These days, the making-of books about our favorite movies and TV shows are often not much more than glorified press notes, studio-sanctioned marketing beats that don’t come close to telling the real story of what happened behind the scenes.
But every once in a while, a no-holds-barred account still surfaces. And that’s where the new book about David Lynch’s Dune comes in, which at 560 pages seemingly has the scoop on everything that went into making the infamous sci-fi spectacle that Lynch still regards as a painful experience. Though infamous might not be the right word, as it turns out…
Written by Max Evry, who happens to also be a buddy of mine, A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune - An Oral History features some 50 interviews in total, many of them new and with people who worked on all facets of the film. (There’s even a “legacy” section that features modern-day critics looking back at the 1984 picture, including a few words from me, so consider this a disclaimer!)
I spoke to Evry recently about the two years he spent researching and writing the book, and he dropped a bunch of stories about the making of Lynch’s opus during that chat. You can find the full discussion on my podcast, but today we’ve got an exclusive excerpt from A Masterpiece in Disarray which focuses on whether or not Lynch would ever return to do a director’s cut of the film.
“The sad part is Lynch and [producer] Raffaella De Laurentiis were game to do a proper recut, and they had so much footage,” Evry told me. “The original assembly cut that was made in Mexico [where the film was shot] was four hours and 20 minutes roughly, and that was without effect shots. So it may have been closer to five hours once all the effect shots were thrown in.”
The film Lynch set out to make is not the film that was released in 1984, but the filmmaker talked about a director’s cut seriously as late as 1986 and 1987. Still, it wasn’t to be.
“When it came time to put up or shut up, Universal made the wrong choice,” says Evry. “It was the same wing of Universal that did bastardized cuts of The Thing and Scarface.”
Anyone who remembers the TV edits of those films can understand why Lynch wound up taking his name off the broadcast version of Dune (with good old Alan Smithee subbing in for the helmer). Read on for the excerpt from A Masterpiece in Disarray:
For years after Dune, David Lynch told the press he wished to go back and take a second pass to restore the sci-fi epic to its proper length. Although a three-hour extended cut was manufactured by Universal Television, it was without Lynch and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis’s involvement.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): Universal asked him to do the extended cut while he was working on Wild at Heart or whatever. He said, “I would really love to do that. Can you wait for me?” They said, “No. We’ll go ahead and do it anyway.”
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): They contacted me and I spoke to David, and David was willing to do it. He said he would do it, and then they didn’t want to pay him. Anything. He said, “Then I’m not going to do it.” Then none of us did it. None of us got involved, and they did their own thing.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): He said, “Then you take my name off the movie.” That’s why it says, “Directed by Alan Smithee.”
Lynch said, “Then you take my name off the movie.”
This was in 1988 before the advent of DVD and even before the idea of a director’s cut was popularized with the release of Ridley Scott’s original cut of Blade Runner. That failed sci-fi film got a whole new lease on life with its Director’s Cut and subsequent Final Cut, and is now considered a masterpiece far removed from its poor reception in 1982. Would a similar reappraisal have met a David Lynch director’s cut of Dune? One has to wonder if Universal’s shortsightedness left millions of dollars on the table.
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): Imagine today, right? It was very unwise on their part, but that’s what they did. I’ve never seen it. There was a department at Universal that used to do that. They used to take movies and recut them. David was asked, and David said yes. We all said yes, that we would work on it, but then they didn’t want to pay David any money and then—rightfully so—David said, “Well, then I don’t want to do it.” Because it is a lot of work.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): I think David should go back and do it. Or at least someone intimately familiar with his intentions . . . something not done on the “restored” version for TV, which was a total travesty.
FREDERICK ELMES (Additional Unit Cinematographer): I hope so. I do. You want to set it right. It so misses the point.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): Sadly, the decision to cut the film came before all of the VFX had been completed, so there would have to be recreations of those, but with CGI, that would be relatively easy now. Another problem would be finding all of the bits and pieces. I have heard they have been scattered far and wide.
MOLLY WRYN (Actor, “Harah”): I was reminded by someone that there was a fire at Universal and a lot of film got destroyed. I don’t really know the details.
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): I don’t know about the footage. I never even thought of asking. I can find out.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): David shot a film that was to be about 45 minutes longer than the version released. Most of what got left in was exposition. When storytelling and character development were cut, the movie lost much of its core and continuity. But finding all of those missing pieces would probably entail a monumental search.
BOB RINGWOOD (Costume Designer): I love the movie it could have been. If David ever gets around to doing a recut, I think that will possibly be good, but I suspect that a lot of the footage is lost. We shot enough footage to do a six-hour film. I think he’s talking about possibly recutting it. It’s very painful for David—he doesn’t even like talking about it. If the footage survives, he could cut a better film. He’s more experienced now. I do wish he would do it.
MOLLY WRYN (Actor, “Harah”): That makes me sad: I’m in the one film David hates that he did, because it’s not his. That’s the one I’m in, but I have no regrets. I loved Harah; I just wish I had more scenes. It was a shock to have been cut. It really was. I wish he’d re-edit it. I love that you told me David’s thinking about it. That means everything to me. I would like David to have some pride in it and redo it and put his name back on it. That would mean a lot to me personally. He should do it for posterity, for history. He put his life into that.
MARY VOGT (Costume Assistant): It’s too bad David had a bad experience with the end product of Dune because there’s a great movie there. He brought a really interesting sensibility to it that you see in German expressionist films, like a UFA film.
“The ongoing perception of how things went down was that Dino De Laurentiis took final cut away from David Lynch and destroyed the film in the editing process,” Evry told me. “And there's so much more nuance to it than that. And a lot of that had to do with the involvement of Sid Sheinberg, who was the chairman of MCA at the time.”
It is sort of a conspiracy of everybody involved, including David's inexperience with films like this.
Sheinberg was a powerful Hollywood figure for many years, but he also had a reputation for re-cutting films that he deemed were in trouble (Ridley Scott’s Legend and Terri Gilliam's Brazil also ran into problems with Sheinberg).
“If you read the book, you'll find you can't 100% put the blame on him either,” says Evry. “It is sort of a conspiracy of everybody involved, including David's inexperience with films like this, and the fact that he didn't have the leverage at the time to demand what he needed to demand to keep it on track, in terms of being aligned with his vision. So I think that people who read A Masterpiece in Disarray are going to find, it does talk about Herbert, it does talk about Lynch, but it is on the whole a story of how a big-budget movie is made, and then later unmade. And I think it'll be fascinating for people even who aren't completely interested in Dune, or aren't even interested in Lynch, but people who are really fascinated by the filmmaking process.”
You can pick up A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune - An Oral History right now.
Continue reading...
But every once in a while, a no-holds-barred account still surfaces. And that’s where the new book about David Lynch’s Dune comes in, which at 560 pages seemingly has the scoop on everything that went into making the infamous sci-fi spectacle that Lynch still regards as a painful experience. Though infamous might not be the right word, as it turns out…
Written by Max Evry, who happens to also be a buddy of mine, A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune - An Oral History features some 50 interviews in total, many of them new and with people who worked on all facets of the film. (There’s even a “legacy” section that features modern-day critics looking back at the 1984 picture, including a few words from me, so consider this a disclaimer!)
I spoke to Evry recently about the two years he spent researching and writing the book, and he dropped a bunch of stories about the making of Lynch’s opus during that chat. You can find the full discussion on my podcast, but today we’ve got an exclusive excerpt from A Masterpiece in Disarray which focuses on whether or not Lynch would ever return to do a director’s cut of the film.
“The sad part is Lynch and [producer] Raffaella De Laurentiis were game to do a proper recut, and they had so much footage,” Evry told me. “The original assembly cut that was made in Mexico [where the film was shot] was four hours and 20 minutes roughly, and that was without effect shots. So it may have been closer to five hours once all the effect shots were thrown in.”
The film Lynch set out to make is not the film that was released in 1984, but the filmmaker talked about a director’s cut seriously as late as 1986 and 1987. Still, it wasn’t to be.
“When it came time to put up or shut up, Universal made the wrong choice,” says Evry. “It was the same wing of Universal that did bastardized cuts of The Thing and Scarface.”
Anyone who remembers the TV edits of those films can understand why Lynch wound up taking his name off the broadcast version of Dune (with good old Alan Smithee subbing in for the helmer). Read on for the excerpt from A Masterpiece in Disarray:
A Masterpiece in Disarray – The David Lynch Director’s Cut
For years after Dune, David Lynch told the press he wished to go back and take a second pass to restore the sci-fi epic to its proper length. Although a three-hour extended cut was manufactured by Universal Television, it was without Lynch and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis’s involvement.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): Universal asked him to do the extended cut while he was working on Wild at Heart or whatever. He said, “I would really love to do that. Can you wait for me?” They said, “No. We’ll go ahead and do it anyway.”
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): They contacted me and I spoke to David, and David was willing to do it. He said he would do it, and then they didn’t want to pay him. Anything. He said, “Then I’m not going to do it.” Then none of us did it. None of us got involved, and they did their own thing.
CRAIG CAMPOBASSO (Production Office Assistant): He said, “Then you take my name off the movie.” That’s why it says, “Directed by Alan Smithee.”
Lynch said, “Then you take my name off the movie.”
This was in 1988 before the advent of DVD and even before the idea of a director’s cut was popularized with the release of Ridley Scott’s original cut of Blade Runner. That failed sci-fi film got a whole new lease on life with its Director’s Cut and subsequent Final Cut, and is now considered a masterpiece far removed from its poor reception in 1982. Would a similar reappraisal have met a David Lynch director’s cut of Dune? One has to wonder if Universal’s shortsightedness left millions of dollars on the table.
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): Imagine today, right? It was very unwise on their part, but that’s what they did. I’ve never seen it. There was a department at Universal that used to do that. They used to take movies and recut them. David was asked, and David said yes. We all said yes, that we would work on it, but then they didn’t want to pay David any money and then—rightfully so—David said, “Well, then I don’t want to do it.” Because it is a lot of work.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): I think David should go back and do it. Or at least someone intimately familiar with his intentions . . . something not done on the “restored” version for TV, which was a total travesty.
FREDERICK ELMES (Additional Unit Cinematographer): I hope so. I do. You want to set it right. It so misses the point.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): Sadly, the decision to cut the film came before all of the VFX had been completed, so there would have to be recreations of those, but with CGI, that would be relatively easy now. Another problem would be finding all of the bits and pieces. I have heard they have been scattered far and wide.
MOLLY WRYN (Actor, “Harah”): I was reminded by someone that there was a fire at Universal and a lot of film got destroyed. I don’t really know the details.
RAFFAELLA DE LAURENTIIS (Producer): I don’t know about the footage. I never even thought of asking. I can find out.
RON MILLER (Concept Artist): David shot a film that was to be about 45 minutes longer than the version released. Most of what got left in was exposition. When storytelling and character development were cut, the movie lost much of its core and continuity. But finding all of those missing pieces would probably entail a monumental search.
BOB RINGWOOD (Costume Designer): I love the movie it could have been. If David ever gets around to doing a recut, I think that will possibly be good, but I suspect that a lot of the footage is lost. We shot enough footage to do a six-hour film. I think he’s talking about possibly recutting it. It’s very painful for David—he doesn’t even like talking about it. If the footage survives, he could cut a better film. He’s more experienced now. I do wish he would do it.
MOLLY WRYN (Actor, “Harah”): That makes me sad: I’m in the one film David hates that he did, because it’s not his. That’s the one I’m in, but I have no regrets. I loved Harah; I just wish I had more scenes. It was a shock to have been cut. It really was. I wish he’d re-edit it. I love that you told me David’s thinking about it. That means everything to me. I would like David to have some pride in it and redo it and put his name back on it. That would mean a lot to me personally. He should do it for posterity, for history. He put his life into that.
MARY VOGT (Costume Assistant): It’s too bad David had a bad experience with the end product of Dune because there’s a great movie there. He brought a really interesting sensibility to it that you see in German expressionist films, like a UFA film.
“The ongoing perception of how things went down was that Dino De Laurentiis took final cut away from David Lynch and destroyed the film in the editing process,” Evry told me. “And there's so much more nuance to it than that. And a lot of that had to do with the involvement of Sid Sheinberg, who was the chairman of MCA at the time.”
It is sort of a conspiracy of everybody involved, including David's inexperience with films like this.
Sheinberg was a powerful Hollywood figure for many years, but he also had a reputation for re-cutting films that he deemed were in trouble (Ridley Scott’s Legend and Terri Gilliam's Brazil also ran into problems with Sheinberg).
“If you read the book, you'll find you can't 100% put the blame on him either,” says Evry. “It is sort of a conspiracy of everybody involved, including David's inexperience with films like this, and the fact that he didn't have the leverage at the time to demand what he needed to demand to keep it on track, in terms of being aligned with his vision. So I think that people who read A Masterpiece in Disarray are going to find, it does talk about Herbert, it does talk about Lynch, but it is on the whole a story of how a big-budget movie is made, and then later unmade. And I think it'll be fascinating for people even who aren't completely interested in Dune, or aren't even interested in Lynch, but people who are really fascinated by the filmmaking process.”
You can pick up A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune - An Oral History right now.
Continue reading...