Atlas Shrugged Movie
While doing some research for the directory of Ayn Rand admirers at the Atlasphere, I came across a scintillating interview with James Hart, who has apparently written a new screenplay for Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. (Link found via Miss Liberty.)
He comments:
“I hated [Atlas Shrugged] in college,” the 56-year-old New Yorker admitted. “It was the peace and love era and the values of the time weren’t consistent with Ayn Rand’s philosophy. Years later, I read it again and it blew me away. I’ve read it four times in the last six months.”
What changed Hart’s mind?
“We’re on the threshold of what Ayn Rand predicted,” he noted. “Socialism has crept into everything and we’re penalizing the thinkers, the movers and shakers for being successful. In a way, the world that Ayn Rand created in Atlas Shrugged is the United States today.”
How true. And it’s nice to hear that the movie’s financial backers are not only admirers of the novel, but also apparently committed to seeing the project through to fruition this time.
UPDATE 12/26/03 - I just found another interview with James V. Hart, from 1993, this time with NY Screenwriters Magazine. It’s an interesting interview, although he doesn’t discuss the Atlas Shrugged project, of course. He makes an interesting (and probably instructive) comment about the difficulty of keeping control over your own script:
I think we have become an industry of re-writers. As fellow screenwriters we should discourage this and I’m afraid that screenwriters are becoming a Guild of Re-Writers as opposed to Writers. But when the director says, ‘I want more writers’ that’s what you get.
Makes me wonder how much of a problem this will be on the Atlas adaptation.
UPDATE (2/27/08) - You can now learn much, much more about the movie at the Atlasphere’s Atlas Shrugged movie archive.
Originally published at Mudita Journal. Please leave any comments there.