Harlan Ellison's Watching (42 page)

Simply put,
Dune
is filled with magic! And like an encounter with a wizard, the film stuns normal perceptions, demanding a sense of wonder and close attention.

Scene after scene presents fresh images, cosmic concepts, plot twists and innovations for which standard filmviewing attitudes are wholly inadequate. And therein may lie the essence of the nightmare for director David Lynch, producer Raffaella De Laurentiis, and Universal Studios.

The very strengths of
Dune
contain the seeds of its possible failure in 1984. And it is a casebook study of why most science fiction films of recent memory have been so sophomoric. If one goes to see a western, no explanation is needed to set up the background. See a man in a Stetson with a bandanna over his face, lying in wait with a Winchester, and you know the Wells Fargo stagecoach will be coming down that road in a moment. See a patient being wheeled into a hospital on a gurney, and you know that in mere seconds a noble physician will be performing a tracheotomy. Boy and girl meet cute, and you know love and laughs are on the way.

But science fiction postulates worlds that might be, but have never been. So
everything
has to be explained. And with a devious, imaginative story involving four planets, warring Imperial households, alien technology and deeply mystical concepts about our need for messiahs . . . even the smallest details must be explicated. Can an audience corrupted by the soundtrack of an explosion in the airless vacuum of deep space retool its viewing habits to appreciate a film of such complexity?

There are trade-offs that may make it more difficult. In exchange for scope and grandeur, the enormity of vast forces in conflict, the color and fascination of alien places we have never seen,
Dune
sacrifices that which science fiction has too often jettisoned: characters whose hearts we know, humor and wit, insights into the human condition. For all its heroes who are competent and heroic beyond measure, for all its villains so malefic that they make Darth Vader no more ominous than a mugger,
Dune
has no Rocky or
Chariots of Fire
sprinters to root for. Because we did not need to have the Civil War explained to us,
Gone with the Wind
could concentrate on the travails of Scarlett O'Hara and Rhett Butler.

Yet
Dune
proffers unusual, some might say greater, treasures. For a generation of kids who've grown up with word processers and space shuttles and Isaac Asimov on the bestseller lists, an sf film with a brain. For moviegoers treated to the moral and ethical bankruptcy of slasher films and
Porky's
, a film that deals with concepts of home and courage, loyalty and love of family, nationalism and the wonders of the universe.

If the adults who have reviewed this film with confusion are wrong, and more than fifty years of the popularity of serious science fiction has created an audience capable of the joys of the intellectual mind-leap, then
Dune
will reach and uplift its intended viewers. But if the audience has been too far debased with simplistic twaddle, then like 2001, this film will have to wait for the judgment of time.

The first week
Dune
made $6 million.

Beverly Hills Cop
, which premiered December 3rd, in its three-day opening pulled in $15,214,805. The five-day total: ever so close to $20 million.

In five weeks, by which time it had nearly vanished from the movie screens of America,
Dune
amassed a total of $27.4 million. In five weeks
Beverly Hills Cop
did more than $122 million in box-office revenues.

As I write this,
Dune
still cost $40–41 million to produce, with (an estimate) of between $7–10 million for prints and advertising. In its first 110 days of release
Beverly Hills Cop
has made one hundred and ninety-one million, eight hundred and sixty-five thousand, six hundred and fifteen dollars. And change.

It is safe to say
Dune
was a disaster. Because not one of you was satisfied.

And I submit that you were dissatisfied before you ever got to your theater seat, because the priests of the Black Tower, from Frank Price and Frank Wright on down, quaffed deeply from the cup of derangement that is the brew of choice at Universal. They threw the film community into panic, the stock market into flux, the waiting millions who had hungered for
Dune
for a decade and a half into confusion. And they destroyed what I view as a film of considerable worth. Hell, you read my review; I'm on record.

Apparently, only two of the many critics writing for national publications derived sufficient joy from
Dune
to overcome the bad vibes to give the film a positive review. One was David Ansen in
Newsweek
. The other one has just said he's on the record. And nothing could more ironically keynote the symbiotic relationship I described earlier than that Universal, in the person of Frank Wright, after doing everything in his power to scare me off and tilt me toward negativity, exploited my review in major newspaper advertising. With a rueful shake of my head I perceive this to be a demonstration of the kind of chutzpah one associates with embezzlers running for public office.

And Frank Herbert suggests that the phrase "
Dune
was a disaster" be amended by one word.
Dune
was a
created
disaster. Of the five hours of
Dune
committed to film, only two hours and seventeen minutes made it to the screen. Exhibitors like a flick that runs two hours seventeen, rather than five: they can show it more often in a day. They can empty the theater more often, they can pour in a fresh audience more often, they can sell more Coke and popcorn and tooth-rot. Maybe De Laurentiis dad&daughter can cut together a tv miniseries with the outtakes. Maybe they can do a theatrical "special edition"
à la Close Encounters
. But it won't be done for the videocassettes (say, in two versions, such as was effected by Warner Home Video when they recently released both the emasculated theatrical version and the full director's cut of Sergio Leone's wonderful
Once Upon a Time in America
). It won't happen—at least not in the foreseeable future—because they've already announced an early release for
Dune
sometime this summer: two hours seventeen. So Frank Herbert's suggested revision tastes in no way of sour grapes. It
was
a created disaster. Slash out nearly three-fifths of a film for the convenience of cineplex operators trying to push Mounds Bars, and what you offer to the public is a quadriplegic commanded to dance the gavotte.

Overseas, where Frank Price's writ don't run,
Dune
is breaking box-office records in West Germany, Italy, Austria, South Africa and France. In England, in its third week,
Dune's
take was up by 39%, the sort of increase in attendance generally credited to word-of-mouth promotion. Opening night in Paris saw queues of more than 40,000 filmgoers.

Dune
will no doubt earn out in foreign revenues, cable and cassette sales, and may already have turned a profit just from merchandising. One never knows. But in the logbook of film history,
Dune
is a major disaster.
Heaven's Gate, Cleopatra, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Ryan's Daughter, Dr. Doolittle, Sorcerer . . .
and
Dune
.

And here is a grace note for you. Something I got from Frank Herbert for use in the review, for which there was no room, so it was put aside. I reveal it here (Frank assures me) for the first time: the precise moment in which Frank Herbert conceived the grand scheme that became
Dune
:

"I had long been fascinated by the messianic impulse in human society; our need to follow a charismatic leader, from Jesus to John Kennedy. Men who ought to have a warning sign on their forehead reminding us that they, like us, are subject to human frailties. I wanted to write a meaningful book on the subject, but though I had the theme, I couldn't find just the right setting. Then, early in the 1950s, I was doing a piece on the U.S. Department of Agriculture's project controlling dunes on the Oregon coast, near Florence. I was in a Cessna 150 looking down on that rolling expanse of sand, and suddenly I made the connection between deserts and the rise of Messiahs in such barren lands, and in an instant I had my canvas, the planet Arrakis, called Dune."

Herbert was the god-emperor of Dune, and De Laurentiis was the great sandworm he rode to the big screen. But in that game of gods and businessmen the rules change at the whim of the players; and not even the god-emperor of Dune could triumph over the derangement of the priests of the fabled Black Tower.

This has been a true story.

The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
/ August 1985

Let's see, now. Didn't I promise to say a few words about
2010
(MGM)? That was a while ago. Put on the side-counter warmer till I'd wrung myself dry in re
Dune
, by the way of explanation. Seems somehow moot now. But, as I said I'd say, I'll say so now.

2010
is a great deal smarter and more high-minded than the first reviews would have had you believe. For instance, a critic named Michael Ventura appraised the film in the
L.A. Weekly
under the headline
2010
: A COMIC BOOK IS NOT A POEM. He didn't consign the movie to hell, but he said it wasn't the lyric icon Kubrick gave us; said he had trouble remembering the sequence of scenes; said it was devoid of that quality we might call "divine." Well, that's true.

And granted that once you get beyond the mystical trappings the plot is considerably thinner than
2001
(with which
2010
has been, and perhaps should be, inevitably compared), and the "philosophy" is homespun, it nonetheless seems to me that the most salient praise one can direct toward
2010
is that the film has a brain. It is
about
something.

In a year redolent with smarm—the clone grotesqueries of the sexually corrupt
Hardbodies
and
Risky Business
's ethically bankrupt popularity with filmgoers of all ages—a movie that attempts to say the universe does still contain wonders and intellectual uplift must be treasured. That ain't, as we say in the world of comestibles, chopped liver (a food of my people).

As one who has gone on record at obnoxious length about the inadequacies of director Peter Hyams, I hear the glinkety of your eyebrows lifting when I report that if there be substantive inadequacies in
2010
, they cannot be levied against Hyams. He has directed with cool composure and high craft. And as one who has been friend to Arthur Clarke for more than thirty years, again I perceive furgling at my belief that the things-wrong with this film stem directly from Arthur's novel, a book I suggest never should have been written.

Ask Budrys to deal with that aspect of the matter. He's the book evaluator; I'm just the joe who goes blind sitting in dark rooms on your behalf.

For me, a sequel to something as remarkable as
2001
must not only answer the cosmic questions joyously left unanswered in the original, it must take me into equally as extrapolative places.
2010
attempts the former, and I'd rather have been left with my own suppositions. What was proffered as solution to the puzzle seemed rinkytink, commonplace, unmemorable.

Yet feeling the oppression of the sequel's inadequacies is very likely because one has the unrelenting drive to believe that all this massive machinery—$27 million in production and another $24 million for prints and advertising? that's what I think it was—must have been set in motion for some Deep Purpose; and when the payoff comes, the flashing lights and terraforming scintillate not in the glare of the memory of that star child floating toward Earth at the conclusion of
A Space Odyssey
.

There are nice, subtle, futuristic touches that the alert viewer remembers—one player's tie, collar and watch—Arthur feeding the pigeons from a park bench—but one comes away from
2010
with two impressions:

First, that it is a peculiarly earthbound film, returning from the wonder and mystery of that ebon slab floating in space to the mundane (by comparison) concerns of loved ones left behind, and terrestrial political squabbles. Literally, a bringdown.

Second, that Peter Hyams pulled off something of a small miracle. Given the book as basis, a story at best mildly innervating; and given the necessity to make the movie based solely on the Everest Principle ("because it's there"); and given that MGM's then-chief operating officer Frank Yablans needed a major vehicle to save his ass at the studio so the film was rushed into production; and given that Hyams at his top-point efficiency isn't Kubrick after a sleepless week; and given that the expectations of those who deify
2001
can never be fulfilled; it is something of a small miracle that
2010
is as intelligent, as inventive, as handsome as it is.

That it makes sense at all, given the above, is much to the director's credit. It earns him respect and a stay on the note of foreclosure that has haunted his previous films.