Dune, The David Lynch Files

As a young and inexperienced writer, Kenneth George Godwin met David Lynch in late 1981 to conduct interviews about the making of Eraserhead. The resulting article gained Lynch's favour and in the Spring of 1983, Godwin found himself hired by Universal Studios to help document the production of Dune in Mexico. For six months, Godwin - working with cameraman Anatol Pacanowski - observed the chaos of one of the biggest, most expensive motion pictures made up to that time. On set and behind the scenes, Godwin witnessed David Lynch wrestling with the unwieldy beast, trying to impose his particular, idiosyncratic vision on what was for the studio and producer Raffaella De Laurentiis a massive commercial enterprise. Little surprise then that the movie which resulted is both magnificent and almost fatally crippled.

In this companion volume to his previous book on the making of Eraserhead, Godwin reprints an edited version of the diary he kept that summer in Mexico, along with photographs and documents, and transcripts of some of the interviews conducted by the documentary team for a video account of the production of Dune which was destined never to be completed.