"Visionary" is the most misused term in film circles of late, thrown around by idiots who wouldn't know a D.W. Griffith film from a Warhol. Such is the fate of Alexandro (proper spelling) Jodorowsky, a darling of cultists.
Unlike the particularly lame set of experts rounded up here (fan boys as film critics and untalented film directors Richard Stanley and Nicolas Winding Refn), I was a film buff in the '60s and '70s and properly placed Alexandro's work ("El Topo", "Fando & Lis", "The Holy Mountain") in the context of his betters: Glauber Rocha from Brazil and the fabulous European surrealist Arrabal.
Frank Pavich who directed this documentary fails to mention even in passing that "Fando and Lis" was adapted by AJ from a play by Arrabal. "Viva la Muerte!" by Arrabal was just as influential a midnight movie at the outset of the '70s as AJ's "El Topo", and all the art-house directors of that era owed plenty to the innovations of Rocha in a series of films from which "Antonio das Mortes" stood out, and would still be a reference point if folks did their homework.
In covering AJ's work this documentary is incomplete and misleading. The most famous anecdote regarding "The Holy Mountain" concerns star Dennis Hopper going crazy during filming and leaving the set, forcing AJ to replace him. Nowhere is that level of historical research encountered here.
Instead we have AJ pontificating, gesticulating, and basically acting the part of "the mad genius" for Pavich's camera. This routine, favored by Werner Herzog in recent decades gets old in a hurry and made watching "J's 'Dune" a real chore. I interviewed Terry Gilliam in 1981 in Manhattan on his promo junket for the release of "The Time Bandits" and he behaved in person one-on-one quite similar to the way Jodo acts here. Both men are so full of enthusiasm and passion concerning making movies that they literally seem about to blow a gasket at any moment.
Both Jodorowsky and Gilliam have become famous over the years for the outlandishness (and scale) of their projects, and their becoming folk heroes by going Don Quixote-like up against the windmills/giants of the Film Establishment, i.e., the guys who hold the purse-strings.
Much is made here of Hollywood's inability to see the power of AJ's meticulously (and permanently) enshrined shooting script that is bound in hardback the size of an unexpurgated Webster's dictionary. Both he and Gilliam seem to have a mental block against recognizing the difference between making a large-scale, say mature David Lean- scale, movie and writing the Great American Novel or crafting the ultimate Broadway Play. Self-appointed "visionaries" need not apply - only fools like Bob Guccione and his "most expensive porn film of all time" Caligula can do that. Artists like these should sensibly follow in the footsteps of avant-garde filmmakers, Maya Deren, Ed Emshwiller, Stan Brakhage and Stan Vanderbeek: create independent, no-budget, uncompromising underground cinema. Leave the $200,000,000 projects to hacks like Michael Bay.
It was Dino De Laurentiis (along with Joseph E. Levine and Alexander Salkind) who initiated the era of big-budgets we currently live with: back when Dune by AJ was being worked on and shopped the entire film industry was functioning under very tight budgetary restrictions following the near-collapse of the studios in 1969: no film in the '70s was being green-lighted with a budget as high as $15,000,000, which Dune would entail.
For the record, it was 1976 when Levine's "A Bridge Too Far", Dino's "King Kong" and Salkind's "Superman" were independently produced at much higher budgets, opening the floodgates. And not coincidentally it was Dino, through his daughter, who ended up producing the David Lynch flop of "Dune".
So the doc's argument about AJ's war with stupid studio execs is completely off- base and ignorantly presented -their hands were tied at that time.
Worse than that, the movie's implication about the power and influence of AJ's Dune, even without it being made, is 180 degrees off the mark. Sure, we see trotted out a who's who of ultra-creative talent that was working on preparing the movie: Giger, Moebius, O'Bannon, even hangers-on like Welles and Dali. Ridley Scott is rightly shown to be the chief recipient of the fruits of their labors -going from the promising art-house director of "The Duellists" to fame and fortune (via hiring AJ's technicians) with increasingly bigger- canvas epics like "Alien", "Blade Runner" and ultimately "Gladiator" and many others all of which not coincidentally resemble the '60s epics that sank Hollywood's fortunes and led to that moratorium on big-budget projects in the first place.
The legacy of this unfinished film is not launching top technical and creative talent in a host of blockbusters but rather the industry's ongoing fascination with flashy, mindless crap, currently emblazoned by the application of 3-D (a tarnished medium from the early '50s) to so many pictures as well as fake IMAX (not using the IMAX photographic system) to market the junk.
What Pavich presents as AJ's strengths are in fact his fatal flaws. Rounding up the top talent - it seems like he has the Midas touch in finding the best in each field, does not disguise the obvious fact that had he actually been able to make "Dune", AJ would be calling all the shots, like a Robert Rodriguez (writer/director/cameraman/editor). Evidence of this creeps into the doc with the segment dealing with Doug Trumbull, who is sloughed off as arrogant or not a team player when AJ rejects his participation out of hand, when in fact it is obvious that AJ is the arrogant s.o.b., not Doug.
AJ would have a firmer and more legitimate place in film history had he remained independent and tackled smaller-scale films that expressed exactly what he wanted to say, a la the models of Jim Jarmusch or Woody Allen.
