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Dan O’Bannon died yesterday. I knew this was coming, I’d been reading about the guy a lot recently and in interviews with him I thought, “This is not a dude long for this world.”

I’ve reading about him as research for a book I’m working on called Magnificent Failure: The Most Influential Science Fiction Movie Never Made. O’Bannon was one of a team of 5 artists and designers brought together by a visionary director to work on a movie that was never finished, never really begun, in spite of months of preproduction. That team would go on, together and separately, to define the look and feel, the themes of Science Fiction films over the last 30 years more than any of the directors we associate with those films. Lucas, Spielberg, Ridley Scott, these guys didn’t create the worlds they presented to us. They hired these 5 artists to create those worlds for them.

Dan O’Bannon would become known primarily as the screenwriter for Alien. But his first gig was as an artist, a special effects designer, at USC’s Film School with his exact contemporary John Carpenter. The two of them wrote and designed the 1974 cult classic Dark Star. A very weird little movie that has a lot to recommend it, especially if you view it as a student film, which it was, and watch it stoned, which I think most of them were at one point or another.

Based off the quirky, rough vision of Dark Star, O’Bannon came to the attention of another director. Along with 4 other artists and designers, he was hired by Alejandro Jodorowsky for Jodorowsky’s impossible, insane, psychedelic, Jungian, mind-altering adaptation of Frank Herbert’s Dune.

Probably he knew it would never get made. There had to be a feeling, a nagging twinge in the back of his mind. Pink Floyd doing the soundtrack. Jean Giraurd the art. Orson Wells as the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and Salvador Dali as the Emperor of the Known Universe. It was simply too grand, too ambitious. Too many wishes were coming true for it to all hold together. Jodorowsky must have sensed even from the beginning that this movie could only exist as an ideal.

To make it, Jodorowsky simply asked everyone he thought was awesome to come with him. When he met with the guys at EMI records in London about which artists might be interested in doing the soundtrack, they listed off a bunch of their mid-range talent. Jodorowsky said “Well hang on. You represent Pink Floyd. What about them?” Their reaction was “Oh they’re too expensive. You can’t afford them.”

He thought that was crap. This was a creative endeavor and the guys in the Floyd were obviously creative guys. What did money matter? So he called them up and asked them if they’d be interested in contributing a song. These were guys who’d read Dune and seen Jodorowski’s El Topo. They flew to Paris, where Jodorowsky was based, and after a meeting agreed to do the whole soundtrack for the film, releasing a 2-disc album of music afterward called DUNE. For a brief period in the 1970s, there was going to be a Pink Floyd double-album called DUNE.

That’s how he did everything. He was seen at the time as a brilliant, visionary director and this was going to be a massive commercial enterprise privately funded outside the studio system. So there would be no compromise. It was a perfect storm. He was hot, he was a creative genius, and he had tons of cash. That’s how he got all these people to come onboard.

Jodorowsky wanted each of the worlds the story takes place on, each of the factions in the movie, to have its own distinct visual design. To that end he hired five artists and spent almost 2 million dollars, roughly 1/5th of the film’s entire budget, on art and design in preproduction. Looking back, it seems clear that he was perfectly happy spending his budget in creating, rather than on a creation. The process was the goal, not a finished movie. The artists he assembled in Paris worked for months and produced hundreds of pieces of concept art, including ships and weapons and costumes. Five guys, working in a Paris studio for months, were secretly creating the future of the future in film.

Dan O’Bannon, based off his Dark Star experience. Jean Giraurd only shortly after starting Metal Hurlant, the influential French magazine that would launch him into world-wide recognition as Mobius. Chris Foss, a British Illustrator noted for his covers of SF novels in Britain. Ron Cobb, a former Disney artist and at the time an illustrator for a radical, underground newspaper in Los Angeles, and co-conspirator with Dan O’Bannon on Dark Star. And finally, H. R. Giger. Also not yet famous, because this was several years before Alien.

That’s them. Jodorowsky’s dream team of designers and illustrators. None of them had done much yet. Jodorowsky was not, I don’t think, recruiting relative unknowns because he lacked influence or capital, but because there was no commercial SF scene the way there is now. He was laying the foundation for that scene.

Who knows what would have happened, had the movie ever been made. It’s hard to imagine such a weird book, made vastly more weird by Jodorowsky, becoming a commercial hit. But looking at the vision of the future it would go on to produce by proxy in the form of these five artists, it clear he was onto something. The worlds those five guys would later create became huge. Influential some of them, and box office smashes, others.

Here’s a list of the movies those five artists would work on, together or separately. Each of these movies owes a visual debt to a movie that was never made.

• Star Wars
• Alien (the entire team would go on to work on this film)
• Blade Runner
• Tron
• The Abyss
• The Fifth Element
• Heavy Metal
• Conan the Barbarian
• The Last Starfighter
• Back to the Future
• The Abyss
• Aliens
• Total Recall

It’s crazy, when I think of it, that no one has done a book or a thing on this before. Of the five artists and Jodorowsky, O’Bannon is the first to die and at 63, I think early.  Time’s a wastin’.

To give you a clear idea of the influence of these artists, here’s a panel from The Long Tomorrow, a story in Metal Hurlant written by O’Bannon and illustrated by Jen Giraurd, next to a concept pice from Blade Runner.

This page contains only a few images, a tiny fraction of the total, created for Dune. A full assessment of the impact these five artists had on SF would take…well, it would take a whole book.

When Jodorowsky’s Dune finally ground to a halt, it left behind it a group of writers and artists who didn’t feel as though they’d failed. They’d been paid well to produce some astonishing work and formed creative relationships that would see them through the next ten years. The fact that no movie came of it had to seem incidental. The dream was the process. The process was the project. The journey was the destination.

When you look back at the team Jodorowski assembled, and what they-in groups and alone-went on to produce, it seems reasonable to conclude that the never completed Alexander Jodorowsky version of Dune is the most influential science fiction film of all time. The fact that it was never finished is beside the point.

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