The greatest film you’ve never seen

Legend has it it’s the best film you’ve never seen. It is, at least, the most ambitious film you’ve never seen, with an estimated runtime of 10 hours, revolutionary visual effects and production design, and mystic humanism the likes of which our most liberal modern blockbuster couldn’t project in its wildest moment.

The closest you can come to this non-existent masterpiece is “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” a 90-minute documentary now showing at the Merrill’s Roxy Cinema in Burlington. The masterpiece in question is Spanish surrealist filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky’s profoundly liberal adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel, “Dune.”

Herbert’s novel, published in 1965, reads like historical fiction, an epic saga of intergalactic royal houses in the far future warring over spice mines on a desert planet. A former journalist and ecologist, Herbert used the novel like a spear to puncture the idea of the hero, a concept he found dehumanizing, while turning the premise of territorial conflict over “spice mining” into an easy allegory for our oil trade.

The result is one of the best-selling and most acclaimed science fiction novels ever, which explains the appeal of a cinematic adaptation. But, at more than 400 pages of intricate details covering three years of story, reworking “Dune” into a compelling film is like safecracking.

It’s been tried twice: in film in 1984, in the form of a 137-minute movie directed by David Lynch and starring Kyle MacLachlan, Sean Young and Sting (and butchered by its producers); and on television in 2000, in the form of a four-hour mini-series co-starring William Hurt. The vocal majority hasn’t been satisfied by either adaptation.

But they would have been stunned silent by Jodorowsky’s “Dune.”

Jodorowsky mounted the project in 1974, without ever having read Herbert’s novel. In this documentary, Jodorowsky says adaptation is like marriage.

“You cannot leave the novel pure — you must rrrrape the novel,” he says, rolling the “r.”

At the time, Jodorowsky was fresh off two increasingly successful films, the surreal western “El Topo” and the trippy mystic experience “The Holy Mountain,” which was financed with help from George Harrison and John Lennon.

Jodorowsky envisioned “Dune” as a titanic messiah tale that would revolutionize film, the polar opposite of Herbert’s anti-hero novel.

In the documentary, Jodorowsky explains that he has a “yes” stance on life: something succeeds, yes! Something fails, yes! He said yes! to everything in making “Dune,” questing to assemble a cast and crew of — as he put it — “spiritual warriors,” with imaginations in tune.

Among his spiritual warriors were Dan O’Bannon for visual effects, the man who did the loony visuals for John Carpenter’s sci-fi comedy “Dark Star” (1974) and would go on to write “Alien” (1979); comic book artist Moebius, who later designed “Blade Runner” (1982); Chris Foss, the sole down-to-earth figure in the documentary, an easygoing British artist and former architect known for his sci-fi paperback covers; and infamously eccentric German artist H. R. Giger, who went on to design “Alien” (and who died this week at age 74).

They describe Jodorowsky as a man on a quest, not delusional but possessed by imagination, as evidenced by his cast: Salvador Dalí , who Jodorowsky agreed to pay $100,000 an hour; Mick Jagger, who would have played the role inhabited by Sting in the 1984 film; Orson Welles, who agreed to play the film’s villain after Jodorowsky told him he would hire Welles’ favorite chefs to cater the set; and Jodorowsky’s own son, who was trained by a renowned martial artist to play the film’s protagonist.

It’s not hard to see the project stalling. Short a few million dollars, Jodorowsky and crew sought funding from American studios; incredibly, Disney came closest to putting up the money, despite almost incessant scenes of intense sexuality, decapitations, torture and drug use. All the American studios were impressed, but the film was too unusual, and they passed, killing Jodorowsky’s “Dune.”

Until this documentary. The documentarians have wisely let the cast and crew speak for themselves, inserting production art, script excerpts and Moebius’ extensive storyboards between interviews and setting it all to a pounding, vibrating and psychedelic synth soundtrack (Jodorowsky hoped Pink Floyd would compose the film’s score).

In one example of great documentary filmmaking, Jodorowsky, incredibly animated and youthful at 88, pauses during a spiritual tirade to interact with his cat, cooing to the kitty before resuming his speech as if nothing had happened.

The documentary slips at the end by suggesting, via montage, that Jodorowsky’s “Dune” influenced everything that followed, from “Star Wars” to more recent sci-fi. Bull. Jodorowsky, like any surrealist, deals chiefly in archetypes, which have been present in human mythology for as long as there’s been human mythology — no wonder subsequent mythology shares similarities.

That ending, in fact, obscures the tragedy of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” which is that it was never allowed to have an effect. But watching this documentary, you get the picture.

Thomas Benton is a journalism major at Johnson State College and is finishing up an internship with the Stowe Reporter.