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Throughout the 1970s, the author Frank Herbert saw many producers and directors take stabs at bringing his Hugo- and Nebula Award-winning sci-fi novel Dune to the screen: Roger Corman (Battle Beyond the Stars), Arthur P. Jacobs (Planet of the Apes), Alejandro Jodorowsky (El Topo), Ridley Scott (Alien). Director David Lynch finally made it happen in 1984. In the author’s archives at California State University, Fullerton, while unearthing Lynch’s long-lost Dune Messiah script, I discovered a copy of Herbert’s own attempt at a screenplay adaptation of his original 1965 masterwork, a 321-page behemoth which even the author admitted was too unwieldy to make a viable motion picture.
Reading it now, as Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Two is set to conquer the worm of the worldwide box office, it is interesting to see the parallels between Herbert’s and Villeneuve’s visions, as well as the struggles that even the originator of this expansive fictional universe had in ushering it to the screen. After seeing both parts of Villeneuve’s Dune adaptation and interviewing the director, as well as having written a chronicle of Lynch’s version titled A Masterpiece in Disarray, it is obvious to me that Herbert possessed neither Villeneuve’s penchant for precision storytelling nor Lynch’s gift of glorious visual imagination.
After the Italian producer Dino De Laurentiis acquired the rights to Dune in 1976, he hired Herbert himself to pen the screenplay. Written on an early home computer with 10.5 million bytes of memory, Herbert’s work included treatments and rough outlines of what was meant to be—like Villeneuve’s contemporary adaptation—a two-part experience, at De Laurentiis’ initial suggestion.
“Paul’s story falls neatly into two packages,” Herbert told Starlog magazine in 1979. “I have no objection to breaking it up if that’s the way we have to do it to tell the story … How long a film can you make and still get the investment out of it? That’s the real question.”
According to the plan, the first film would end with Paul’s acceptance as leader of the Fremen, and the second would deal with Paul’s battle against the Emperor. This diverges from Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One, which ends with Paul being accepted by the Fremen after having defeated Jamis in combat, but which leaves the part where he fully joins their resistance for Part Two. This second film actually makes a meal out of Paul’s reluctance to take advantage of the false Bene Gesserit prophecy and embrace his perception as a messiah, with the character not truly reaching for the brass ring until the third act, when he takes full leadership over the Fremen to destroy the forces of the Harkonnens and the Emperor.
In the undated Dune screenplay by Herbert, each half of the script features a cast of characters right at the top, both listing around 20 major speaking parts.
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As with the book, the script begins with the gom jabbar scene between Paul Atreides and Reverend Mother Mohiam, except in this version the Atreides have already made their trek from Caladan to Arrakis. Right after Paul passes his test with the box, the four wise men of Thufir, Yueh, Gurney, and Duncan present Duke Leto with a wounded Fremen and three others assassinated by the Harkonnens.
HAWAT
Assassins! They trapped three of these poor fellows over there beyond the cliffs.
HALLECK
There was a worm. We had to run for it.
You can see the problem: Right off the bat, Herbert is using dialog to discuss action scenes that would be far better to see than to hear about. He’s also introducing concepts left and right (the Bene Gesserit order, the Kwizatz Haderach, sandworms, Fremen, Harkonnens) without giving any context to them.
As in Lynch’s film (and the book itself), we get those lovely inner-thought voiceovers. Duke Leto (Oscar Isaac in Part One) thinks to himself, “We’ve been on this damned planet only two days and already the Harkonnens are at work!” Often these VOs contain psychic conversations between two characters, a technique Villeneuve uses several times in Part Two, as between Feyd (Austin Butler) and Lady Fenring (Léa Seydoux).
The stage-play-esque stretches of barefaced expository dialog continue unabated when Herbert’s script introduces the world of the hedonist Harkonnens, who covet a globe of Arrakis made out of jewels in their Guild Ship decorated with pornographic paintings. Introducing a character not in Villeneuve’s film, they’re shown torturing Wanna with an “agony box” as Feyd essentially videotapes it for Wanna’s husband, Doctor Yueh, so he will do their bidding against House Atreides. She calls them “monsters,” with the Baron articulating, “Of course we are, my dear Wanna. We will do anything to regain our planet and its precious spice … We must rule Dune and the spice. We all need the spice. It lengthens our lives and you Bene Gesserit witches need the spice for your dreams.” Not quite Paddy Chayefsky.
Stilgar arrives at Leto’s Great Hall with a whole contingent (including Mapes, Kynes, and Chani) to extract the water from the dead Fremen using a deathstill. Paul tells his mother, Jessica, that he recognizes Chani from his dreams, prophesying that she will bind him to the Fremen. Stilgar gifts his people’s water to Paul, whom he instantly recognizes as the Mahdi (the messiah of legend, though it is never explained beyond that he may be “the Shortening of the Way”). Duncan joins the Fremen as an olive branch, and Mapes joins the Atreides as a house servant. On her way out of the hall, Chani gives one of those backward glances to Paul that Zendaya does so frequently in the new movies.
After Wanna unexpectedly dies during torture, the Baron plans to use Yueh to kill Paul with a hunter seeker while preserving Yueh’s wife in a “crystallis” (a crystal case). Count Fenring (who will lead the Emperor’s Sardaukar to attack the Atreides disguised in Harkonnen uniforms) arrives at the Guild Ship. Disgusted by Harkonnens and acting only in the Emperor’s interest, he takes the recording of Wanna’s torture to hand off to Yueh.
On Arrakis, the Duke’s remaining soldiers and luggage (including atomics) are delivered, with Gurney playing accompaniment on his Baliset. Herbert was reportedly insistent that the playing of this instrument appear in the film, something which was filmed but cut from Lynch’s film and Villeneuve’s first Dune, but which finally appears in Part Two. Herbert then includes the scene where Duke Leto rescues the carryall crew from the worm, almost beat-for-beat like Lynch’s, though Villeneuve gave the scene more juice by having Paul be nearly killed. One great moment acknowledges the injustice served to the Fremen as two of them (guides) try to board Leto’s ornithopter:
KYNES (VO)
We have no room for them.
PAUL (VO)
There’s a capsule history of the Fremen!
We get a cool scene of Duncan fighting literally back-to-back with Stilgar against a squad of Harkonnen amid the dunes. Stilgar chastises Duncan for using his shield (it attracts the worm), then they capture a Harkonnen who warns them there is a traitor in their midst. The scene where Mapes cuts herself to show fealty to Jessica is there, as is the scene of Paul and Gurney practice-fighting (although sans shields) and the hunter seeker’s attack on Paul.
Because Herbert cannot let much go, we get the banquet scene that has been left out of both theatrical adaptations of Dune because the political machinations it reflects are not essential to the plot (Leto is going to die soon anyway). The banquet winds up eating up nearly 25 pages of the script before it is interrupted by Count Fenring’s attack on the Atreides fortress with the aid of Yueh lowering the shields.
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The beats of the attack are similar to both movies. The scene crescendos with a moment of Yueh standing before burning palm trees, an image Villeneuve glommed on to for his. Piter gives the Baron a more plausible excuse for sending Paul and Jessica to the desert to die rather than simply killing them, noting that a Truthsayer may question him later. Duncan flees to a safe house in the desert, while Thufir is captured. Paul and Jessica are flown to the desert by a henchman named Czigo, who is deaf and therefore less susceptible to Jessica’s use of the Voice, but Paul is able to take him out with a knife.
Piter dispatches Yueh (who mumbles “You … are … so … predictable!”), then Leto kills Piter—not the intended Baron—after the Baron interrogates him for several unnecessary pages on the whereabouts of his atomics stockpile. “They’re dangerous even when you think they’re beaten,” Fenring tells the Baron in the aftermath of Leto’s final attack. “They’re magnificent.”
In Kynes’ desert sanctuary, Duncan is briefly reunited with Paul and Jessica. Paul, now technically the rightful Duke of Arrakis, has a pointless back-and-forth with Kynes over the imperial ecologist’s loyalties and some stuff we already know (the Emperor has sided with the Harkonnens). Then the station is attacked by Sardaukar, who quickly dispatch Duncan, as opposed to the glorious death that Jason Momoa’s Duncan gets in Dune: Part One. Paul and Jessica fly off in an ornithopter and evade their pursuers by flying into a storm.
Feyd administers poison to Thufir in order to control him, while Kynes dramatically dies in the desert, eaten by a worm. After finding fruit growing in the desert, Paul suspects he is close to the Fremen sietch. A group of Fremen led by Stilgar and Jamis discover the mother/son pair, with Jamis arguing for their death and Stilgar countering that the boy may be the Lisan al Gaib (messiah). It will be another 15 pages of wanderings and conversations until the fight between Paul and Jamis is invoked right before a blocked out “INTERMISSION” to signify the end of Part One and the start of Part Two.
Both the 1984 (extended version) and 2021 films choose to have Jamis fight immediately after the Fremen are introduced, so Herbert’s decision to start Part Two with the fight is bizarre since it deprives Part One of any real climax or hint of what’s to come. Another seven brutal pages of intertribal bickering occur before the amtal rule is put into effect so Paul and Jamis can start swinging blades. The flashback voice of Gurney Halleck’s training aids Paul during the drawn-out battle (“Keep your mind on the knife, not on the hand”), and after Paul dispatches Jamis there’s a verbal tête-à-tête with his mom, before (as in Lynch’s original cut) he “gives water to the dead” (cries over Jamis).
One major change finds Mohiam instead of Ramallo acting as Reverend Mother to the Fremen, with Mohiam crying out “Abomination!” upon seeing Jessica is pregnant. The Water of Life ceremony is held, with Jessica experiencing vivid flashbacks to Mohiam’s teachings when she was a child. She awakens to find Mohiam dead and her fetus now infused with the sacred water she drank. As in Part Two, there are several pages of the fetus in conversation with Jessica: “Mother! What have you done to me? I must be born immediately! Immediately! Before I’m even born, you give me every memory of that old witch—my grandmother!” The fetus then reveals Jessica’s buried fetal memory of her own father standing over her at birth … Baron Harkonnen. “Call him daddy,” the fetus implores.
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Alia is prematurely born, and the tribe (including Paul) drinks the water transmuted by Jessica. Villeneuve’s decision to not include Alia’s birth at all in his Part Two stemmed from a desire to ramp up the timeline of the second half of the story from taking place over years to mere months.
“Momentum” is the reason Villeneuve gave for the compression when I interviewed him for Den of Geek: “Pressure to feel that the character was running against time, and that the world was eroding under his feet quickly. To give him less time to have a grip on reality, and create more feelings of danger around him. He will not have the time to install himself in the culture; he will not have time to absolutely gain the trust of all the Fremen. I did that just to put Paul more on edge.”
In Herbert’s script, Alia is born with the ability to speak, an effect that would have been awkward only if it were filmed in the late ’70s or early ’80s: “All of our ancestors right here in our heads! Do you like your father?” Alia then derisively witnesses a Fremen spice orgy of clapping, singing, drinking, and coupling. Paul and Chani strip off their stillsuits and go at it, with the Fremen egging them on: “There they go! Make us another Fremen!” It’s hard to imagine a weirder version of Dune than David Lynch’s, but Herbert found a way.
The Baron once again assumes control of Arrakis, with Feyd acting as governor. The character of the Baron’s other nephew, Rabban, has been deleted. Dave Bautista, it seems, lucked out with Villeneuve as his filmmaker.
We then flash forward three years as the Fremen ambush a group of Harkonnens, with a 3-year-old kid Alia egging them on with chants invoking her brother’s tribal name: “Muad'Dib! Muad'Dib!” Paul (from here on exclusively referred to as Muad'Dib) now has blue eyes from spice intake, and is described as having “a lean hardness about him … The desert has stripped him down to whipcord muscles.” Fremen attacks have slowed spice production to a crawl; the Emperor has begun to take notice. Paul and Jessica argue over whether or not to use the Atreides’ atomics stockpile, which could incur the wrath of other Great Houses, while a giggling Alia earns Jessica’s scorn by frequently refusing to reveal certain things with her catchphrase, “Don’t ask me. I’m an Abomination.”
As sampled by Lynch for his abandoned Dune Messiah script, there is the scene from the book where Chani fights to the death all Fremen who wish to challenge Paul’s rule. “Every challenger must know he could be killed by Muad'Dib’s woman,” she tells Paul, who calls that a “very Bene Gesserit way of thinking, my love.”
Meanwhile, the Baron and Fenring confront Feyd (whom they catch mid-tryst with some floozy) about the slowing spice production. Fenring proposes that they join forces with other Great Houses of the Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles (CHOAM) to genocide the Fremen entirely.
Now it’s time for Paul to conquer the sandworm. There is a storm so powerful that it rolls, then disintegrates, a human skull before it passes, allowing Paul and his Fedaykin death troops to set up camp and wait for a Maker (a really big worm) to show up. One does, and Paul climbs it, and is eventually joined by the others, officially indoctrinating him as a Fremen. This triumph is immediately followed by the Emperor landing hundreds of Guild ships, containing thousands of Sardaukar, in Arrakeen. Reverend Mother Mohiam has also been restored to life.
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“Now, we shut down the spice harvest completely,” Muad'Dib tells himself in VO. “They must be made to know who really rules on Dune!”
In a scene almost identical to its counterpart in Part Two, the Fremen attack a crawler spice harvester run by Gurney Halleck, now a smuggler. However, we don’t get the classic “You young pup!” line as Paul and Gurney reunite. Having now fought beside them, Gurney will teach the Fremen how to kill Sardaukar. Paul then leads a group into Arrakeen to get recon, disguising themselves as “stupid townies” (an actual line from the script). They watch a gladiator fight between Feyd and an Atreides fighter named Padrail, which lasts for 10 pages. Mohiam winds up recognizing Paul, who has to fade into the crowd to escape.
When Gurney reunites with Jessica, he still believes that she was the traitor who took down House Atreides, but Paul convinces him that it was Yueh, in a scene utterly devoid of merit. Paul then decides it’s time for him to drink the Water of Life, even though “a man has never changed the poison.” Paul has visions of the future (Alia with a bloody knife, himself fighting Feyd), and, as in the new Part Two, he lays there in a state of living death for many days. He then asks to drink more Water of Life, and awakens with all the memories of his forefathers: “I have seen all the paths which we could follow … and one path which I will never take.”
Just as the Emperor and the Baron learn from messenger Alia that an Atreides Duke is still alive (“Your assassins failed, grandfather. My brother is alive and hungry for your blood.”), Paul unleashes the power of atomics as Jessica wails “No-o-o-o-o … !” An opening in the canyon ushers in the storm while Alia kills her grandfather, the Baron, with a gom jabbar (it’s Paul who kills him in Dune: Part Two). A massive and short battle ensues, with sandworms defeating Sardaukar and Paul bringing the Emperor to his “day of reckoning.”
Inside the residency, we get one long final confrontation between Paul and the Emperor that hits all the beats of the book, including the knife fight to the death with Feyd. Over 30 pages, we get a dump truck of exposition that Villeneuve largely avoids in his film. “Discipline is required to be as economic as possible, specifically with dialog,” he told me—a lesson well learned.
Of course, Herbert couldn’t help himself in including his famous final line of Jessica’s: “We, Chani—we who carry the name of concubine—history will call us wives.” Lynch shot this line for his film but wisely left it on the cutting-room floor. Villeneuve never considered putting it in his film, where Chani and Jessica have roles far more complex than what Herbert imagined.
“It’s a book that embraced a fatal world where the rules are medieval,” says Villeneuve, who grew up in a feminist household. “In a book you have time to explain, but in a movie, where the audience is driven by emotions, you have to be careful with the ideas you’re bringing.”
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After the script was poorly received by De Laurentiis, Herbert took one last stab at trying to pull it in a less lengthy/slavish direction. From his second home in Hana, Hawaii, he wrote a letter to De Laurentiis stating, “I believe I have found a way to condense it into the required length … It must be the story of Paul’s transformation into the Messiah of the Fremen, and his use of this to restore his family’s power … The key characters are now Paul and his mother—all others are supporting until Chani moves into a more important role—three characters in all, six supporting."
This included giving the functions of both Mentat and Gurney Halleck to Duncan Idaho, introducing Chani early in the place of Mapes, combining Liet Kynes with Stilgar, and making Reverend Mother Mohiam also a stand-in for the Fremen priestess Ramallo. The Emperor would be seen as only a projection (not unlike Emperor Palpatine in The Empire Strikes Back), while Princess Irulan would be in cahoots with Feyd-Rautha.
"We should be able to do it in ninety minutes," signed off Herbert.
Despite this optimistic proposal, De Laurentiis ultimately decided to take the author out of the equation. In January of 1980, newly installed director Ridley Scott (to whom the copy of the script I read is addressed) appeased Herbert by saying he liked eight scenes from the author’s script. However, Scott ultimately chose writer Rudy Wurlitzer (Two-Lane Blacktop) to work on a very different (ultimately doomed) version, which at one point included incest between Paul and Jessica. For his own part, Herbert was big enough to admit his shortcomings—and that film is the realm of filmmakers for a reason.
“I did a screenplay, and it was awful,” Herbert stated in a 1983 Waldentapes interview. “It was too long. It lacked the proper visual metaphors. I was too close to the book to be able to see it as a film.”
The two theatrical movie versions of Dune that exist now are a study in contrasts. Lynch’s is arguably more faithful to the word, despite ignoring the author’s central theme of distrusting charismatic leaders. Villeneuve’s two-parter leans in to that theme—expanding on how fanaticism builds to ultimate universal catastrophe—yet it plays faster and looser with characters, dialog, and the timeline of events. If you prefer one over the other—or, heaven forbid, think neither adaptation lives up to the novel—just remember that we Fremen have a saying: “Making movies is hard.”
