Atlas Shrugged. Will Audiences?
[Guest post by Lee Stranahan]
When I was a teenager, I was part of a clique of Ayn Rand fans. This was the early 1980s and right around the time that Miss Rand passed away. I actually crashed her funeral, but that’s another story. My point is, this was way before the internet so we would just chatter at each other in real time about topics like whether the rape scene in The Fountainhead was really rape rape, how cool it would be if the roads were all privatized and especially about how awesome an Atlas Shrugged MOVIE would be.
Seriously, we’d talk about it all the time. How would they do ‘the speech’? Should it be a miniseries or a really long movie? Maybe Rush could do the soundtrack! And casting! Boy, we talked about casting all the time. How about Harrison Ford as Hank Rearden? He’s got the suffering look. Jodie Foster as Dagny? Alda Alda as James Taggart or Ed Asner as Wesley Mouch! Think of all the stars you could cast! Even as recently as a couple of years ago, names like Angelina Jolie were being floated.
We couldn’t have imagined that when Atlas Shrugged actually came to life as a film, that the casting and production design would look to be on the level of a Canadian made-for-tv movie. As Jerry Seinfeld once said, “Who ARE these people?”
As jJerryThe film opens in theaters tomorrow. Coincidently, my ex-wife is an extra in it. I won’t be seeing it in the theater because I hardly ever see any movie in the theater. Nothing personal. As Jon Voight once said to me about Titanic, “I hope it does well, as I hope all films do well.” (Really, he said that to me. )
Hey! Jon Voight would have been good as Midas Mulligan!
– Lee Stranahan
That woman was a Godawful writer.
“Atlas Shrugged” is one of the few books in my life that I simply was unable to finish (I usually read them all the way through, even if I hate them).
I managed to get through “The Fountainhead”, but “Atlas Shrugged” was more than I could bear.
Dave Surls (baf401) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:02 pmI know who one of “those” guys is; Armin Shimmerman! Quark!
Felipe (d37996) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:03 pmDream-casting Atlas Shrugged (or, say, The Chronicles of Amber) is fun, but budgets have to be kept within reason, and there’s something to be said for not having the actor overwhelm the part (personally, I think Sean Connery would have been great as Hugh Akston, but the audience would be too busy saying “That’s Sean Connery, dude!” to pay attention to what he was saying no matter how well he nailed the part).
As for box office, we’ll see–I suspect it will end up doing quite well in the DVD market.
M. Scott Eiland (27aed4) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:26 pmSeriously, we’d talk about it all the time. How would they do ‘the speech’? Should it be a miniseries or a really long movie? Maybe Rush could do the soundtrack!
Ah-ha! So that’s why Patrick invited you to blog here!
JVW (615582) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:39 pmI read Atlas Shrugged as a teenager, and was unimpressed. The fact that I was reading writers like Austen, Joyce, George Eliot, etc. probably had something to do with it.
I tried re-reading it last year, and gave up after about a hundred and fifty pages, when I realized that almost every major character, especially the heroes, would, if they existed in real life, be some sort of psychotic. The only person I could imagine existing in the real world was Eddie (Dagny’s assistant). Matters were not helped by the sometimes very stiff dialogue, and the sometimes totally wacked dialogue that masqueraded as stiff dialogue. For instance, the first conversation between Hank and Dagny, in which they cheerfully discuss how nice it would be to force the other one to pay as much as possible in a commercial transaction. In other words, how to screw the other one over–the other, more interesting sort of screwing does not come for a few more hundred pages, IIRC. It’s not really possible to put that sort of dialogue on screen in any believable way. Which is odd, since Rand’s primary job before becoming an independent writer was to write screenplays.
I’ve also tried and failed to read the Fountainhead, for the same reason–I couldn’t motivate myself to become interested in a bunch of mentally ill people.
Her non-fiction, both in style and substance, is much much better than her fiction, and ought to be on everyone’s reading list.
kishnevi (1b86f1) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:46 pmI dunno, even as a teenager I kind of considered Ayn Rand to be intellectually sort of… teenage.
To me she was like the far-end-spectrum equivalent of say, Kurt Vonnegut, but without the ice-nine. Entertaining, and tossing around some cool ideas, but not actually proposing a model of the world that real people could bear to live in.
I think I thought even “2112” was actually artistically superior to Ayn Rand’s prose. Not that I read her stuff all the way through. At least “2112” has great drumming, though. But Ayn Rand’s personal demeanour was simply too funny for words. Good thing she didn’t marry Frank Lloyd Wright — it would have been crossing the streams, and the entire cosmos might have been vaporized as a result.
One thing I’ll say for Rand is that she was saying stuff that needed to be said, back when so many of the “serious” writers were embracing a mindlessly easy leftist vision that falls apart upon inspection, but which they sort of presumed all the other “bookish” people had also embraced as a factory pre-set. Rand was refreshing in that sense. I remember thinking, Wow — a different set of silly platitudes than the ones I’m used to!
Exagerrating to make a point can be amusing in light conversation, but the problem with using it to make a serious argument is that eventually you have to factor out the exagerrations in order to scale the argument back to reality, and in the process much of the original “point” turns out to be untenable. Same reason Plato’s Republic drives so many people dotty. As a thought experiment, yes; as an actual plan, um… no.
d. in c. (26c04c) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:50 pmShe wrote a dystopia, which is eerily close to real life events, it’s highly allegorical, reality today
narciso (8a8b93) — 4/14/2011 @ 6:55 pmis almost unfalsifiable, as the last few threads attest.
I had high hopes for this film, but the preview did nothing for me…the settings look too modern…I will most likely wait for it to come out on DVD…btw, I can hear Jon Voight saying that…just sounds like something he’d say!
Ellen (a13e9f) — 4/14/2011 @ 7:06 pmFred Barnes disagrees. He saw the whole movie. I’ll see it on DVD.
Mike K (8f3f19) — 4/14/2011 @ 7:22 pmThis is a story I demand to hear…
Scott Jacobs (d027b8) — 4/14/2011 @ 7:22 pmNot sure if anyone noticed, but the preview said “Atlas Srugged, Pt. 1.” I think about the book and figure that it can’t be done in less than a miniseries. That chick does not meet my expectations of Dagny. Looking forward to seeing it.
carlitos (00428f) — 4/14/2011 @ 7:48 pm“In 1957, Whittaker Chambers reviewed [in Buckley’s National Review,] ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ the novel by Miss Ayn Rand wherein she explicates the philosophy of “Objectivism,” which is what she has chosen to call her creed. Man of the Right, or conservative, or whatever you choose to call him, Chambers did in fact read Miss Rand right out of the conservative movement… [Rand] will have to go down as an Objectionist; my guess is she will go down as a novelist or, possibly, just plain go down, period.” – William F. Buckley, Jr.
DCSCA (9d1bb3) — 4/14/2011 @ 7:55 pmHoly Jeebus. Do you ever have an original thought, IMP?
JD (318f81) — 4/14/2011 @ 8:07 pmIs that the same Jon Voight the owned the used car George Costanza bought? Oh, right. That was John Voight. lol
PatAZ (d09837) — 4/14/2011 @ 8:13 pm‘Not sure if anyone noticed, but the preview said “Atlas Srugged, Pt. 1…’
My advice: Don’t hold your breath waiting for Part II.
Dave Surls (baf401) — 4/14/2011 @ 8:28 pmPatAZ
You mean John Voight the periodontist?
pinandpuller (938903) — 4/14/2011 @ 8:57 pmIt currently has 13 reviews at Rotten Tomatos, and they’re all negative.
Steven Den Beste (99cfa1) — 4/14/2011 @ 9:59 pmLooks… disappointing. I was hoping it would have that ‘film noir’ feel to it. Even the camera quality feels soap opera-ish. The setting is 5 years from now. 5 weeks to film on a $10 mil budget. It seems it was rushed due to the fact that the rights were about to expire. Disappointing…
the other JD (4c43bd) — 4/14/2011 @ 9:59 pmUnfortunately, a bunch of increasingly mentally ill people are interested in YOU.
They’re called the Federal Government.
Did you not HEAR the recent budget speech by the PotUS (aka, Nutjob-Denialist-in-Chief)???
Smock Puppet (c9dcd8) — 4/15/2011 @ 1:00 amJudging from the heavy duty media exposure the film is getting, that’s probably the only option you’ll have.
PJ O’Rourke reviews it, too.
.
IgotBupkis, President, United Anarchist Society (c9dcd8) — 4/15/2011 @ 1:03 ami’d go see it, but i don’t go to Left LA for much of anything, and it’s playing in Westweird:
lousy traffic, stupid and expensive parking, plus hordes of UCLA students, some even in the theater.
i’ll pass.
redc1c4 (fb8750) — 4/15/2011 @ 1:38 amMaybe some day it’ll play on a revival-house double bill with a bad low-rent long-winded adaptation of “The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists.”
Balance!
d. in c. (68ff46) — 4/15/2011 @ 3:23 amI read Anthem. The rest were to pretentious and self absorbed to stomach.
quasimodo (4af144) — 4/15/2011 @ 10:07 amShe was a vain old broad. When she was old.
Saw her interviewed by Phil Donahue. What a suck up he was that day.
Wasn’t he always that, quasi?
PatAZ (d09837) — 4/15/2011 @ 10:54 am“She was a vain old broad. When she was old.”
Unfortunately, she was also a vain old broad when she was young!
Dave Surls (be7c7f) — 4/15/2011 @ 7:48 pmI saw the movie this afternoon and rate it three stars. Finally, an adult movie without stupid explosions or special effects every thirty seconds. No stuntmen flying through the air or jumping twenty feet without breaking an ankle.
I work in industrial research and the movie gives a little taste of what it takes to get a product to market, although movie time constraints made it look too easy. The theater had a good crowd at a Sunday matinee.
This is a good movie to use to rate the critics. See the movie and compare what you see to various movie critics. I’ll never look at the tomato-meter again.
GaryP (1f2034) — 4/17/2011 @ 4:23 pm