Author: Devil's Avocado (---.ohio-state.edu)
Date: 06-19-2000 13:11
was that it was directly responsible for Blue Velvet.
Dino De Laurentiis wanted to make the next Star Wars, and saw the Dune property as the perfect vehicle. He wanted a hot up-and-coming director, and Lynch was fresh from his brilliant work on The Elephant Man. At the time, it probably seemed like a good idea.
While Lynch's directorial style probably wasn't the best fit for a sci-fi yarn (IMHO, he's vaguely Kubrickian, in that he doesn't want his actors to act in any "normal" fashion), I think the two biggest problems were that
1) a book as complicated and dense as Dune doesn't lend itself to the two-hour movie format, no matter what the director's qualities are. When the director wants to project his own vision onto the script, it just muddles the waters even worse. I've discovered this firsthand with some extremely unsuccessful Call of Cthulhu scenarios in weird settings.
2) running the Dune production was like running a large city. It called for a director who was more of a hands-off delegator; a manager or coordinator-type. Lynch does intensely personal films where he can obsess over detail (particularly important when you're twisting reality to vit your own vision). He didn't have a prayer of coordinating anything of the scale of Dune.
If I recall correctly, De Laurentiis signed Lynch to a two movie contract- Dune and a project to be named later. Lynch had been loudly complaining about how all the money he was getting to make movies was meaningless because he didn't have final cut- the producers could go in and chop up his movies, and he couldn't say a thing (which is exactly what happened with Dune). So after Dune bombed, De Laurentiis said, in so many words, "okay, smartass, I'm giving you final cut with a shoestring budget. Knock yourself out." The result was Blue Velvet, and Lynch hasn't looked back since. Pretty cool, eh?
Oh, yeah, and the other best thing about the movie was this recent commerical where some ad execs are tryign to get Sting to promote something, and at one point, they said "we loved you in Dune!" That was great.
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