Unfilmed screenplays and artificial intelligence: Jodorowsky’s Dune, technological change and remediation

The recent field of ‘Shadow Cinema’ highlights the challenges of telling an alternative film history emphasizing the role played by unproduced pictures, opening a new line of research, including new issues to screenwriting studies. This article aims to stress the role of unproduced screenplays towards shadow, and to briefly introduce a typology of unfilmed scripts, highlighting four types of unproduced screenplays. Furthermore, this article will focus on the former type of unfilmed screenplay, the virtuous cycle of some unfilmed screenplays, which is characterized by a broad time gap and historical interval. As an example of the latter, I will focus my analysis on Dune , a screenplay and film project written in 1974 by Alejandro Jodorowsky. The article also analyses the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune , by Frank Pavich, and an anonymous experiment with generative AI, found on YouTube, with speculated scenes from Jodorowsky’s unproduced picture.