Does a home media release require a thesis statement? Do boutique and specialty home media labels need a good, compelling argument for securing the rights to add a movie to their library? “People who like this film should be able to own a copy themselves” seems like reason enough to feed physical and digital libraries, butmakes an implicit plea of its director, David Lynch: Break the 37 year silence and talk about the film.
famously, shies away from discussing his adaptation of Frank Herbert’s massive, influential 1965 science fiction epic in interviews. Speaking to the former point on the 4K’s Deleted Scenes feature, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis, the daughter of the film’s legendary executive producer Dino De Laurentiis, mentions the sticky claim that “there was a four-hour version of the movie edited by David Lynch, but that never really happened.
Almost four decades later, Lynch, who arguably walked so that John Harrison could run in his 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries,and so that vaunted French Canadian auteur Denis Villeneuve could reportedly soar in his own forthcoming adaptation, deserves reconsideration for what he achieved in bringingto life.
“The storytelling isn’t particularly great in the movie, and that’s one of the reasons why it wasn’t a commercial hit, but boy, it’s a visionary thing,” he explains. “Even for all its flaws, I think it’s much more interesting than most of the Hollywood science fiction fare.”tries, and succeeds, in creating something that lasts, and to create something that lasts when that something is rooted so deeply in the psyche of its author is a titanic challenge.
“There are some books that should never be made into movies,” declares Harlan Ellison, screenwriter and one of the film’s few defenders via his 1989 bookquite, which probably shouldn’t have been made into a movie, much less two movies, much less a miniseries. But as Villeneuve’s take on the source material lumbers from the Rialto to HBO Max and into theaters, we should all be grateful Lynch did it first.