Yeah, from what I remember, Lynch had done Eraserhead which nobody saw, but a movie exec loved it and pitched him the Elephant Man and that got a ton of attention, including the Oscar, and if you squint you can kindasorta see a Dune series like Star Wars or Star Trek or Terminator! (hey, there's lotsa books to adapt, right? Right?) (And the Road Warrior series had a desert in it, right? Right?) -- And the 80s was the era of Artsy Scifi too, its last gasp maybe, with pictures like Altered States and Escape from New York (that ENDING) and Blade Runner and Videodrome and believe me, I could go on. (I remember a friend showing me a bootlegged Liquid Sky and both of us feeling like we were high on the movie. Ah youth.) And even the lighter films, like Starman or Aliens or the Abyss, had some great character work and actual otherworldly moments. This was the era of Repo Man and Brazil! So maybe it wasn't totally nutty to try to start up yet another scifi franchise with David Lynch, especially when they didn't really know he was David Lynch yet.

....still, you get the feeling that all that could have been averted if someone had shown De Laurentiis Eraserhead. But then we wouldn't have gotten Blue Velvet and that would have been very sad.

(In fact now I'm thinking of the parallels between Lynch doing Dune, and the really bad press Chloe Zhao's Eternals is getting. Hmm.)