Representing Clients Means Successfully Telling Their Stories – even when they’re incredibly complex
Dune: Part Two is about to pass the $600 million box office milestone. Along with Dune Part One, the Dune movies have now topped $1 billion in ticket sales.
Amazing, particularly as it was a well-known fact that Frank Herbert’s 1965 groundbreaking novel was considered ‘unfilmable.’ Too ‘dense’... too ‘symbolic’... too ‘introspective’... too ‘complex’ ...too many ‘details’... too many ‘explanations’...
To do the novel justice, it was thought, there would be far too much ‘telling’ and not enough 'showing.' It goes without saying that ‘telling’ and ‘great movie experience’ are seldom mentioned in the same breath.
Dune ~ the Impossible Story to Film
Since Dune’s publication, there have been numerous attempts to produce a movie version. Dune’s story and characters are virtually impossible for filmmakers to resist. Starting in the late ‘60s, everyone from the people who produced Planet of the Apes to Peter Berg, Ridley Scott, and cult film favorite Alejandro Jodorowsky (who tried to sign, among many others, Pink Floyd, Orson Welles, and Salvador Dalí as collaborators) all failed.
The great David Lynch produced a Dune film in 1984 that was, to be kind, an unmitigated disaster. In the words of Harlan Ellison, “It was a book that shouldn’t have been shot. It was a script that couldn’t have been written. It was a directorial job that was beyond anyone’s doing, and yet, the film was made.”
The only good thing to come out of Lynch’s Dune was that the experience was so traumatic for him he swore off ‘big pictures forever’ and made Blue Velvet a few years later.
Why Dune: Part Two Succeeds
So how did director Denis Villeneuve and his team do it? How did they take an impossibly complex plot, characters whose most important conversations were usually with themselves, and alien environments and make it not just watchable but engrossing?
The screenwriter David Wayne Young has a theory, one we agree with: Villeneuve was “forced to pick small moments and explain them as succinctly as possible." He goes on to explain that the “audience can’t be subjected to an entire encyclopedia of Frank Herbert’s vast universe, with its keen world-building and stunning backstories. Instead, exposition comes from unique, actionable moments that affect the development of a character or storyline.”
To get there, of course, Villeneuve and his team of writers dove into the books and then all the other materials they could find that helped flesh out Frank Herbert’s universe. Letters he wrote, articles, interviews, and the script—almost as long as the book—he wrote for one of the abandoned previous attempts to film it.
Dune Part Two and Litigation
Compelling Narratives are the Key to Representing Clients
They picked out moments, scenes, small bits of dialogue, and tiny but telling details and spun them into a story that not only conveyed significantly more than the gist of Herbert’s vision but also the full emotional punch of it.
In short, they made a movie that no one can turn away from.
Who you turn your story over to bring to an audience is important under any circumstances, but who you turn your story over to in a court matter is vitally important.
We once wrote about a legal team that had a jury doing Sudoku. That’s not telling your client’s story in any meaningful way; it’s David Lynch’s Dune without Sting’s weird acting.
Representing Business Law Clients
Making a Complex Story Relatable
In any business law matter, whether it’s headed toward negotiations, mediation, trial, or anything in between, it is essential that your story is told... well, right. The facts are gripping, and their emotional impact is felt.
When you bring your story to Hopkins Centrich, we’ll do just that—no one who hears your story from us will ever pull out a crossword puzzle or start fiddling with their Apple Watch. They’ll be riveted until the credits roll.