The famed screenplay “Dune” adaptation that released in theatres October 22, 2021, was written on MS-DOS program which only holds 40 pages in memory. RottenTomatos rated it an 83% on their “tomatometer” and the average audience score was 90%.
The critics consensus, “Dune occasionally struggles with it’s unwieldy source material, but those issues are largely overshadowed by the scope and ambition of this visually thrilling adaptation.”
The audience consensus, “Denis Villeneuve’s Dune looks and sounds amazing and once the (admittedly slow building) story gets you hooked, you’ll be on the edge of your seat for the sequel.”
Dune is a 1965 science fiction novel by American author Frank Herbert, originally published as two seperate serials in Analog magazine. The movie titles onscreen as “Dune: Part one” Directed, and Produced by Denis Villeneuve, he as well was involved in writing the screenplay along with Jon Spaihts, and Eric Roth.
In the movie computers are banned and the world goes to a pre-technology time if you will, so I suppose it’s only right that they do the screenplay the old fashioned way using the MS-DOS program Movie Master.
Roth writes everything using the 30 year-old software. “I work on an old computer program that’s not in existence anymore,” he said in an interview in 2014. “It’s half superstition and half fear of change.” Roth wrote the screenplay for Dune in 2018 and explained he was still using Move Master on a Barstool Sports Podcast in 2020.
That’s like the Tavern I worked at freaking out when the grill had a problem because the size of grills increased over the years and no grill will fit in the space we had. I guess that grill was 30 years old too, now that I think about it…
In a video he shows us his DOS window in Windows XP and booted up Movie Master 3.09 on a old-school (ancient, if I may) beige mechanical keyboard. “ Nobody can get on the internet and get this, I have to give them a hard copy.” Roth said. “They have to scan it and then put it in their computers and then I have to work through their computer because you can’t even email mine or anything. You can’t get to it except where it is. It has 40 pages and it runs out of memory.
Roth says the 40 page limit helps him achieve structure in his screenplays. “I like it because it makes acts, I realize if I hadn’t said it in 40 pages I’m starting to get in trouble.” he said. Other writers have used this same method. Among them being George RR Martin using WordStar (first launching in 1978) to slowly write every single Game of Thrones book.
I have to say, this is some dedication to the 90’s. Roth is onto something when it comes to eliminating distractions. It’s taken me four days to write this little post. I find it amusing that Dune, which was so long they broke it into two parts, and Game of Thrones one of the longest series in pop-culture literature was written on programs that have less memory than a 2000 era flip phone.
