utm_medium=urlshortener&utm_campaign=twitter