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Atlas Plugged
Yet another attempt will be made at bringing Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged to the screen. A new production company says they have a scripter all ready to go. No word on a director or cast, so let the wild speculation fly.
Me, I'd like to see Vin Diesel as John Galt just hear that voice boom out "A is A -- and Man is Man" in a dark theater.
(via Free-Market.net)
Jesse Walker|5.14.03 @ 1:01AM|#
How about Carrot Top as John Galt? (I've never actually read the book, so you'll have to tell me whether he's appropriate for the role...)
James Merritt|5.14.03 @ 2:10AM|#
Many people have commented on how difficult it has seemed, to
translate "Shrugged" to the screen in the modern day, and make it
relevant and interesting to modern American audiences. Something as
central to the book as the railroad industry, for instance, is
today merely a shell of its post WWII self, and hardly serves as
the apt and compelling metaphor for a disintegrating civilization
that Rand clearly intended it to be.
Yet, if you get rid of the railroad, you have a problem. An Atlas
Shrugged about the auto industry, the broadcast industry, the
airline industry, or the computer industry, for instance, just
wouldn't be the same. For one thing, why would Rearden Metal be so
important without a need for sturdy rails? "Rearden Chip" just
doesn't have the same feel, does it? Keeping the railroad, on the
other hand, forces scriptwriters to go retro, setting the story in
an alternative universe, and at a time, when the railroads haven't
yet become as feeble as we see them to be here and now. Some people
would find an alternative-retro "Shrugged" quaint(as they did, say,
the 1984 remake of "1984"). I think, however, that any such
audience will probably be smaller than the blockbuster-obsessed
film and television industries would like to see.
I'd set "Shrugged" where it belongs: in the reasonably near future,
where innovation and entrepreneurism have reinvented and
revitalized high-tech, high speed rail travel, perhaps as an
alternative to air travel in a post 9/11 world, and perhaps as part
of a wave of economic activity and prosperity that followed a
general repudiation of statism and authoritarianism in our present
time (I only wish!). The key to plausibility here would be for
someone to come up with COMMERCIAL rail systems for inter-city and
intra-city travel that could compete with both the automobile and
the government-subsidized public transit systems. Once this is
established, however, and with some updating of other technological
anachronisms (e.g., the use of the internet as a global broadcast
device instead of a radio network as a national medium), the rest
of the book would pretty much fall into place (and some elements,
e.g., the energy-field "cloak" over Gault's Gulch, would become
even more plausible).
The most important benefit from setting "Shrugged" in the future
would be to get people looking forward, toward a possible future,
as a place we might come to if we don't make some changes now, not
a place we already managed to avoid because of a lucky fall of the
dice.
As outright, but scrupulously plausible science fiction with a
strong resonance to our own political situation today, I think
"Shrugged" could do very well, either on TV or in the theatres. I'd
buy that for a golden dollar.
Stretch|5.14.03 @ 2:57AM|#
Oh God, the last thing you want to do is start egging on the
randroids around here. If I hear "A is A" one more time the blood
vessels in my neck are going to pop.
I propose that John Galt start a fresh, subversive website at the
start of the heady tech bubble in the mid-90s. The website could be
called...I don't know...Suck.com or something. A wacky assortment
of characters could work for him for very low wages until
eventually they all run out of money and spend the next 5 years
explaining to prospective employers that "Suck.com" was NOT a porno
site and was actually a capital-I Important website.
Nah. That's too far-fetched.
Stretch|5.14.03 @ 3:22AM|#
I confess, in my very early college days, to being an Ayn Rand
ayatolla.
Yes, she was a hack writer. Don't get me wrong - there's lots of
good ideas there, and her influence has been huge. But, at least in
Atlas Shrugged, the characters are all flat and predictable. Not
characteristics of a good book.
James Merritt|5.14.03 @ 3:35AM|#
The "Starship Troopers" movie did take a great many liberties
with Heinlein's book. I saw the movie first, and so compared
"backward," but was surprised at how some of Heinlein's most
important political messages survived the translation, more or less
intact: the notion of citizenship being merely one. I also thought
that the retro-flavored, yet high-techy Federal propaganda spots
scattered throughout the movie were incredible satire, of the kind
I had missed since RoboCop. It took MSNBC and Fox News Channel
years and the Iraqi war to equal or surpass that level of satire in
real life.
Heinlein seemed to have a pretty good sense of humor, to judge from
his Time Enough for Love and Friday period, so I am sad that he
didn't live long enough to see and comment on the movie. He might
not have blessed it as a faithful version of his book, but I
suspect he might have liked it well enough, and appreciated the
compliment.
Jamie Lynn|5.14.03 @ 4:00AM|#
I agree with James. If Atlas Shrugged is to have a future as a
popular film it must be set in the near future rather than the near
past.
I think, however, that some way needs to be found to involve the
telcoms and the silicon industry in the plot, since they are a huge
part of the current american economy and I don't see them going
away anytime soon. Perhaps instead of an oil tycoon Wyatt could be
the owner of a small telcom and make some amazing discovery in the
tecnology industry that keeps him rising toward the top?
Croesus|5.14.03 @ 4:02AM|#
I think a lot of Rand's ideas are flat out nuts, or at least despicable. Her notions concerning gender relations are a good example. They remind me of the "weaker vessel" concept in Christian circles.
Will|5.14.03 @ 4:11AM|#
I truly think Rand is one of the great writers of the 20th
Century. The problem is that she is a genre unto herself. So it is
difficult to take the measure her achievement by comparison with
other authors working in the same aesthetic milieu, because there
aren't any.
The similarity between Rand's advocates and detractors in terms of
fanatical intensity is striking.
|5.14.03 @ 4:11AM|#
I think Rand's ideas were seriously screwed up (remember the female labor activist in "Fountainhead" that had "the kind of hands that would drop things all over the kitchen?"), but that she was a great author. The characters were flat, but she certainly did a lot with them, and her ability to draw the reader into her world was first rate. This left liberal devoured every word of that book, and this thread has convinced me I have to read "Atlas Shrugged."
Croesus|5.14.03 @ 4:32AM|#
joe,
I found reading Rand, well, I found it was similar to reading
Soviet agitprop. :)
Stretch|5.14.03 @ 4:50AM|#
I'd hesitate to use the words "Ayn" and "milieu" anywhere in the
same paragraph.
Gun to the head, I'd have to say "Atlas Shrugged" is a book that
should be read. Not because it's good literature - it's not. Not
because it's good philosophy - it's not. (How useful are the works
of a "philosopher" who never bothered to read much
philosophy?)
The best I can come up with is this: It's a very crude but useful
cudgel with which to bash your own collectivist instincts over the
head with. It sort of encourages a habit to think through clearly
many of the things we all take for granted.
Her most important insight is a profoundly conservative one: That
human nature is essentially fixed, and we'd all be a lot better of
acknowledging and dealing with that fact, rather than trying to
change it.
mojo jojo|5.14.03 @ 5:03AM|#
Well Rand had her flaws like all humans (she chained smoked for one which eventually killed her). But she WAS the champion for "reason, individualism and capitalism" at a time and place when those ideas were ananthema and for that she will always be a hero to me. As for the movie it will be interesting to see how they can stuff it into a reasonable amount of time. Whoever made Starship Troopers should be flogged for ruinng one of my fav books. Where in the hell was the powered battle armor!! I waited more than a decade for that movie and they screwed it up. aaaarrrgghhh
Stretch|5.14.03 @ 5:11AM|#
Yeah, but don't forget about that redhead taking her top off. Seriously. I don't think THAT was in the book.
digamma|5.14.03 @ 5:19AM|#
Jason Alexander as James Taggart. (The un-funny George
Costanza.)
Nicole Kidman as Dagny Taggart.
Kevin Spacey as Hank Rearden.
Alan Cumming as Cuffy Meigs.
"Tom Sawyer" in the background during the final escape.
|5.14.03 @ 5:41AM|#
They ought to set the story inside a giant latex version of Ayn Rand's head, where giant laser beams come out of her eyes that have the power to bore the living piss out of people who try to read her books...
Warren|5.14.03 @ 6:05AM|#
"Shrugged" had a fine premise; The productive members of society giving the finger to the rest of the world and refusing to support their sanctimonious irresponsibility anymore. But the damn thing just drones on and on. And if you didn't get the point after the she dropped the first five hundred anvils, she spells everything out a few dozen times more in the last 100 pages. Honestly, encountering Rand (especially her non-fiction) was a turning point in my life, but I wish she'd have stopped at "Fountainhead" and never bothered with this one at all.
|5.14.03 @ 7:23AM|#
I am tending to agree with those who think a movie of Atlas
Shrugged would have to be set in the near future with some kind of
revamped rail system.
Its hard to imagine how well it would sell, and of course like any
movie, it would depend a lot on how its put together. Few people
take the entirety of Ayn Rand's philosophy seriously (I
don't...lest I couldn't enjoy Heinlein!), but a lot of people would
site either Atlas or the Fountainhead as a book that had a
significant influence on their thinking.
As for the concerns about doing to Atlas what they did to Starship
Troopers, the link said the screen play was being done by the guy
who made Contact into a movie. There are signicant differences, but
the movie perserved the theme of the book pretty well, and it
wasn't bad as a movie either, not as bad as Troopers.
The real question is, who would write Halley's Fifth? You couldn't
ignore it, and you would have to get it right.
David|5.14.03 @ 8:57AM|#
Halley's music: Danny Elfman. No, seriously - he could do
it.
And Kidman as Dagny...you know, that's pretty good. Spacey - not
quite. Harrison Ford, perhaps.
|5.15.03 @ 6:35AM|#
Agree with Lazarus Long - I dread to think that they would do to
this book what they did to Starship Troopers.
I don't think Rand was a hack writer, but I find her characters too
wooden, although she was an unashamed stylist who despised
so-called "gritty realism" and wanted to portray people as they
could be, rather than were. That surely explains much of the books'
appeal.
I have always thought of Shrugged as science fiction anyway.
Note to Rand-haters - there would hardly be a libertarian movement
today in the US without her.
|5.15.03 @ 9:42AM|#
Croesus,
A lot of that Soviet agitprop was great art (although a lot more
sucked). I'm going to whatever libertarians have instead of Hell,
aren't I?
s.m. koppelman|5.15.03 @ 12:20PM|#
Gilbert Gottfried as Hank Rearden.
A chimpanzee with a bicycle horn as Dagny Taggart.
I confess I haven't read this masterpiece. There's something about
reading Rand's dialogue that makes me want to scrape out my
eyeballs and eat them.
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