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After six months of shooting, six months in postproduction, and nine months of concentrated editing, Dune was ready to be unleashed onto 1,700 screens worldwide simultaneously, a rarity then. There were four gala premieres scheduled for the film: Washington, DC; Los Angeles; Miami; and London.
The DC premiere at the Kennedy Center took place on December 4 and included Dune author Frank Herbert, Kyle MacLachlan (“Paul Atreides”), Francesca Annis (“Lady Jessica”), Dean Stockwell (“Doctor Wellington Yueh”), Raffaella De Laurentiis (producer), and, of course, Dino De Laurentiis (executive producer). The latter wrangled Herbert and David Lynch (along with his wife, Mary Fisk) invites to a White House state dinner to meet President Ronald Reagan, whom Lynch admired. Supposedly the President and First Lady Nancy Reagan told Herbert they enjoyed the film, though official records show Dune wasn't screened for the president until December 22, at Camp David.
“It is an important town for an important movie,” Dino told The Washington Post. “The Kennedy Center is the most important in the United States. That is why we have the premiere of Dune here.”
MacLachlan, smiling between book signings at the premiere, told a reporter: “I don’t feel like a God Emperor, just an actor. Actually, the process of filming was boring and tedious. The fun came in seeing it in its final form. This is the second time for me, I saw it once before in New York. Yes, I do hope there’s a sequel. I’d like to be in lots more. I’d read all the Dune books years before the movie, but once I was cast in it, I began to read them voraciously.”
“I think the movie captures the book,” Herbert opined. “Of course, it leaves out scenes, but it would have to, otherwise we’d be here 14 hours.”
However, negativity around Dune was already circulating. Lynch tried to quell the bad buzz (Variety had dubbed it a “Dune-boggle”) to the Los Angeles Times shortly after this premiere, saying: “I don’t know how the rumors got started, but they aren’t based on truth … that the picture was in trouble, it wasn’t going over well and that we had a bad preview. Well, I was at the Los Angeles preview, and the feeling I got was that we had a successful preview. The feeling I got at the premiere was an awful lot better. Dune is a film built for a big screen with big sound, and they had that at the Kennedy Center.”
Lynch later admitted in Greg Olsen's Beautiful Dark: “I said that I liked the film. I convinced myself that I did. But I was a very sick person at the time. I was dying inside.”
Herbert was also banging the drum for the movie and its planned follow-up, bragging to Philadelphia Daily News: “The principals of the cast and the director, David Lynch, have all been optioned for two more films. We have enough outtakes from this one to make a four-hour TV miniseries. We’re already plotting the screenplay of the sequel.”
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A copy of the script for Dune II was even seen in Herbert’s office when he was interviewed for Prevue magazine in December 1984: “That’s David’s rough draft of Dune Messiah. Now that we speak the same ‘language,’ it’s much easier for both of us to make progress, especially with the screenplays.”
Lynch elaborated even further on his plans to shoot Dune II and Dune III back-to-back in Starburst #78:
At the Royal London Charity Premiere benefiting the National Association for Mental Health on December 13 were Lynch, MacLachlan, Annis, Sting (“Feyd-Rautha”), Patrick Stewart (“Gurney Halleck”), Siân Phillips (“Gaius Helen Mohiam”), and Raffaella partying at the Empire Theatre in Leicester Square alongside special celebrity guests like Prince Andrew (Duke of York), Andy Summers and Stewart Copeland (The Police), Andrew Ridgeley and George Michael (Wham!), Gary Kemp (Spandau Ballet), Nick Rhodes (Duran Duran), Roger Taylor (Queen), Grace Jones (Conan the Destroyer), Julie Walters (Educating Rita), Danny Huston (Wonder Woman), Billy Connolly (The Hobbit), and the American artist Jean-Michel Basquiat.
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There is even a photograph of Annis and Sting smiling as they cut a large (truthfully, disgusting-looking) Dune cake with a chocolate sandworm suggestively placed between fondant representations of Arrakis’ two moons.
One last premiere was held concurrently the night of the London event at the Dadeland Triple Theater in South Miami, Florida, to benefit the Coconut Grove Playhouse, where José Ferrer (“Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV”) was artistic director. Ferrer attended the public event alongside actor Brad Dourif (“Piter De Vries”), with tickets available for $20 for the film (with preshow champagne reception) or $50 for the film and a gala party with the stars. A critics’ screening and press conference with Ferrer and Dourif were also arranged, attended by John Sayles and Maggie Renzi, who had intended to screen The Brother from Another Planet in Cuba but were denied visas, so they settled for watching Dune. The reception by the press at the conference was reportedly icy.
During a London press conference in January 1985 (once writing was on the wall regarding Dune failing), Raffaella made a bold and not inaccurate prediction (via Space Voyager #14): “No, it won’t flop. It’s too original. It doesn’t look like anything that’s been on the screen before. I think it’s going to become a big cult movie.”
What follows are recollections of the cast and crew of Dune on their premiere experiences.
IAN WOOLF (Directors Guild of America [DGA] Trainee): I went to the premiere at the Kennedy Center in Washington with my wife and a friend of ours. After the two hours and 20 minutes, you could hear a pin drop in the theater. It’s like, “What the fuck was this?” It wasn’t good.
VIRGINIA MADSEN (Actor, “Princess Irulan”): I didn’t go to that one. I went to the premiere at the Chinese, or maybe it was Westwood? They handed out this little dictionary. I saw that and I thought, “Oh no, this movie is in trouble … you need a dictionary.”
ERIC SWENSON (Visual Effects, Motion Control): I don’t remember everybody being bummed or super excited. It was like, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.” Everybody hates their own stuff, and thinks they could do it better. I’m looking at Rambaldi’s creatures and the forced perspective miniatures. Some of those sets, like the Emperor’s palace, were still left over when I got there, and to see them up on the big screen was phenomenal.
ALICIA WITT (Actor, “Alia”): I loved it! I loved it. I also missed a lot of the scenes that were missing. It was amazing to have that first experience of having watched something being filmed and then seeing it made into a real-life movie. That’s always magical, and it never stops being magical. No matter how many times I’ve done it now, you watch a scene being filmed over and over again from all the different angles and then you see it turned into a story. I also remember being confused by the feedback that I heard after the movie that people didn’t understand it, because obviously I knew the story backward and forward and it made perfect sense to me, but I can see now how it might have been confusing to people who hadn’t already read the book.
VIRGINIA MADSEN (Actor, “Princess Irulan”): It was kind of hard for me to recover from the fact that my face was 25 feet tall in the theater. That was the coolest thing I could have ever dreamt of as a little girl. There it was. I might not have been Barbara Stanwyck, but there I was. To me, everything about the movie was perfect because I was so proud to be a part of something that big when I was such a sci-fi/fantasy/horror fan. It was very exciting and very beautiful. I wanted to see it again immediately. [Laughs.]
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PENELOPE SHAW SYLVESTER (Assistant Editor): They were all very complimentary at the Royal premiere in London. We all went out and partied afterward. I remember going into the ladies’ room, and Sting’s wife’s dress had come apart and she was in a panic. I said, “Don’t worry!” Being a Girl Scout, I had my safety pins; we pinned her up and back she went.
SEAN YOUNG (Actor, “Chani”): I was never at a screening when that movie came out because I was in Africa doing a movie called Baby: Secret of the Lost Legend. It was a long shoot. I never even saw the picture at all until 18 years later when I watched Dune on TV one day. I didn’t have a whole lot of thought about it, but I do remember the reshoot scene at the end that we shot day for night. I thought that was pretty good.
Young harbors no ill will toward the filmmakers for reducing her role of Chani almost to the point of haiku.
SEAN YOUNG (Actor, “Chani”): This is going to sound ridiculous, but I couldn’t have cared less. It didn’t matter to me. That’s show business. That’s what I mean about practicality. When you take stuff personally in show business, it makes life harder. How many people put their money in to make this movie? They paid you, right? They don’t owe you a storyline unless you put it in your contract: “I must have a storyline that takes up a half-hour of this picture at least.” Nobody will do that. If I could do one thing differently, it would be nice to appear in one of the gowns. Francesca got to wear nice gowns and she was also in the stillsuit, so she had both. Chani only had the stillsuit. That was it. Well, I had a little ropey see-through thing for the love scenes. It would have been nice to have a spiffed-up My Fair Lady moment. [Laughs.]
Molly Wryn did not discover that her major character of Harah—along with her entire storyline—had been almost completely excised from the finished film until she attended the premiere in Los Angeles.
MOLLY WRYN (Actor, “Harah”): Imagine? My heart crushed. Broke. It hurt. David had said to me not long before that, “You know, some of your stuff has been cut.” Something very gentle. I said, “Okay.” But I had no idea I was completely cut. They even shot me for the credits, when they show everybody’s face, but didn’t use it, which was sad. I remember how shocked I was. And then at the end, not even my face that they filmed. It took a while, they film from all directions and then pick out what they want to use and … gosh, I’m getting teary about it.
Harlan Ellison wrote articles at the time alleging that Frank Price of Universal thought Dune was “a dog” and was deliberately withholding it from the press.
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FRANK PRICE (President of Universal Pictures, 1983–86): Not a dog. It was not bad. David Lynch does good work. Harlan Ellison was always around with a chip on his shoulder.
PAUL M. SAMMON (Universal Pictures Publicity Executive): Prior to its release, there was a great deal of journalistic interest in Dune. Fan interest was somewhat split prior to the film’s opening, though. There was the inevitable skepticism of, “Isn’t this the same producer who gave us that mediocre remake of King Kong?” That was balanced by Frank Herbert’s very vocal enthusiasm about how faithfully David Lynch was “doing” his book. In fact, I included some footage of Frank heartily (and genuinely) endorsing Dune in my “Destination Dune” convention featurette, but then the release date kept being pushed back and audience/press interest began waning.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): They didn’t do any press screenings. That’s where all that anger came from the press. People started writing bad stuff because of that.
FRANK PRICE (President of Universal Pictures, 1983–86): Oh yeah. You don’t want to give critics time to destroy you. I had a picture at Columbia that is a good example, called Neighbors. It had John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. When we test-screened it, audiences hated it. I told the marketing head, “Get every theater you can get, every seat, because we’ve got to get everything out in a week.” We did great business for a week, and then it collapsed. Word of mouth destroyed it. But with Dune, you can’t get your money back in a week.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): They didn’t want anybody to knock it down before it was released, but not letting them see it had the opposite effect. Then the movie came out, and it just didn’t do well.
THOM MOUNT (President of Universal Pictures, 1976–83): The real problem was people didn’t show up. It’s hard to know. When we did The Deer Hunter, I was told by everybody repeatedly that the picture would be a total failure, that no one wants to see this long exegesis on our painful exit from Vietnam. Six Academy Awards and hundreds of millions of dollars in income later, they were wrong. But on the other hand, you’re talking to the guy who gave Xanadu the go-ahead. I know what it is to lose every dime.
Despite the wild reactions, much of the cast and crew weren’t blaming Lynch.
FREDERICK ELMES (Additional Unit Cinematographer): What’s on the screen isn’t really David’s film. It’s a different edit. It’s a different version of the film, and that made me very sad.
TERRI HARDIN (Stillsuit Fabrication, Stunt Double): People would say, “Oh, that movie was so terrible.” What you don’t realize is there’s like seven hours on the cutting room floor. Frank Herbert at the screening was devastated, so sad that he had to show us this movie. I think he had seen it before, but he was heartbroken by the movie. So many people were disappointed by the results. The De Laurentiises weren’t at our screening, mostly the builders and below-the-line people. It was supposed to be two films, and it became one, really short and really not very comprehensible.
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KENNETH GEORGE GODWIN (Production Documentarian): I knew there was stuff that would have made a stronger film. You’re 45 minutes into it before the Harkonnens attack, and mostly what we’ve got is just setting up all these royal families. You’ve got this huge exposition at the beginning, then a pretty rushed midsection. After he’s with the Fremen, they start to follow him and attack … That’s all compressed into a couple of montages. There was way more shot. Then you’ve got the ending, a big battle scene. A huge chunk of the meat of the story got ditched.
GILES MASTERS (Art Department): The stories of what David went through are well-documented, and it wasn’t the film that he wanted. It wasn’t the film most of us expected to see when we went to the premiere. Everybody was a little like, “Oh, what happened?”
LUIGI ROCCHETTI (Makeup Artist): In addition to the human side of Lynch, I admire his vision of things. The film could have been better. It’s a very complicated and difficult story to tell, and surely David’s version was better when it was uncut.
KENNETH GEORGE GODWIN (Production Documentarian): If David had been left alone with the editor, it would have been better, had more coherence. The emphasis was never so much on the story as on creating four different worlds with all their architecture, the sense that these places all have different histories, different societies. That kind of world-building appealed to him more than the story of this kid who becomes a god.
JANE JENKINS (Casting Director): I don’t know that I ever understood it any better than when I struggled through the book. I think that the movie was not as successful as David could have made it. He had a vision to do it in black and white. He didn’t want to do it in color. I think that it had the potential if David had been left entirely to his own devices to make it a stronger movie. There was a lot of interference in his version, but [he] was not a powerful enough director at that point in his career to say, “All right, everybody back off,” and have final cut. Even though I found Eraserhead very odd, to say the least, all his films have been very interesting. Dune is probably the least successful [of his films] because he didn’t have enough control to do what he wanted.
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): Look, it’s not an easy adaptation. If you have not read the book and you’re not familiar with the book, you’ll get lost easily. One of the mistakes—and I’ll take responsibility for that—was David would have probably been a lot more esoteric, but I was concerned about people being able to follow the story. Sometimes I was pushing to explain things, to remain close to the book, to be faithful to the book. I’m not sure that was always the right decision to make.
Excerpt adapted from A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History by Max Evry. Published by arrangement with 1984 Publishing LLC. Copyright © 2023 Max Evry.
