What if...

In art, as with science and etc. there are some concepts and questions of potential but impossible being that are fun to discuss. It sounds like I'm being complicated, but I'm not. Among bibliophiles, the most often discussed topic is the contents of the lost-to-fire library of Alexandria. It was a huge building that housed the most complete collection of manuscripts in the ancient world. Now you can read more about it if you want.

The library of Alexandria was lost to the world by one of a few possible means, fire, attack, decree or Muslim conquest and destruction. No one knows what many books and papers it held that are now possibly lost forever, so for those who are interested in books, it's a good time stretching the imagination to speculate on what great works of literary art are now gone forever. It's the same with movies. Even for large movies there are casting auditions. The studio heads have ideas of who they want to cast in the lead roles, and sometimes these work out and sometimes they fall through. Here's a few examples: Al Pacino was not originally supposed to star in The Godfather. Robert Redford was originally supposed to take that role. Princess Leia was almost played by Jodie Foster. Stanley Kubrick was supposed to direct A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. (He passed away, and his exhaustive notes were used by Steven Spielberg to make the film instead.)


It was the same with original Star Wars movies. I knew part of this story before, but today I found out the other half, and it got me excited to write. When George Lucas was trying to find a director for Return of the Jedi, (originally entitled Revenge of the Jedi), he first asked David Lynch and David Cronenberg. Cronenberg passed and went on to make Videodrome, The Fly and The Brood. (More recently he made A History of Violence and Eastern Promises.) Lynch passed because he wanted to make Dune, a film which he did end up making. If you have ever seen a David Lynch film, (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Twin Peaks, Mulholland Drive, Wild at Heart), you know that he has a uniquely weird creative mind. I can only imagine what the Jabba's palace scenes would've looked like with Lynch or Cronenberg at the helm. It would've been ten types of fucked up weirdness, and it would've been great.


But Lynch made Dune instead, and he did a great job. It's his film, no doubt, but it's also a good adaptation of the book. (It's a massive book, so paring it down wasn't easy.) However, was almost something completely different as well. Maybe if David Lynch had taken on the Jedi job, we would have gotten a Dune movie directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, the man who made El Topo, which features a western gunslinger fighting a large man with no arms who always carries a man on his shoulders who has no legs. (This way they function as one being.) And who was going to design the men and monsters of Dune? H.R. Giger, who designed the alien in Alien, and Moebius, an artist who worked on Alien, The Abyss, several iconic graphic novels, and The Fifth Element. Oh, and instead of Toto doing the music, Pink Floyd was supposed to collaborate with Jodorowsky in the score. Now that might not seem like a crazy fucked up movie of incomparable grandeur yet, but here's who Jodorowsky wanted for the cast: Orson Welles, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali, Geraldine Chaplin, Gloria Swanson, Alain Delon and David Carradine.


You would need a kryptonite projector to screen a movie like that. For me, and other cinephiles, it's fun and agonizing to wonder what that movie would've been like. But there's a reality that I cannot ignore. When writings started piling up in the library of Alexandria in the Middle East, and monks up in northern Europe were writing all they could, there was a lot of borrowing and forgery that went hand in hand. Many of the libraries' manuscripts were loaned out, copied, and the copies were sent back to the library. So the reality of that situation is that, most likely, as a result of the proliferation of copying, we probably still have most of what existed in the library. Anything that was of little importance to people of the day is of little importance to us. (Wouldn't it be nice if all the copies of Soul Plane and Cool As Ice just faded into the distance, leaving no copies, by the year 2200?) So a Lynch Return of the Jedi might be fun to think about, but it also might have been a huge disaster. A lot of director's only do their best while working from their own material. Lynch would have been reigned in by Lucas and his creative vision would've been stifled. Jodorowsky and his monster cast could never have worked with each other. Too many egos in that movie, so I doubt if it could've been made at all...or that the finished product would have very good. Blade Runner is an iconic work influenced by Moebius' art, and that just wasn't ready for people at the time of its release; Dune might have fallen prey to the same tastes.

The reason we have an imagination is so that we can play with possibilities. The above movie scraps are are just elements that we can use to build wondrous scenes in our own minds, other than that they're trivia. The realities of the situations can't stand up to the great images we can create ourselves, so it's fun to play, and sometimes it's okay that things didn't turn out as originally planned.

(The pictures, in order:
-Dune II by H.R. Giger [vehicle concept]
-Dune Worm XII by H.R. Giger [sand worm concept]
-image of the "baby" in Eraserhead
-image from El Topo)