Ridley Scott’s Lost Dune Script Found: 'I Don't Think It Would’ve Made Fans Happy'

"It would be very easy to make a bad film of Dune…" –Ridley Scott, South Bend Tribune, 1979

This week marks the 40th anniversary of David Lynch's Dune. Initially a $40 million box office disappointment upon its release, it has since cultivated an ardent cult following over the past four decades, particularly in contrast to Denis Villeneuve's recent adaptations of Frank Herbert's iconic novel. After Ridley Scott, fresh off the success of Blade Runner and Gladiator, left the project, the eccentric David Lynch took the helm in May 1981, announced by mega-producer Dino De Laurentiis.

Little was known about the version Ridley Scott had been developing for De Laurentiis—until now. Thanks to the diligent efforts of T.D. Nguyen, a 133-page draft of Scott's unproduced Dune film, penned by Rudy Wurlitzer (known for Two-Lane Blacktop and Walker), was discovered in the Coleman Luck archives at Wheaton College and shared with this author.

When Scott joined the project shortly after the triumph of 1979's Alien, Frank Herbert had already crafted a sprawling two-part screenplay that was meticulously faithful yet challenging to adapt cinematically, as previously noted by Wired and Inverse. Scott identified a few usable scenes from Herbert's script but ultimately enlisted Wurlitzer for a comprehensive rewrite in London as pre-production commenced at Pinewood Studios. Like Herbert's and Villeneuve's versions, it was intended as the first part of a two-film series.

"The Dune adaptation was one of the most difficult jobs I’ve ever done," Wurlitzer reflected to Prevue Magazine in 1984. "It took more time to break it down into a working outline than to write the final script. I believe we kept to the spirit of the book but, in a sense, we rarefied it. We interjected a somewhat different sensibility."

"We did a script, and the script is pretty fucking good," Scott affirmed to Total Film in 2021.

The reasons behind the collapse of Scott's Dune project were manifold, including emotional turmoil following the death of his brother Frank, reluctance to film in Mexico as stipulated by De Laurentiis, a budget exceeding $50 million, and the allure of the Filmways' Blade Runner project. A crucial factor, as revealed by Universal Pictures executive Thom Mount in this author's book A Masterpiece in Disarray – David Lynch's Dune, was the lukewarm reception to Wurlitzer's script: "Rudy’s version of the script did not receive unanimous, glowing enthusiasm."

Was Wurlitzer's script an inadequate cinematic translation of Herbert's expansive narrative, or was it simply too dark, violent, and politically charged to appeal as a commercial blockbuster? Dive into our comprehensive script analysis to form your own opinion.

Rudy Wurlitzer (age 87) and Ridley Scott were approached for this article but chose not to participate.

A Wilder Shade of Paul

The October 1980 draft of Dune opens with an evocative dream sequence of deserts transforming into apocalyptic armies, setting the stage for Paul's "terrible purpose." Ridley Scott's signature visual richness is evident in descriptions like "birds and insects become a whirling hysteria of motion," showcasing his unique artistic vision.

Frank Herbert's Dune (First Edition)As Scott shared with Total Film, “We did a very good take on Dune, because early days, I’d work very, very closely with the writer. I was always glomming the look of the film onto what he or she was writing."

This dream transitions to Paul Atreides waking to the sound of rain at Castle Caladan. Unlike the charismatic Timothée Chalamet, this Paul is a 7-year-old with long blonde hair, about to undergo the Reverend Mother's test with "the box." His recitation of the Litany Against Fear during this ordeal is intercut with his mother Jessica's, underscoring their psychic bond. Visuals of a burning hand and flesh falling off bone echo Lynch's version, though they're merely hallucinations.

After passing the test, young Paul retrieves a sword using The Voice and nearly kills Duncan Idaho in his sleep to test his warrior prowess. This Paul embodies a "savage innocence."

"Rudy Wurlitzer’s version of Paul is far more assertive," observes Stephen Scarlata, producer of the documentary Jodorowsky's Dune. "He actively takes charge. We even see a flash-forward of his growth from age 7 to 21, where his relentless training leads him to surpass Duncan Idaho. Personally, I prefer Lynch’s depiction of Paul. There’s an added tension in believing Paul might defeat Gurney, only to realize he doesn’t. This vulnerability makes us feel more fear and concern for him, especially when Paul and Jessica are forced to escape."

At 21, Paul is a master swordsman, "handsome, charismatic, regal." Duncan, now older and more seasoned, mirrors Jason Momoa's portrayal with characteristic humor.

DUNCAN
It is a teacher's duty to have his
pupil someday surpass him.
(smiling)
But, don't think you can relax. This
is just one level you have reached.
There are other, more perilous,
methods to master. But, not now.
Now we are going to get properly
drunk.

Long Live the Emperor

The narrative then shifts to a rock garden where Jessica observes a gardener raking white pebbles. Suddenly, rain begins to fall, and the gardener falls to his knees, proclaiming, "the Emperor is dead." This pivotal moment, as noted by contemporary screenwriter Ian Fried, diverges from the book but adds a unique catalyst to the plot.

"I absolutely love the moment of Jessica looking out across the castle at the gardener raking white pebbles into patterns," Fried told IGN. "Then all of a sudden it starts raining and the gardener falls to his knees, prostrates himself, looks up at the sky and says, 'the Emperor is dead.' I get chills just saying that. On the other hand, that's not at all from the book. There's so much material in Dune that to be adding new stuff is probably not what most people would have wanted or would want now. That was a really, really interesting part of the script, that the catalyst for everything is the Emperor dying."

The scene transitions to the Emperor's Inner Kingdom, a mystical setting surrounded by Snow Peaks and a Mandala. Here, members of the Twenty-Four Great Houses mourn the Emperor as his soul is transported by colorful energies. The dead Emperor speaks through an old Medium, bequeathing the Planet Dune/Arrakis to Duke Leto Atreides in a bid to stave off cosmic darkness.

BARON
(to DR. YUEH)
Understand the position well
before you leave. Who controls
Dune controls the Spice, and
who controls the Spice controls
the Universe. Without me, your
Duke controls nothing.

"Normally I have credited Lynch with this great line," Mark Bennett of DuneInfo told us. "Given that this was a De Laurentiis project script, I wonder if Lynch read it and borrowed that line, or came up with it independently?"

Flight of the Navigator

The Atreides family's departure from Caladan aboard a Guild Heighliner introduces a Navigator, a spice-mutated figure visualized as "an elongated FIGURE, vaguely humanoid with finned feet and hugely fanned, membranous hands, floating in a transparent outer container, like a loose, flexible skin; a fish in a strange sea with eyes of Total Blue." The Navigator, akin to Scott's later film Prometheus, falls into a coma after taking a pill and guides the Heighliner's course with musical intonations.

"I absolutely loved that they were able to show the Navigator," Fried adds. "Even though I love the Denis Villeneuve movies, I'm really disappointed we didn't get to see his take on that. A missed opportunity."

Upon arriving on Arrakis, the Atreides' fortress evokes the aesthetic of Scott's 1985 film Legend, with its medieval tone emphasized by swords, feudal customs, and Bosch-like Dew Collectors. The ecological theme is highlighted when Liet Kynes introduces his daughter Chani to the Duke and Paul at a weather station, showcasing dissected native creatures and discussing the destructive impact of spice harvesting. During their Ornithopter journey through the desert, reminiscent of Blade Runner's cityscapes, Kynes and Chani choose to walk back to their home, allowing factory workers to escape on the Duke's 'Thopter.

This is intercut with Shadout Mapes, a servant with three breasts, gifting Lady Jessica a crysknife as city dwellers outside beg for water. The streets of Arakeen are depicted as squalid urban "ghettos," highlighting class disparity inspired by Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.

*DUNCAN picks up the axe.

DUNCAN
(looking at it)
Nasty little instrument.
Not very well balanced, but it will
have to do.

With a short snap to his wrist he
throws it at BURLY MAN coming
towards him holding a long iron
bar. The axe strikes him in the
chest, splitting him in two.*

"That feels like a bar brawl you’d find in a Burt Reynolds or Walter Hill action movie," says Scarlata. "The fight scene feels out of place because it makes Paul seem too invincible too soon. His journey is about growth - learning to survive, adapt, and lead. If he’s already effortlessly beating enemies, we lose the tension/fear for his safety key to making his transformation meaningful."

Following this, Paul and Duncan meet the stoic Fremen leader Stilgar, who decapitates a lone Harkonnen at a smuggler's market. Meanwhile, Jessica, levitating like a turn-of-the-century magician, meditates and decides with the Duke to conceive a child, a decision she articulates explicitly.

Baron Wasteland

After receiving a cryptic message from a blinking insect, Dr. Yueh shares a moment of veiled regret with Paul before sending him to the city for a night of freedom. Paul follows a homeless boy into a Fremen Spice Den, where he inhales blue spice vapor and experiences visions of his unborn sister Alia intoning "Maud'Dib." He then encounters an Old Crone overseeing a pit with a red ball and a tiny snake-like sandworm, which Paul hypnotizes using mudras and places in a conch shell.

After poisoning Thufir over a chess game, Yueh deactivates the house shield, allowing Harkonnen Death Commandoes to infiltrate the castle. Paul, returning from the slums, is attacked by a Hunter-Seeker, reimagined as "a bat-like creature with a cobra's head," which he decapitates just as Jessica enters the room.

This Hunter-Seeker design mirrors the "flying creature with a bomb" from Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune, seen here in storyboard art."The Hunter-Seeker scene is fascinating to me," Scarlata remarks. "Introducing a biological twist to the usual mechanical device mirrors Alejandro Jodorowsky’s unmade Dune from a few years earlier, where the Hunter-Seeker is a flying creature with a bomb strapped to its back… Paul slows his heart rate, disarms the creature, and throws the bomb out the window. Both versions experiment with an animalistic take."

Duke Leto decapitates several Death Commandoes before Yueh shoots him with a dart. Duncan, arriving to save his poisoned Duke, is stabbed by Yueh but manages to cut him in half. Jessica places a poison gas capsule in the dying Duke's mouth. Duncan fends off Sardaukar, sacrificing himself to allow Paul and Jessica to escape in a 'Thopter. The violence is graphic and undeniably R-rated.

The Deep Desert Controversy

Paul and Jessica's escape into the deep desert is more intense than in previous adaptations. Paul's piloting is so fast that G-forces ripple their cheeks, and after a wing is clipped, they crash-land as sand erodes the fuselage. They wait out the storm in a Stilltent, then don Stillsuits and seek out the Fremen. Paul confronts a massive sandworm "face-to-face," echoing a scene from Villeneuve's film.

An element missing from this draft is the incest between Paul and Jessica, which had been included in earlier versions but was removed due to objections from Herbert and De Laurentiis.

"He wanted to do an incest movie!" Herbert exclaimed to The Sacramento Bee in 1982. "Can you imagine the effect that would have had on the Dune fans?"

"In one draft I introduced some erotic scenes between Paul and his mother, Jessica," Wurlitzer confirmed to Prevue. "I felt there was always a latent, but very strong, Oedipal attraction between them, and I took it one note further. It went right in the middle of the film, as a supreme defiance of certain boundaries, perhaps making Paul even more heroic for having broken a forbidden code."

While the draft avoids explicit incest, there is a moment where Paul and Jessica "lie on top of each other" as they slide down a sand dune.

The duo eventually finds refuge in an ancient cave within a giant worm carcass. At dawn, Fremen warriors led by Stilgar arrive on a Sandsled. Jamis challenges Paul to a death duel, which Paul accepts eagerly. Jessica advises her son and hands him the crysknife, declaring him the Lisan al-gaib. The battle moves inside the worm carcass, where Paul kills Jamis, and Fremen take items from the fallen warrior's body, saying they were "a friend of Jamis." Paul sheds tears for his vanquished foe, a scene similar to one filmed but cut from Lynch's Dune.

During a night-time Spice ceremony, Paul is given the name Maud'Dib. He learns that he has won Chani, Jamis' wife, in battle. Chani accepts her husband's death and Paul as her new mate, with Paul offering Jamis' water to the tribe's reservoir.

Fremen then carry their possessions to a Sundancer, a giant trimaran, to cross the great salt flats. Kynes aims to unite the tribes behind the Lisan al-gaib legend, encouraging Chani to stay close to Paul. Chani's allegiance to Paul is complicated by her fear of Jessica, reflecting themes in Dune: Part Two.

*PAUL
I ask for acceptance without
reservation, even for that which
you cannot understand.

CHANI
As we share the same purpose, I
withhold nothing from you.*

"A true leader is never a clear model of Christian goodness," Wurlitzer noted in 1984. "Many times he is ruthless, very determined, and willing to make sacrifices to serve certain ends. That doesn’t mean he has to be a consummate Machiavellian, only that certain shadings in his character make him a little dangerous, a bit abrupt. Even Christ drove the merchants out of the temple."

"I feel like Paul is almost a cipher," Fried observes. "He's too much of a perfect Messiah. It's very hard to relate to him. It's not clear, based on this take on the material, that Paul's even the main character."

The climax features a Water of Life ceremony led by a Shaman with three breasts and male genitals, performing an erotic dance as a sandworm emerges and dies, turning water blue. Jessica drinks the Water of Life, merging auras with the Reverend Mother and becoming the new Reverend Mother. All the Fremen believe Paul is their Messiah. The script ends with Jessica using a thumper to call a giant sandworm, which Paul presumably will ride, though this is not shown.

Conclusions

H.R. Giger's exceedingly phallic sandworm design.Frank Herbert's ultimate message in the Dune series was the disastrous nature of following charismatic leaders, a theme central to Denis Villeneuve's adaptations but largely ignored by Lynch. Wurlitzer's script, while unfinished or intended as the first part of a two-parter, presents Paul as a confident young man accepting his destiny as a universal dictator, with complicit actors like Chani and Kynes supporting his rise for their own planetary goals.

This script was conceived at the dawn of modern science fiction cinema, following the success of Star Wars and Alien, perhaps expecting too much from audiences in terms of embracing a revisionist, R-rated sci-fi film tackling ecological devastation and exploitation. This mirrors the challenges faced by Zack Snyder's adaptation of Watchmen.

As Scott noted in the Tribune in 1979, "For years sci-fi has been treated as underground material, yet there's always been a vast and enthusiastic readership for sci-fi novels. Dune has sold 10 million copies."

Wurlitzer's script also enhances visual storytelling by introducing key relationships earlier than in Lynch's film, such as Kynes and Chani together and the Duke meeting the Baron earlier. The Emperor's death serves as the catalyst for the Duke's downfall, a more straightforward narrative choice than the convoluted plot of the Emperor's plan in other versions.

The legacy of Wurlitzer and Scott's Dune includes H.R. Giger's phallic sandworm design and Harkonnen furniture made from skeletons, now displayed at the Giger Museum in Switzerland. Vittorio Storaro, earmarked to lens this version, later worked on the 2000 Sci-Fi Channel miniseries Frank Herbert's Dune. Scott and De Laurentiis eventually collaborated on 2001's Hannibal, which grossed $350 million worldwide. Some script elements found their way into Blade Runner and echo story beats in Scott's upcoming Gladiator II.

"Wurlitzer's work here –which Scott himself referred to as "a decent distillation of Frank Herbert"– is arguably the only adaptation of the material for the big screen which gives the novel’s ecological, political, and spiritual aspects equal footing," Fried concludes. "The ecological aspect of Dune is covered in this script in a way it's never been covered in any other piece of material. That's one of the strengths of this adaptation: It feels like it's important to the story being told. It doesn't hit you over the head with it. It genuinely is a consequence of what man has done to this planet, the ecological issues that have developed around spice mining. There are a lot more clear motivations in the Ridley Scott Dune script for a larger variety of characters."

Perhaps future filmmakers will revisit Dune, emphasizing its ecological themes, which remain relevant as Herbert's novel approaches its 60th anniversary, echoing the enduring concerns of environmental decay, the dangers of fascism, and the need for societal awakening.