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)

Comments

Jesse Walker | May 14, 2003, 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...)

mike c | May 14, 2003, 1:14am | #

That's Howard Roark you're thinking of. Right author, wrong book.

James Merritt | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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.

Lazarus Long | May 14, 2003, 3:05am | #

They will mess it up. See Starship Troopers...

Croesus | May 14, 2003, 3:15am | #

Am I the only person who thinks that Rand was a hack writer?

Stretch | May 14, 2003, 3:18am | #

Starship Troopers was all right. At least the redhead took her top off.

Stretch | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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.

Mike E | May 14, 2003, 4:09am | #

"Atlas Plugged" . . .the mental images are disturbing . . .

Will | May 14, 2003, 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.

joe | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 4:32am | #

joe,

I found reading Rand, well, I found it was similar to reading Soviet agitprop. :)

Stretch | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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.

Douglas Fletcher | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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.

Jag | May 14, 2003, 7:23am | #

Hey Stretch: A is A

mike c | May 14, 2003, 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 | May 14, 2003, 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.

Tom | May 15, 2003, 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.

joe | May 15, 2003, 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?

Stretch | May 15, 2003, 11:49am | #

You're in it, Joe.

s.m. koppelman | May 15, 2003, 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.

Steve McGregor | May 28, 2003, 10:29am | #

I personally think that Diane Lane should play the part of Dagney Taggart....

Joe Mama | August 21, 2003, 2:08am | #

Dagny Taggart? More like, "Tag-her." What a tramp!

digamma | February 21, 2004, 11:18am | #

Wow, I don't remember any of those things happening in Atlas Shrugged.