Jodorowsky’s Dune

Was Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Dune, “the greatest movie never made?” The South African director Richard Stanley makes that claim in Frank Pavich’s documentary about the ill fated project, currently playing at Film Forum. Writers, filmmakers and artists often fear they are putting a curse on an idea by talking about it before actually undertaking the work. One wonders if the same thing can be said about talking too much about postmortems, in which an unsuccessful attempt has resulted in a stillbirth. In the case of Pavich's Jodorowsky's Dune, one wonders if it might have been better to let sleeping dogs lie. The documentary brings to light the  deficiencies of a millenarian project that might better have lived on a as a great mystery and question mark. Jodorowsky if you remember had achieved notoriety with El Topo which played midnights at Chelsea’s famed Elgin theater and other art house venues during the 70’s. Jodorowsky had come to film through the avant-garde directing productions of Beckett, Ionesco and others in Mexico before producing early films like The Holy Mountain, whose mixture of provocation and hallucinogenic spirituality appears, from the clips show in the documentary, to have combined the kitsch of Charles Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theater Company with the high strung camp of Warhol’s Factory. Jodorowsky shared Warhol’s infatuation with celebrity and had enlisted  Pink Floyd, who'd just recorded “The Dark Side of the Moon” album to do a sound track. Salvador Dali agreed to work only if he received the highest salary in Hollywood at $100,000 an hour and Orson Welles was cajoled with the promise hiring the chef from his most favorite restaurant in Paris to cook his meals. Dali asks Jodorowsky “did you ever feel like you lost a clock in the sand?” and Jodorowsky proudly recounts how he won Dali over by answering “I never found a clock, but I lost a lot." In Jodorowsky’s recounting Mick Jagger, at the height of his fame, walked towards him at a Paris social function and agreed to participate. An enormous storyboard was created with the help of Dan O’Bannon, a Hollywood special effects expert who’d worked on John Carpenter’s Dark Star and would later co-write the screenplay for Total Recall, Jean Giraud, the comic book artist known as Moebius, Chris Foss, a designer of science fiction book covers and H. R. Giger, the Swiss painter. Everything about Dune was larger than life (in his failed pitch to Hollywood Jodorowsky talked about a movie that might be 20 hours long) and hearing  Jodorowsky’s claim that he would start the movie with a panning shot of the universe that would outdo the opening sequence of Touch of Evil, you get the feeling that this is one case where Hollywood was right. David Lynch’s Dune was a failure, but who knows if Jodorosky’s Dune might not have been the science fiction version of Heaven’s Gate. At the end of the documentary, Jodorowsky’s says “I was raping Frank Herbert, but with love.” That’s no guarantee Frank Herbert would have liked it.

Mark Rylance’s Richard III

Mark Rylance is out to make his mark as one of the greats, a Kean, a Garrick, a Booth, but he is also trying to be something more. He is both acting and exfoliating. In the Shakespeare's Globe production of Richard III, currently playing in repertoire with Twelfth Night at the Belasco the audience is allowed to come early and see the actors getting dressed and in the course of the play, Rylance himself steps in and out of his role, seemingly at will. During one recent performance an audience member sitting in the Elizabethan Gallery, built on stage, literally collapsed and fell out of her seat. Rylance played the moment with consummate tact, rejoining with “as I was saying,” when it became apparent that she was alright. We’ve recently had the all female Donmar Warehouse production of Julius Caesar at St Ann’s Warehouse. This Richard III is all male, which is the way it was originally done in Elizabethan times, with one exception. The Elizabethans weren’t drag queens. Here we have Richard’s mother as a mammy with an oversized rear end. Richard’s wife Ann looks like a character out of the Addams Family. This production could have been called The Comedy of Richard III  and staged by Charles Ludlam and his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, were Ludlam still alive. And while it gives Rylance the opportunity to exhibit the full range of his comic skills including those of a master of ceremonies, a ham, stand up comedian and sometime Uriah Heap, it sometimes detracts from the tragedy. It is only in the final act that Tim Carroll, who directed, really tackles the question of the self-abnegation which has created a tyrant and monster. One sometimes forgets that Shakespeare created a character who hated himself, almost as much as he was despised. You have to take a breathe but by the end, in a fourth down drive, Rylance settles back in his character and gives us back the Richard, we have always known and despised— in his all his horror.