"There's a cone of silence between two of the pillars over here on our left," the Baron said. "We can talk without fear of being overheard." He led the way with his waddling gait into the sound-deadening field, feeling the noises of the keep become dull and distant.

The Count moved up beside the Baron, and they turned, facing the wall so their lips could not be read.  - Frank Herbert - DUNE - 1965

Herbert referenced a “Cone of Silence” in his first and second Dune books; a device deployed to insure ones conversation would not be overheard. In the Dune Part 1, we utilize this device in an invented scene between Reverend Mother Mohiam, Piter de Vries and the Baron. Desiring privacy for a critical piece of traitorous conversation, Mohiam intoned to an off-camera servant “Activate cone of silence”. For months this line did its job, unnoticed, till a moment of down-time during the first temp mix when I realized that keeping it as-is would have unintended comic consequences.

For anyone over the age of 50, Get Smart was a favorite TV program in the U.S. It was certainly one of mine. One of the many Bond-esque spy-gadgets it employed for comic effect (let’s not forget the Shoe-Phone) was a device they called the “cone of silence”, a plastic shield that lowered from above, encapsulating the speakers, insuring they would not be heard. We, too, had a cone of silence in Dune.

Interestingly both Dune and Get Smart saw their introduction to the public in 1965. We also know that Frank Herbert referenced the cone of silence in other science fiction works of his starting in 1963, predating both Dune and Get Smart. While we will never now whom the actual author of the cone of silence might be, we did know that any comic allusions, thanks to the TV show, were not good for our film. If for no other reason than in Get Smart, it was constantly failing.

Having grown up in Montreal, Denis Villeneuve was likely immune to the cultural consequences of using the line as-is (it may have been translated differently if Get Smart ever was broadcast in Montreal at all!), and had we not brought it up, it might have stayed in the film. My guess is that both Eric Roth and Jonathan Spaihts, our amazing writers, were old enough to be familiar with the TV show but used the concept as written by Herbert himself to be as faithful to the original as possible.

None the less, not willing to risk a laugh, earned or not, Denis asked us to change it. Rather than rename the device (and we racked our brains for alternatives) we simply cut to RevMo‘s back and removed the word “cone”, leaving the line a simple command: “Activate silence”.

Here’s what one of the cones of silence looks like.