Soon to follow were “El Topo,” and “The Holy Mountain,” which was a smash hit in Europe. By that point, Jodorowsky was swimming in offers, and he found his next project in a cinematic version of Frank Herbert’s sci-fi novel “Dune.” (Jodorowsky hadn’t read the book, but a friend had told him it was great.) With the backing of a young French oil heir named Michel Seydoux, Jodorowsky worked feverishly for two years, creating storyboards with a team of artists and assembling a cast that included David Carradine, Mick Jagger, Orson Welles and Salvador Dalí (who insisted on a salary of $100,000 per minute of screen time). Pink Floyd and the French prog-rock band Magma signed on to provide scores for two of the warring planets.

After burning through more than $2 million of Seydoux’s money and never shooting a frame, Jodorowsky could not find additional backing. While he believed his “Dune” would mark the arrival of an “artistical, cinematographical god,” Hollywood saw a money pit.

“Is his ‘Dune’ a failure?” Frank Pavich, the director of the new film, says. “I don’t think it is. Everything is there, everything is in the storyboard book Jodo made — the artwork, every scene, every bit of dialogue, every camera move, everything. Was his goal to make a film, or was his goal to change the world? Well, if his goal was to change the world, then mission accomplished.” Pavich makes that case in the final section of his documentary, comparing the French comic-book artist Moebius’s sketches for “Dune” with uncannily similar clips from “Star Wars,” “Raiders of the Lost Ark” and “The Terminator.” Did George Lucas, Steven Spielberg and James Cameron take ideas from the storyboards of “Dune,” copies of which, we’re told in the documentary, were left with every major studio? “Jodorowsky’s Dune” argues that there was at least a subconscious influence. Of no dispute, though, is that the movie sired Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” which was co-written by Dan O’Bannon, the special effects creator of “Dune,” and given its Oscar-winning visual effects by another “Dune” artist, the Swiss surrealist H. R. Giger. Moebius and the British painter Chris Foss, who dreamed up the interstellar spaceships of “Dune,” were consultants on that film.

In “Jodorowsky’s Dune,” Jodorowsky tells Pavich: “I have the ambition to live 300 years. I will not live 300 years. Maybe I will live one year more. But I have the ambition.”