Easily the biggest loss in terms of unrealised passion projects and one that definitely won't ever get made is Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. The director is mainly known for a trilogy of psychedelic sort of westerns he made during the sixties and seventies, and even then it's mainly known by the sort of people who are familiar with weird trippy movies about false idols starring a bunch of hippies. For a period not long after that, however, Jodorowsky worked on an adaptation of Frank Herbert's classic sci-fi novel Dune, and actually got a fair ways into pre-production. Heading out to France to work on it, the director initially had surrealist Salvador Dali on board as a production designer, casting Orson Welles in a major role. His script would've been fourteen hours long and cost some multiple millions of dollars to make, which is not the amount of money people give to Jodorowsky to make films. Especially when they're adaptations of Dune starring his son. Two good things came out of this abandoned project, though: first, the recent documentary Alejandro Jodorowsky's Dune. The second thing? Scriptwriter Dan O'Bannon and artists Moebius and HR Giger, after the project fell apart, decided tor re-team on another project. Which you may know as a little thing called Alien.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
