Updated:
Sep 27, 2023 11:20 pm
Posted:
Sep 27, 2023 11:17 pm
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:
“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.
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