A pre-production set of artworks for a proposed 1970s Dune movie adaptation will auction for at least £0.25 million says auctioneers Christie’s.
The Dune Bible was prepared, probably in 1975, by and for director Alejandro Jodorowsky in collaboration with some of the most important comic book artists of the 1970s.
It is the star lot in Christie’s Science Fiction and Fantasy sale that is due to close on December 13.
Jodorowsky, a Chillean-born, French director was working on a plan to film Dune, the 1965 cult sci-fi book by Frank Herbert.
The film rights to the novel had been bought by a French collective.
You can see how well realised the plans were, but they weren’t enough to open Hollywood’s purses.
But, in order to get an enormous project up and running (they reckoned the movie would be up to 15 hours long) they needed Hollywood cash.
To produce a compelling case for the work, Jodorowsky got together some of the best fantasy and sci-fi artists around.
They included Moebius (the pen name for Jean Giraud), Chris Foss, and a Swiss artist called Hans Ruedi Giger.
Mick Jagger, Orson Welles, Alain Delon, and Salvador Dali were lined up to star, while Pink Floyd and Magma had offered musical services.
This book is the remnant of the director’s attempt to win $5 million funding for Dune.
It includes concept drawings, designs, and an almost complete storyboard of the movie.
Despite missing out, Jodorowsky describes the project as a success of sorts. “[it] proved to the Americans that it was possible to make a larger-than-life science fiction movie, outside of the scientific rigor of 2001: A Space Odyssey’.
Star Wars, Alien (to which Giger contributed), and many other movies are said to carry the mark of this amazing document.
It is an oblong octavo book measuring 210mm by 295 mm with 11 colour pictures and 268 monochrome images of drawings made for the film.
It is numbered 4. It’s believed that 20 bibles were taken to Hollywood, but it’s thought that fewer than 10 survive. This copy is probably the one discovered by producer Michel Seydoux in his mother’s home.
Christie’s believe it will sell for between £250,000 and £350,000 (exactly the same estimate they have put on a first edition of the foundational sci-fi work Frankenstein in the same sale).
A copy of the bible was sold in 2021. It was bought at auction for $2.9 million by Soban Saqib, a crypto and NFT entrepreneur from California, who said he was acting on behalf of a community of Dune fans in the cryptocurrency world.
