Atlas Shrugged Script: Only Slightly More Than Twice as Long as Galt's Speech
Brian Doherty | May 23, 2007, 11:16am
David Boaz at the Cato blog sums up some thoughts from Atlas Shrugged screenwriter Randall Wallace on the script, which is complete--at 129 pages.
Here's how Wallace, an Oscar nominee for his Braveheart script, explains the connections:
The assertion that change occurs when heroic individuals are willing to stand up–and further, that people in the herd want to be heroic individuals but aren’t encouraged to do so until they find a leader worth following–is very much in Braveheart, and it’s something thoroughly ingrained in the American psyche.
I think Mel would make a great Hank Rearden, by the way.
While I live in L.A., I'm not quite a full-on "Hollywood insider." Still, I did subscribe to Variety for a year, and I'll go out on a limb and say a big-deal epic for which no director nor complete cast appear to have been slated is pretty unlikely to be out next summer, no matter what Wallace says.
GILMORE | May 23, 2007, 1:06pm | #
I have a few points to make without reading anything anyone's already said, which is disrespectful and lazy. I apologize.
- Why does the fact that Ayn Rand was a Fundylibertoid mean that ANONE, especially us, should care about her shitty fiction? Really. I can agree with a lot of her basic ideas, and also hold that she was a crap storyteller. Her longer novels in my view dont deserve to be filmed. They're too flat and unuanced. Soap operas with economic subtext.
Anthem, however, would make a decent sci-fi film ... One reason that book succeeds is that she didnt give herself room to pontificate, and just told a PK Dick style parable.
- Also Ayn_Randian's existence = proves NotThatDavids point
I fully belive that it is fair, right, good and proper for any particular camp to mock, malign and abuse the fundies in their midst. Democrats should kick the hippies in the nuts, the GOP should evict the Dobsons, and we, the leftover people, should remind our core-constituency of nerds, sci fi freaks, ferret-owners, transgenderists, etc. that they all have to sit in the back of the bus and shut up so they dont ruin our hepcat image.
See, like Nick. Nick is a great face for Libertoids, because he gives the impression we're a bunch of suave, economically literate...uhh... potheads. :)
Ayn Rand - herself and her fan club - tends to reinforce the image of libertoids as nerdy paranoid naysayers with layers of personality problems. Basically, someone you'd never want showing up at your kegger.
It's nice to refer to Rand as a historical pioneer for Libertarianism, but it doesnt mean we have to also be her literary fan club.
Fluffy | May 23, 2007, 1:22pm | #
Well, Gilmore, I'm not sure I agree completely with your literary evaluation.
Atlas is in fact unnuanced - so much so that Rand invested time and energy in inventing a theory of aesthetics to justify her lack of nuance. But that doesn't necessarily discredit it in literary terms for all time. It's a stylistic throwback without much of a place in the history of 20th century "high" literature, sure.
I think The Fountainhead and We the Living are actually pretty decent literature, and aren't nearly as stilted as Atlas.
I don't think Atlas would make a good film for several reasons:
1. It's too long, and can't really be profitably shortened in my humble opinion without having the implausibility of a "strike of the mind" toppling an industrial society heightened to really obscene levels.
2. It takes place in a magic-realist America that combines the attributes of many different eras, and would therefore have to take place in a sort of "Hudsucker Proxy" world that I don't think filmgoers would take to.
3. Many of the subplots would make little to no sense to a modern audience. The Rearden marriage makes no sense in 2006, Dr. Robert Stadler's conflict would be alien to the audience, etc. But taking out the subplots [the likely solution] just makes the story that much flatter.
I also think the film is a bad idea because too many of the readers of Atlas take it as a political and economic primer instead of as a metaphor for the role of reason in man's existence. The strike idea is, at the end of the day, silly - technological society runs on too broad a base of human expertise to be vulnerable to the disappearance of a small group of people. That's why Rand has to construct the composite environment in #2, above - to create a world where the strike could work. And once we dispose of the literal strike and look at the story as a metaphor, I just think that there HAS TO BE a better way to make a film that makes that metaphorical point than to try to squeeze Atlas into 2 hours.
James Anderson Merritt | May 24, 2007, 3:28am | #
# Fluffy | May 23, 2007, 1:22pm | #
# I don't think Atlas would make
# a good film for several reasons:
# 2. It takes place in a magic-realist
# America that combines the attributes
# of many different eras, and would
# therefore have to take place in a
# sort of "Hudsucker Proxy" world that
# I don't think filmgoers would take to.
I disagree with you there. Don't think "fantasy 1940s that never were..." Think "sf 2040s that might yet be..." There are a lot of rail fans out there, and many economic and technological reasons why we might see a revitalized rail system in the near future. The person or persons who make that happen could forge a new modern era of transportation, and be among the class of magnates to which Rand alludes in AS.
Furthermore, politics and economic trends seem cyclical. After a booming entrepreneurial, laissez faire period of several post-millennial decades, in which South America (notably Chile and Argentina) could once again ascend, we could fall back into a statist-socialist global pattern, which would pave the way for the Cuffy Meigses and James Taggarts of the world.
It just seems to me that setting the AS movie in a possible FUTURE, as opposed to an imaginary, parallel universe PAST, would be the better call.
