Josh Brolin sure has written a lot of poems about Dune/Timothée Chalamet
Brolin's putting out a new book, Dune: Exposures, this week, featuring behind-the-scenes photos and poems about his co-workers
When Josh Brolin set himself the task of playing Dune badass Gurney Halleck—one of the great “warrior poets” in all of science fiction, crafted by author Frank Herbert as one part killer, one part rock star—he doesn’t appear to have half-assed the process. Which is to say that, it’s now clear that Brolin spent quite a bit of his time on the set of Denis Villeneuve’s two adaptations of Herbert’s classic novel—the latter of which comes out on March 1—in his own warrior-poet mindset, crafting what we would conservatively—with no judgment!—call kind of a lot of poems about filming, Dune, and Timothée Chalamet. Which we know, because he’s putting out a book of them, including one apparently about Chalamet in which Brolin writes of his “cheekbones,” “youth-laden eyes,” and “lips of a certain poetry.”
And while we’re pretty sure that, were a co-worker to write and then very publicly publish poems like that about us, it might make hanging out at craft services kind of weird—Chalamet seems like he can probably hang, right?
Anyway, the actual provenance of Brolin’s book, Dune: Exposures (out next week), is actually a little tricky to track down. As best we can tell, the book is similar to, maybe even the same, as a small-run book that was included in a limited special edition of a coffee table tome called The Art And Soul Of Dune back in 2021. Which, as our colleagues at Gizmodo noted back at the time, cost $595, a ridiculously high Dollar Per Brolin Dune Poem (DPBDP) ratio. (For evidence, we’ll point to the following 2022 Late Show With Stephen Colbert clip of Brolin reading one of his poems from a book, referred to as The Art And Soul Of Dune, which features a cover extremely similar to the one Amazon has displayed for Exposures. Thank you for tuning in to this installment of CSI: Josh Brolin Sci-Fi Poetry Edition.) Exposures is published by the same company that published that earlier special edition, so we suspect this them making the book a bit more accessible to fans wanting a taste of Brolin’s magic.
In addition to Brolin’s writing (which he told Variety this week is, “tongue-in-cheek, sometimes it’s descriptive, sometimes it’s a dialogue and sometimes it’s a poem”), the book also features numerous pictures from the Dune movies’ director of photography, Greg Fraser, showing behind-the-scenes images from the sand-swept epics. Which all sounds pretty gorgeous, really, even if a rigorous self-examination makes it clear to ourselves that we’re mostly interested in hearing Josh Brolin write really effusive poetry about his co-workers. (Also, we’re holding out hope for an extra extra special edition, where he gets his thoughts on the popcorn bucket down on paper.)