King Shot: Jodorowsky’s Unmade Film and Other Movies Never Shot

At the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, Nick Nolte walked the red carpet beside Alejandro Jodorowsky and the Paris producer Simon Shandor. They were there to launch a film called King Shot, described by its producers as a “metaphysical spaghetti gangster” picture, with David Lynch attached as executive producer. A press release dated 26 May 2008 promised it would reach cinemas in 2009. It never did. Jodorowsky fans still talk about King Shot, and its story is a case study in how a cult filmmaker’s next project can exist for years as announcements, cast lists and rumor, and never as a single frame of film.

This article sets out what the published record actually supports, separates it from what was only reported once, and then places King Shot among other famous films that were planned but never shot.

Who is Alejandro Jodorowsky?

Born in Tocopilla, Chile, in 1929, Jodorowsky worked in theater and mime in Paris and in avant-garde performance in Mexico before turning to film. His feature Fando y Lis (1968) caused a scandal in Mexico, but it was El Topo (1970), a surreal western, that made his name. It ran for months as a midnight attraction at the Elgin Theater in New York beginning in December 1970, a run that helped invent the midnight movie as a phenomenon. John Lennon admired it, and Allen Klein, then managing the Beatles’ business affairs, arranged its American distribution and backed The Holy Mountain (1973).

After that, his filmography became irregular. Tusk (1980) barely circulated, Santa Sangre (1989) was well received, and The Rainbow Thief (1990), starring Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif, was a production in which he had little creative control. Then came a gap of more than twenty years. It was in that gap that King Shot was announced.

He was far from idle during those years. Jodorowsky became one of the best-known writers in European comics, above all with The Incal, the science-fiction series he created with Moebius beginning in 1980, much of it drawing on ideas first developed for his abandoned Dune. He also wrote novels and books on the tarot and developed a practice he called psychomagic. Film, though, remained the medium his admirers most wanted him to return to, which is why each new announcement drew so much attention.

King Shot Jodorowsky: what was announced

The clearest primary source is a French-language press release from the production company Clavis Films, dated 26 May 2008. Its headline billed the project as a “Jodorowsky–Lynch constellation,” launched at Cannes 2008 and due in theaters in 2009. According to that release:

• Lead producer: Simon Shandor of Clavis Films, Paris.
• Co-producer: Eric Bassett of Industrial Entertainment, in a French–American co-production.
• Executive producer: David Lynch, with world sales entrusted to Absurda, Lynch’s company.
• Cast said to have agreed to lead roles: Nick Nolte, Marilyn Manson, Asia Argento, Arielle Dombasle, Udo Kier, Adan Jodorowsky and Santiago Segura. Mickey Rourke and Willem Dafoe were described as having been approached.
• Cinematographer: Vilmos Zsigmond, the Oscar winner for Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
• Genre: a “gangster spaghetti métaphysique,” aimed at a broad audience while remaining tied to the director’s personal universe.

A year later, in May 2009, the trade press reported that shooting was planned for October 2009 in Spain, with the Hungarian producer Laszlo Kantor also involved as a co-producer. English-language coverage generally translated the genre label as a “metaphysical spaghetti western,” and that is the phrase most fans remember.

What is uncertain

Beyond the press release and the trade reports, much of what circulates about King Shot is thin. Budget figures differ between reports, and one blog from early 2009 placed the shoot in Mexico rather than Spain. Colorful descriptions of individual characters appeared in entertainment blogs, but I could not trace them to a script, a director’s statement or the producers, so I have left them out. There is no published synopsis from the production that I could verify. Even the exact roles of each producer shift slightly from source to source; the 2008 release names Lynch as executive producer, while some later articles simply describe him as a producer.

What is not in doubt is the outcome. No principal photography is documented, no footage has surfaced, and no release ever followed.

Why King Shot was never made

The explanation came from Jodorowsky himself. In an interview with The Guardian in November 2009, as widely reported at the time, he said he had been unable to find the money for King Shot and would turn instead to his long-planned sequel to El Topo, known at various times as The Sons of El Topo and Abel Cain. He said then that he had found Russian backers for that project. It did not go into production either, and in later interviews he described investors who put in some money and then disappeared.

When he did return to directing, it was on a different footing. The Dance of Reality, an autobiographical film about his childhood in Tocopilla, premiered at Cannes in 2013, and Endless Poetry (2016), its sequel, was funded partly through crowdfunding by his own company. Neither had anything to do with the gangster project, and King Shot quietly disappeared from his public plans.

The unmade film that came first: Jodorowsky’s Dune

For many people, King Shot is a footnote to a far more famous unmade film. In December 1974 a French consortium led by Jean-Paul Gibon acquired the rights to Frank Herbert’s novel Dune and hired Jodorowsky to direct. He assembled an extraordinary team: the comic artist Moebius drew storyboards, Chris Foss designed spacecraft, and H. R. Giger created designs for the Harkonnen world. Pink Floyd and the French band Magma were lined up for the music. The planned cast included Salvador Dalí as the Emperor, Orson Welles as Baron Harkonnen and Jodorowsky’s son Brontis as Paul Atreides. Herbert later recalled that the script was the size of a phone book.

No studio would finance the film on Jodorowsky’s terms, and the rights passed to Dino De Laurentiis, who produced David Lynch’s Dune (1984). The documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune (2013), directed by Frank Pavich, told the story to a new audience and turned the abandoned project into one of the most celebrated films never made. The connection with Lynch, who later served as executive producer on King Shot, is one of those coincidences cult film history loves.

Other famous films that were never shot

King Shot belongs to a long tradition. A few of the best documented:

Clouzot’s L’Enfer had an unusual afterlife: Claude Chabrol filmed the script in 1994. Kubrick’s research for Napoleon was so extensive that it was later published in book form, and many writers see its period research echoed in Barry Lyndon (1975). These projects share something with King Shot: they survive as paperwork, designs, test footage or announcements, and their reputations grow precisely because nobody can see the finished film.

Why unmade films fascinate cult audiences

An unmade film is the purest cult object. It cannot disappoint, it cannot be re-edited by a studio, and it belongs entirely to the imagination of the people who care about it. Jodorowsky’s career shows both sides of this. El Topo and The Holy Mountain found their audiences through the late-night circuit, and his Dune found one through a documentary about a film that does not exist. King Shot sits in between: a red carpet, a press release, a remarkable cast list and nothing more. For a filmmaker whose work is so often about transformation and absence, it is a fitting kind of legend.