The Spice Must Flow by Ryan Britt

Author:Ryan Britt [Britt, Ryan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2023-09-26T00:00:00+00:00

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In the summer of 1984, Kyle MacLachlan was in New York City, looking at an immense painted image of his own face on the side of a building in Times Square. He turned to his friends and said, “That’s me. That’s the thing I have coming up.” For nearly a year, MacLachlan had been prevented by his Dune contract from auditioning for any other film or television projects, and so he was at “loose ends” until the film finally hit theaters in December. His friends were unimpressed by the giant image of MacLachlan as Paul. “No one cared,” MacLachlan tells me with a laugh. “I was like, ‘This is exciting.’ But I was kind of treading water for a long time.” MacLachlan tells me that he expected his life might be nothing but Dune movies for almost a decade. “The contract I had to sign with the De Laurentiis corporation was for five sequels,” he says. “I don’t know why they kept five, but they were definitely planning on Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. They were banking on the fact that the movie was going to be very successful and that I would be sought after once it came out. The whole idea was that they would have control over me to a certain degree. I had no choice but to sign because I hadn’t ever done a movie, and this was my big opportunity. I ended up signing them, and of course, none of them actually were exercised. Which is probably just as well. But I was sorry about that. I was really looking forward to doing a sequel. Particularly doing Messiah. I think that would’ve been an interesting journey for Paul. But it never happened.”

Because early cuts of Dune didn’t satisfy executives at Universal, the marketing for the film wasn’t what it could have been. Despite excellent coverage in niche science fiction and film publications like Cinefantastique, Starlog, and Enterprise Incidents, the mainstream promotion of Dune was severely curtailed by Universal. Harlan Ellison was even prevented from going to a press screening of the film, on the grounds that the studio wanted as few critics to see the movie before opening as possible. In the world of movie reviews, what was true in 1984 is still true in 2023: If a movie studio is preventing critics from seeing a film ahead of time, nine times out of ten, it’s because the studio has lost faith in the project.

David Ansen, a film critic for Newsweek, notable for being one of the only critics in 1984 to give Dune a positive review, put it like this in 2003: “There was a big backlash against it . . . there was a lot of publicity about the movie before it opened . . . about how they were having all sorts of problems in Mexico . . . and the media kind of fed off of that. People smelled blood in the air. And there was a certain ganging up on the movie when it opened.

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