We’re all ready to see just what Denis Villeneuve and his crew do with Dune: Part Two in a few months, but what if nearly four decades ago we’d had a chance to get a sequel to compare it to? David Lynch’s planned script for a sequel to his wild 1984 movie has been missing for years, but now, an unfinished draft has been found.
Over at Wired, Max Evry—author of A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune—An Oral History—has revealed details from an unfinished draft of Lynch’s Dune sequel, Dune Messiah, discovered last year in archives at California State University, Fullerton. There’s a ton of fascinating details in there, like how Lynch’s script opened with a notably new set of scenes compared to Herbert’s novel—picking up in the aftermath of the Harkonnen’s attack on Arrakeen that saw Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan) killed in action.
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Lynch’s Messiah would’ve revealed that Leonardo Cimino’s mysterious doctor from the first film was actually a major figure from Herbert’s novels: Scytale, a “face-dancer” of the sinister genetically enhanced beings known as the Bene Tleilax. Scytale takes Idaho’s body amid the chaos of the assault on Arrakeen, and what follows in Lynch’s script is a suitably Lynchian exploration of Scytale resurrecting Idaho as the clone “Ghola” Hayt, a surrealist trip into the Bene Tleilax’s homeworld that would’ve opened the film:
Scytale’s friends are laughing and wildly rolling marbles under their hands as they watch Scytale sing through eighteen mouths in eighteen heads strung together with flesh that is like a flabby hose. The heads are singing all over the pink room. One man opens his mouth and a swarm of tiny people stream out singing accompaniment to Scytale. Another man releases a floating dog which explodes in mid-air causing everyone to get small and lost in the fibers of the beautiful carpet. Though small they all continue to laugh, a laughter which is now extremely high in pitch. Scytale (now with only one head) crawls up a wall laughing hysterically.
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There’s a lot more over at Wired, including how Lynch would’ve set the stages for the various political machinations surrounding Paul, now Maud’Dib, and his rule of Arrakis, and how the draft cuts off almost right as Lynch would’ve had to start exploring just how his sequel would’ve framed Paul’s ascension to power. It’s a fascinating insight into what could’ve been—and although Lynch himself, declining to speak about the script’s finding, cites his work on Dune as “a failure in his eyes, and not a particular time that he likes to think of or talk about” to Wired—it holds up a very compelling alternate mirror as to what we’re going to see when Dune: Part Two finally hits theaters on March 1.
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