Jodorowsky's Dune Uncovered

Summary

The most obvious changes between the "fake" script and the Moebius storyboards are the beginning and the end.

The first 19 scenes of the Dog-beings and the history of humanity aren't in the final set of storyboards, and they could have been removed for a number of reasons - cost, pacing or length.

The Dog-beings would have been expensive scenes to film, requiring many special effects, and the "History of Humanity" would have needed lots of sets, costumes and extras for a series of brief scenes. These scenes would have also slowed the film down, delaying the introduction of the main characters and plot.

The ending has the biggest change, with Paul no longer surviving in the Moebius storyboards and, replacing the epilogue, the planet Dune becoming a green paradise and moving through the universe!

The storyboards also appear to have removed a lot of the nudity and sexual content of the script, although the violence depicted in Moebius's drawings is pretty graphic in places - guts on spears, limbs cuts off etc.

The drawings often show much more cinematic sequences than those written in the script. It is unclear if these visual flourishes came from Jodorowsky or Moebius, or, more likely, both.

Otherwise the script and storyboards seems to match up pretty well. Some slight reordering of scenes, and some seem to have been cut or restructured, given the known scene numbers of the storyboards and those in the script.

While the script clearly is strongly tied to the storyboards, the "idiot drawing" are more puzzling. What is revealing though is that in a deleted scene on the Jodorowsky's Dune documentary we see two early costume sketches that don't appear to be in the style of any of the known artists who worked on Dune, but do bear a striking resemblance to the artwork of the illustrations that appear in the script.

Could these sketches be the missing-link between the script illustration and the Moebius storyboards? Unfortunately, no-one seems to know who did these costume sketches, but they do show that there were some very early artwork done on the project that appears to predate Moebius's involvement.

And so we draw to the close of "Jodorowsky's Dune - Uncovered". We hope you have enjoyed this exclusive look into the script and the storyboards. Please let us know your thoughts about script and illustrations - fake or legit?