Someone Actually Found David Lynch’s Half-Finished Dune 2 Script

Max Evry, the author of “A Masterpiece in Disarray: David Lynch’s Dune. An Oral History,” has found a half-written script for the sequel, he revealed in WIRED on Wednesday.

Despite minor cult status, it’s no secret that many felt Lynch’s 1984 adaptation of Dune missed the mark. But before its release and subsequent critical panning and flop at the box office, there was a plan to turn Lynch’s take on Frank Herbert’s space opera into a major movie franchise.

Evidence for this mysterious half-script has been floating around since 1984, when Frank Herbert revealed that he was working with and advising the writer-director on a script for the sequel in an interview with Prevue Magazine. Since then, little bits of information have come out about the script, including in Lynch’s book, “Lynch on Lynch” in 1997, where he wrote, “I wrote half a script for the second Dune. I really got into it because it wasn’t a big story.” But until last year, this script never saw the light of day.

Evry unearthed the script in July of last year while working on his book, finding it in Frank Herbert’s archives at California State University, Fullerton. In the article for WIRED about this find, Evry sang the script’s praises, saying, “He also cracked a way to tell the complex story of Herbert’s 1969 novel Dune Messiah, easily the least cinematic book in the series.”

“It may ring of sacrilege to some, but Lynch’s Dune II would have bested Herbert’s book — and been one hell of a movie,” he added.

He doesn’t discuss exactly how Lynch manages to circumvent these restraints, but it begs the question: What if Lynch’s Dune didn’t struggle at the box office?

It’s unlikely that the script will be widely available outside of UC Fullerton’s archives, and according to Evry, David Lynch didn’t offer much in the way of a comment on the matter.

For more Dune news, check out the latest trailer for Dune: Part 2.