Thank you. I wish I had said that. 
To a large extent I believe that that presentation is largely a strawman. People read, “Communism sucks!”, and replace it in their mind with, “Capitalism rules!” or, “Hippies suck!” Hippies aren’t Communists, so if you’re of a Liberal bent, she’s not really railing against you. Nor is denouncing Communism an endorsement of Capitalism. She spends 800 pages saying why the lack of a free market is bad, and modern liberals who like to think that the free market is bad read that as an attack on them. But modern liberals consider the phrase “the free market is bad” to be equivalent to “We should have universal health care!” Ayn Rand wasn’t talking about universal health care. She was writing in the days when Socialism still referred to an ideal of no government (i.e. Anarchy) and of equal, shared wealth…and where Communism was just the stepping stone to that. Unless you would be perfectly happy to make it law that if someone asks to borrow anything you own, you have to oblige them, then what Rand is ranting against has nothing to do with what you’re thinking when you think, “Socialism” or “Communism”. The terms have been updated over the last 50 years to mean things that are basically incompatible with what she was talking about.
In the odd case where Rand gets off of ranting about Communism and actually talks about Capitalism and the free market, it’s always in conjunction with her ideas of moral behavior. She thought that Libertarians were just as much a group of idiots as Socialists because they also advocated Anarchism. She would require you to be beholden to some sort of basic, shared morality that encourages people to do well by the rest of the world. When Dagny Taggart goes out and saves the world, that’s not Ayn Rand saying that wealthier people are de facto noble heroes. She’s saying that if you’re in a position of wealth, you have a duty to the rest of the world to use your power to make the world a better place by investing in it and making everything to the best of your ability, and that’s something everyone should strive for at every level.
She wouldn’t need to advocate for this method of living if she thought it already existed in the US at the time she was writing.
Like I said, there’s almost nothing about Capitalism nor the free market in Atlas Shrugged. It’s almost entirely about all the ways that Communism, as practiced by the Russians in the early-mid 20th century, causes an economy to lose efficiency. Unless you’re a early-mid 20th century Russian Communist, everything she’s ranting about has nothing to do with you. Nor do those rants equate to a glowing endorsement of Capitalism. As best one can tell from Atlas Shrugged, she basically just was too busy ranting to say anything one way or the other about it. If you’re reading it otherwise, you’re probably not reading it right.
And so it would be, if it included 800 pages specifically about how wonderful or horrible it is to live in a capitalist republic.
Ah, thank God. My Ambien prescription runs out soon. In a year I’ll have a companion DVD for my favorite sleep-aid novel.
Maybe not Glurge; but, while I’ve never read Atlas Shrugged, if it is anything like The Fountainhead or Anthem, or if half the things I’ve read about the book are true, then it is very definitely what TVTropes calls an Author Tract. See also Mary Suetopia and Strawman Political. Not, in any case, journalism.
TVTropes, BTW, also has a “UsefulNotes” page on Objectivism.
I still can’t help but think that John Mace was kidding when he said that it would debut at #1, but if we’re taking this seriously, none of what you just said would do it either. As an example, Winter’s Bone not only played at Sundance, it won the Grand Jury Prize and the Screenwriting award, it’s 95% at Rotten Tomatoes, 90 at Metacritic, is widely believed to be on track for multiple Academy Award nominations as well as dominating the awards season elsewhere, and IT has only made $4,479,003 at the box office! At its widest release, it only played in 141 theaters and never got closer to the Top 10 than #17. Its distribution company COMPLETELY fucked up IMO. It should have been released in October or November, where it would have made money based on the awards season buzz. The same thing happened last summer with The Hurt Locker, which only made something like $12 million. I think it was on DVD by the time awards season came around. The same thing will probably happen with Winter’s Bone.
Anyway, Atlas Shrugged may get the Randians out of the house, but who else will see it? Hardly anybody. I have no interest in seeing it, and I see practically everything (tomorrow night’s movie, Twelve, will make the 150th film I’ve seen in the theater so far this year).
To even get in the Top 20, this movie will have to be truly great, which is doubtful given the content, it will have to have a marketing genius behind it, and it will have to have lots of money for publicity. I doubt it will get anywhere near the Top 10. I’m with Eyebrows 0f Doom, I believe it will play some smaller theaters in LA and New York, and maybe Chicago, then go direct to video. I could be wrong about everything and I’ll admit it if I am.
Racist? Cite. (I have no doubts about her homophobia- I think Nathaniel Branden mentioned it & probably at one time shared it.)
Btw, Eddie Willers in this production is black.
Once when speculating about a star-studded version of ATLAS, I thought “Denzel Washington wouldn’t be a bad John Galt at all.”
John Mace could possibly be right. I suspect he’s thinking about the huge sales for right-wing books these days. Sarah Palin’s biography sold a million copies in the first month. Beck and Coulter and Levin are at the top of the best-seller charts on a regular basis.
Even if the only people who see the movie are people who bought a Palin or Beck book in the last year, the movie could open to $30 million dollars. That’s maybe 3 million tickets.
But more likely is that it will open to limited release, and the publishers will be watching extremely carefully for whether it’s striking a chord with the country. If it’s well acted, well written, and philosophically compelling to the right and the center, it’ll make a zillion dollars. If the limited release just exposes serious flaws in the film, it will fade away fast.
$30 million? You’re dreaming.
The budget being small doesn’t necessarily preclude it from being a big hit - there’s obviously examples of small movies that have hit it big - but it also makes mounting an expensive ad campaign foolhardy. The production company has literally no other credits to its name and no bankable star to hang the film on, and unless there’s a secret financier willing to throw Sun Myung-Moon amounts of money into promoting it, there’s no chance of convincing theatre owners to exhibit the film. The Passion of the Christ worked because Mel Gibson threw his weight and money behind the film, and knew how to sell the controversy (religion is more of a selling point than politics, as well). Gibson had clout and the knowledge of how to work the system. Production/distribution companies without experience have a much tougher battle than people realize - look at everything Summit has put out besides Twilight. Just making the 3000 or more prints to get it nationwide would add 50 per cent or so to the budget of the film.
And that’s setting aside the subject matter, which is not blockbuster-friendly.
As I said before Left Behind had a much wider fan base than Ayn rand, and it still took a shit at the box office. So did that Ben Stein creationist movie. A movie that appeals only to right wingers cannot be a hit, and Atlas Shrugged is too weak and puerile a property to even have universal appeal to right wingers. It has no chance to appeal to the center at all, and no chance to appeal to young people. This thing will play obscurely in a few selected theaters, fizzle quickly and go to DVD within 6 months of release. It’s basically going to follow the pattern of your standard Kirk Cameron movie. Actually, I’m not even sure it will get that. It doesn’t have the Jesus angle (though I doubt the movie will call much attention to Rand’s atheism), and it has no compelling story or characters. It’s one of the worst bestelling novels ever written.
I’ll withdraw racist as the cite doesn’t give it’s own cites as it does for the homophobic statements.
I hope this is hilariously bad.
I can imagine the story significantly updated, keeping only the primary concept (and Rand’s original working title) of “The Strike”, in which various inventors and producers and artists opt out of the system that has turned them into slaves. Maybe it’s in protest over rampant internet copying or cheap overseas manufacturing, i.e. “why the hell should I invent something new just to have knockoffs flood the market? See how well you get along without me, chumps!”
Rand denounced racism, both in print and in her lectures. In *The Virtue of Selfishness," *she wrote: “Racism is the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism.” I had once been at one of her lectures, and someone in the audience pointed out that there didn’t seem to be many black people in attendance. Did that imply that Objectivism was a racist philosophy? She became very indignant, saying [and I’m paraphrasing] that Objectivism is a rational philosophy, and the question is insulting to black people, implying that they’re not as rational as white people. She pointed out that many of her followers were exposed to her ideas in college, and that [at that time] not as many black people had the opportunity to attend college.
And about her homophobia: Back then, people in general were a lot more homophobic than now; it was part of our culture. And to the best of my knowledge, she never spoke about the subject unless someone asked her about it. She believed that homosexuality was a “developmental detour,” but that gay people should have the same rights as anyone else.
Her assertion that Racism has anything to do with “collectivism” is almost as offensive as racism itself. Really, if you read her work, you can mentally change “collectivist” to “liberal” and you’ve got Rush Limbaugh.
This strikes me more as a direct to DVD or made for tv film than a #1 blockbuster. Besides, it’s not as if the kids are dressing up as John Galt for Purim these days.
I don’t see why all the hate about Atlas Shrugged though. To me it just read as a 1000 page diatribe against laziness, corruption and entitlement.
And it seems particularly relevant today. Atlas Shrugged deals with a fictitous scenareo where all the greatest minds and builders decide to opt out rather than have their wealth confiscated by a corrupt and incompetant government run by “looters and mooches”. What we have today is a society where all our greatest minds all become investment bankers and lawyers. Not only have they effectively “opted out” of producing for society, they have effectively become the looters and mooches that Rand describes in her book.
Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think it’s a particularly well-written book. It’s long and tedious and not particularly exciting. But it is considered a “classic” of literature.
No chance John… its one thing to buy warehouses full of some god awful right wing screed and pass it out for free… what’s fox gonna do? Buy out all the tickets and just show the thing to empty theatres??
Yeah number one… look politics aside… my red state good ol boy co-workers may slap that bumper sticker on their car because Glen said so… but when it comes to movies they won’t even know the theatres this bad boy will play in. Rand would love that elitism wouldn’t she. Now Stallone’s newest flick…
Even if it bombs at the theater, it should do tolerably well in DVD sales, as Rand has a considerable number of fans and followers, and the book routinely sells more than a hundred thousand copies a year. Assuming they can keep production costs low (I’m expecting a lot of cheesy CGI) there’s a good chance they can complete the trilogy on the basis of DVD sales. (They’ll probably still insist on a theatrical release just for prestige purposes.) The actual quality of the film won’t matter very much. After all, the novel it’s based on doesn’t amount to much either.
I’ll probably go see it for the same perverse reason I went to see Battlefield Earth. I just have to know if it’s really as bad as I think it’s going to be.
The problem is broadening the appeal of a deadly-dull story beyond that dedicated fetishistic fan-base, and trying to make a movie that will actually hold general audiences’ attention. Maybe they can get Rosie O’Donnell and Dan Akroyd to play detectives in a zany subplot about an antitrust investigation?