Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune
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Denis Villenueve’s 2021 Dune film has resurged interest into the famously difficult to adapt sci-fi book franchise Dune by Frank Herbert. One of the earliest attempts to create a Dune film was by cult film director Alejandro Jodorowsky, who spent three years attempting to develop a Dune film, and was unable to due to ever-growing budgetary needs. Jodorowsky’s Dune is often considered the “the greatest movie that was never made”, and a glimpse into that what could have been can be seen in his Dune storyboard.
Artwork and design for the book was done by Jean Giraud, a French artist better known as Moebius. The header page aligns Futura with a colorful ship mid-space. The title page of the storyboard features all-lowercase Eurostile Bold Extended, tightly spaced, with “DUNE” in Franklin Gothic Condensed. Artist pages lack typography, but character designs are in a Clarendon. The bilingual captions seem to be written on an IBM typewriter using Orator. Last but not least, running titles were added in Herkules.
The storyboard copy shown here recently sold for $3 million to a cryptocurrency collaborative.
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Like on the cover, Jodorowsky’s first name is misspelled as Alexandro.
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The captions are typed in IBM’s Orator, in caps and small caps.
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