While David Lynch's unlucky 1984 adaptation of Dune came as an extreme disappointment to many fans, it might be comforting to remember just how much stranger the movie could have been.

In the early 1970s, underground filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, best known for the psychedelic western "El Topo," assembled an all-star pre-production team to "recreate" Frank Herbert's novel. Swamped in the Hollywood backwash of "Star Wars," the film was never made.

What is left behind, like echoes of water in the desert, are names, reminiscences and occult hints.

Those who dislike the Lynch film, with its sound-based weaponry and "mutilated" storyline, may be horrified to learn that Jodorowsky took on the task of adapting Dune before he had even read the novel.

As he told French documentarian Louis Mouchet, Jodorowsky proposed the project to one of his distributors, Michel Seydoux, sometime around 1973.

"In fact I hadn't even read the book," he said. "Someone had simply told me what the book was about. Besides I just liked the story, and needed to support my family."

Elsewhere, in a 1985 interview with the French magazine Metal Hurlant, he remembers his first encounter with Dune as a more characteristically hyperbolic experience.

'Your next film must be Dune'
"One time, divinity really wanted to tell me in a lucid dream: 'Your next film must be Dune,' " he said. "I had not read the novel. I got up at six in the morning and, like an alcoholic who awaits the opening of the bar, I waited for the bookstore to open to buy the book. I read it in one stroke without stopping to drink or eat. Right at midnight, the same day, I finished reading it."

In any case, he would later compare Herbert's masterpiece to the cathedral at Notre-Dame, the Aztec solar calendar, and the tarot of Marseilles -- all works of profound and universal mythological importance. It was on this level that Dune fascinated him.

"I didn't want to respect the novel, I wanted to recreate it," he explained. " Everyone of us has their story of Dune, their Jessica, their Paul. I feel fervent admiration towards Herbert and, at the same time, conflict. (I think the same thing happened to him.)"

As such, Jodorowsky did everything he could to keep Herbert away from "his" film. Herbert would not make it to Paris, where the nascent production set up shop, until 1975, and it is unknown whether the director and novelist ever actually met.

Meanwhile, Jodorowsky was busy getting what he would call his "seven samurai" together. Seydoux was the first of these, and filled the role of producer. Moebius and Chris Foss were brought in to provide the film with their unique design senses, but Douglas Turnbull, the special-effects wizard who realized "2001: A Space Odyssey," was rejected for "his vanity, his big boss airs and his exorbitant prices."

Instead, Dan O'Bannon, fresh off the unexpected triumph of "Dark Star," was hired to do effects.

In perhaps the ultimate coup for Jodorowsky's unworldly sensibilities, even surrealist painter Salvador Dali was onboard in a small but important role as the galactic Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV. After a brief but typically eccentric display of egoism, Dali agreed to spend an hour on the film set as the emperor for a fee of $100,000 -- an extreme sum for a project with a reported budget of $20 million.

To work around this apparent cinematic problem -- apparently caused by Dali's desire to earn more for his dramatic efforts than, if not God, then Greta Garbo -- Jodorowsky reworked the script, assigning most of Shaddam's scenes to "a polyethylene puppet" molded to exactly resemble the money-crazed surrealist.

Fortuitously, Dali introduced Jodorowsky to the work of Swiss painter H.R. Giger, who was quickly pressed into creating the Harkonnen homeworld of Giedi Prime and all associated elements of design and costuming.

Giger was captivated by the chance to "arrange a whole planet," as he put it in his essay, "Dune: Giger on Jodorowsky."

"My planet was controlled by sinister magic and the indulgence of aggressions," he recalled of Giedi Prime. "Perversions were on the agenda -- briefly, an area for me."

Jodorowsky's samurai would work on the film until 1976, when they fell away one by one. By 1977, the project was dead.

Giger, disgusted at how David Lynch would later realize Dune without him, went on to become darkly famous as the designer of "Alien." He eventually mounted a New York exhibit of his Harkonnen designs at the Limelight dance club in 1984.

Moebius became even more famous as a comic-book illustrator in the French style, eventually coming to belated U.S. acclaim as the designer of "The Fifth Element."

Dan O'Bannon, described by Jodorowsky as "a wolf-child, completely outside of conventional reality," would later distinguish himself as a screenwriter, penning such films as "Alien," "Invaders from Mars" and the upcoming "Flicker."

Christopher Foss and the members of Pink Floyd all got on with their lives, enjoying lucrative, successful careers in their chosen fields.

Dino de Laurentis bought the film rights to Dune and assigns the project to Ridley Scott, who had just directed "Alien" to great acclaim. However, Scott walks off the film, opening the door for David Lynch. The movie would finally start filming in 1983 and would be released a year later, a financial failure and a source of critical confusion.

Dali never got his $100,000. The fate of the polyethylene puppet bearing his likeness is unknown.

Alejandro Jodorowsky is still making films, many of which never see the light of day.

"I liked fighting for Dune," he told Metal Hurlant. "We won almost all the battles, but we lost the war. The project was sabotaged in Hollywood. It was French and not American. Their message was 'not Hollywood enough.' "

"The project of Dune changed our lives."