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Forbidden Cosplay of the Bene Gesserit.

• Post @ Twitter (25 March 2022)

In late 1979, DeLaurentiis hired Ridley Scott, who was fresh from his success with Alien. Scott established a base shop at England’s Pinewood Studios and selected his ex-Alien alumnus H. R. Giger, returning to the Dune project as the production designer. Both men immediately began turning out storyboards and drawings to illustrate the film.

With the apparent rebirth of the project under way. Scott then hired Rudolph Wurlitzer, a novelist whose two produced screenplays, Pat Garrett and Billy The Kid and Two Lane Blacktop, revealed intellectual and minimalist inclinations. But even with this talented scenarist on board, the Dune script, once again, was a key stumbling block.

“The Dune adaptation was one of the most difficult jobs I ever did.” said Wurlitzer. “I did three drafts of that script before I was even beginning to become satisfied with its structure. Even then the initial result was more of a working outline than a script. But eight months later I felt Ridley [Scott] and I had a very strong working screenplay of Dune that, at the very least, kept true to the spirit of the novel. I will say, however, that we rarified it, and injected a different sensibility into the script than that of the book’s.”

In other words, they changed it. For example, Wurlitzer and Scott apparently softened several charac­ters. Paul Atreides, Herbert’s central character who becomes a galactic Messiah, is more mercurial, more the political leader—and much more ambiguous.

Wurlitzer and Scott’s description of the Fremen (the desert nomads who are the secret rulers of Arrakis/Dune) retains their blue within blue eyes (the result of spice addiction, a trait described in the book), but, at least in the early portions of this screenplay, their original ferocity was diluted. Herbert’s ultimate heavy, the Baron Harkonnen, was also toned down.

But it was in the first draft of Wurlitzer’s Dune script that the greatest, and most controversial, alteration of Herbert’s book took place. “I took what I always felt to be a latent but very strong Oedipal attraction between Paul and the Lady Jessica, his mother, one step further.” Wurlitzer said. “I injected a lovemaking sequence between these two. I meant that act as a supreme defiance of certain boundaries, which might make Paul even more heroic—in the sense that he willingly, but lovingly, broke a taboo.”

As a result of this scene, Alia, the strange woman-child born with the mental capacity of an adult, becomes Paul’s sister and daughter.

But Herbert was less than pleased. The incest scene between Paul and Jessica was subsequently dropped in Wurlitzer’s succeeding drafts.

• DUNE: VERSIONS OF ARRAKIS YOU’LL NEVER SEE