Recently sold at auction for £277,200, The Dune Bible is the storyboard for Alejandro Jodorowsky’s film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune, which was famously never made. From an Instagram tour of the book:
The book contains a complete storyboard that tells the narrative of the proposed Dune film shot by shot, in addition to depictions of all the featured characters, vehicles, and environments by the greatest sci-fi artists of the time.
The auction house believes that only 20 of these bibles were ever made and only 10 have survived. An imperfect scan of the book appears to be available on The Internet Archive and here’s a sample of around 46 images.
A similar copy of the book was sold for $3 million in 2021 to a bunch of crypto-dopes who “believed that the purchase granted them the copyright to the book, which they intended to splice and sell as NFTs before burning the physical copy”.
Cult avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky famously did not make his ambitious adaptation of Dune but what if he had brought his unique brand of surrealist psychedelia to the screen with a version of Tron in the 70s? Using the AI platform Midjourney, Johnny Darrell imagined what Jodorowsky’s Tron might have looked like. I love these — I would like to see this movie please.
See also Jodorowsky’s Frasier.
Update: Frank Pavich, director of Jodorowsky’s Dune, ruminates on these AI images of Jodorowsky’s Tron.
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around it all. There seems to be a correlation between how Alejandro’s work was absorbed and referred to by subsequent filmmakers and how his work was ingested and metabolized by computer programming. But these two things are not the same. I want to say that influence is not the same thing as algorithm. But looking at these images, how can I be sure?
It’s hard to find many shortcomings in the software. It can’t render text. And like many painters and sculptors throughout history, it has trouble getting hands right. I’m nitpicking here. The model contains multitudes. It has scanned the collected works of thousands upon thousands of photographers, painters and cinematographers. It has a deep library of styles and a facility with all kinds of image-making techniques at its digital fingertips. The technology is jaw-dropping. And it concerns me greatly.
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