I saw this tonight. I really enjoyed it; it’s an excellent documentary.
Jodorowsky is the star of the show. That is one guy with an 18+ charisma, if I may add to the geek quotient of this thread.
It is also a very funny movie. The segment telling how he persuaded Salvador Dali(!) to play the Emperor Of The Universe(!!) is priceless.
I came away with a ton of admiration for Jodorowsky personally, though I think I would not care much for his movies (might give his graphic novels with Moebius a shot though). At 84, he is still full of boundless energy and enthusiasm. Though arguably completely nuts.
I saw it and I also loved it. I wish the movie had been made. Even if it failed, it would have failed spectacularly and I really love the passion he had for it.
I can’t believe he was going to make a movie with Orson Welles and Salvador Dali.
He should publish his screenplay/storyboard book so we can all see it.
Agreed on all counts. Saw it on the plane out west and really, really enjoyed learning the story. A great vision for the movie - wish it had been made, but yeah, that storyboard book would be amazing to see.
I finally got a copy of this movie and I have to give it a 9/10. Jodorowsky has more energy at 84 than most people experience in their entire lives, I think; he’s practically vibrating in place as he talks about some things.
I found it particularly interesting to note how many things that he and his team developed for Dune ended up appearing in other movies that they later made or became involved with (particularly the arm-chopping scene which was later used as the pivotal event in Santa Sangre).
The team he pulled together for the production side of things did indeed go on to influence science fiction cinema in massive ways. Think how unlikely it is that Dan O’Bannon would ever have met H. R. Giger and how that would mean that Alien would possibly never have been created at all, let alone created as we know it.
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IIRC he says he hadn’t read the book before he decided to make a movie of it; apparently he did read it once pre-pro had begun since he praised Frank Herbert’s writing (“like Proust”).
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Mahaloth and WordMan, I agree that they should publish the storyboard/production book. I’d pay $100 (maybe more) without hesitation for a decent hardcover copy. Hell, if I ever get rich, securing one of the 2 only known remaining copies would become a priority for me. That book’s gotta be freaking amazing.
Yeah, I would buy a reproduction of the book. . . maybe $100+
But, personally, if the movie had ever been made I think it would be terrible. Probably worse that David Lynch’s. Jodorowsky’s Dune had it raining at the end too which was totally fucking ridiculous. I think it would have been just a crazy mess. Probably better for everyone that it just remained a dream and not a reality. It’s a GREAT dream!
Alien did exist before O’Bannon met Giger. Pre-production sketches were published in Cinefantastique well before the film came out. It would’ve looked completely different – it didn’t have that Gigerish alien spaceship, the lander from the Nostromo looked completely different. I don’t know what the Alien itself would have looked like (there werre no sketches reproduced of that). The Navigator might have been in there – O’Bannon and company lifted the idea of the crashed alien spaceship with a huge skeleton inside from the movie Planet of Vampires.
But you’re right that it would’ve looked different. Giger’s previous artwork strongly influenced his designs for the film – you can see the Navigator and the Xenomorph already in his pre-Alien paintings.
I honestly think that Giger’s artwork was a major factor in the film Alien being the success it was. Ridley Scott’s direction had much to do with it, but aside from the few people who saw The Duellists, who knew anything about Scott’s work? His name wouldn’t have carried the film. Giger’s image of the Alien, however, was something completely new and different.
I don’t see any reference to it appearing in Cinefantastique before 1979 and the earliest date I can find on a script is 1976, which was the year after they met (O’Bannon was hired in mid-1975 for Dune).
I know that he said he had half the story finished in 1972, but that was called Star Beast, IIRC.
In any case, I stand by my statement that with Jodorowsky connecting all of these people, Alien would not be at all what we have today. In fact, if you dig deeper, there’s a lot of information there that suggests that quite a lot of science fiction would not exist if it weren’t for this ambitious project and Jodorowsky’s ability to bring people together. (Dan O’Bannon wrote The Long Tomorrow which was illustrated by Moebius and appeared in Heavy Metal magazine. This influenced Blade Runner, the work of William Gibson, Katsuhiro Otomo’s manga and film of Akira, etc.).
Alejandro Jodorowsky is kind of the Ramones of science fiction!
Sorry you can’t find it in Cinefantastique, but it was there. I read the areticle long before the film came out. It was a cdistinctly different look (in fact, it was a while before I realized that those early sketches were associated with the film that came out).
Here are some of those original sketches by Ron Cobb (who did a lot of visualization for Star Wars, too), but you’ll have to separate them from sketches by O’Bannon, Giger, and Scott himself:
Exactly when who was involved isn’t clear in the Wikipedia write-up, although it claims that O’Bannon’s script was imagined with a Giger Alien. Nevertheless, Cobb’s sketches seem independent of Giger influence.
The CinefantASTIQUE ARTICLE MIGHT HAVE BEEN IN vOL. 8 #1, THE wINTER 1978 ISSUE WITH “tHE pRIMEVALS” ON THE COVER (tHERE’S A FLICK i WOULDN’T MIND SEEING THE EXISTING FOOTAGE OF. tHEY EVIDENTL;Y SHOT QUITE A BIT OF TEST FOOTAGE AND SUFF TO SELL THE CONCEPT, SOME OF IT IN WIDESCREEN)
I did end up buying a copy of the film. Jodorowsky is an absolute mad genius.
He said in the doc that he wouldn’t mind seeing an animated version of his film.
Given that there were only 5 (IIRC) copies of the complete, as it were, book of story boards, I don’t see how it can ever be made available to the average fan or to a studio to make.
They showed this documentary last year during the annual Sci Fi Film Marathon I go to at Case Western Reserve University. Usually the deal is everyone yells at the screen during the films like MST3K. But everyone was quiet and thoroughly enjoying the documentary.
I must watch that online, it was on at the local arts cinema a little while ago but I couldn’t drum up much support to go watch it.
I used to pick up a lot of old Panther (and possibly Grafton) novels and short story collections with Foss illustrated covers, I thought the same every time I picked one up, “that ship will never be in there”.
