Hasn’t Hollywood done enough?

April 28, 2006

I’ve noticed that a lot of conservative blogs are rallying behind United 93. With this in mind, I can only imagine how they’ll react to this.

[tag]Ayn Rand[/tag]’s most ambitious novel may finally be brought to the bigscreen after years of false starts.

Lionsgate has picked up worldwide distribution rights to “[tag]Atlas Shrugged[/tag]” from Howard and Karen Baldwin (“Ray”), who will produce with John Aglialoro.

As for stars, book provides an ideal role for an actress in lead character Dagny Taggart, so it’s not a stretch to assume Rand enthusiast Angelina Jolie’s name has been brought up. Brad Pitt, also a fan, is rumored to be among the names suggested for lead male character John Galt.

Indeed, Drudge and others are apparently looking forward to it.

Be afraid.

I hear Fox News has already picked up the TV rights.

Kidding. Probably.

  • Well, when Roger Ebert gives United 93 four stars, it’s pretty safe to say it’s a good film regardless of what bloggers say about it.

  • Why am I completely unsurprised that Hollywood’s biggest smarmy asshole, Brad Pitt (it’s why he plays smarmy assholes so well) and well-meaning but brain-dead Angelina are Randians????

    Trust me, been there, done that, you can’t believe it’s going to happen until they announce Day #1of the shooting schedule, and then you can’t believe it will be in your local theater till you see the ads. Even nowadays, half the movies that get made get shelved after production.

    The fact they’re making this announcement at this point in the game is “whistling past the graveyard.”

    TC, yer Hollyweird Reporter

  • Oh, and Lions Gate “picking up worldwide distribution rights” didn’t cost them a penny. They signed a “deal memo” filled with enough qualifications as to be legally meaningless, unless the movie gets made, and the producers then take it and go begging to the various film financiers, saying “see, if we make it they’ll distribute it and you know it’s such a good movie that it will make scads of money and we’ll be able to pay back the production loan so won’t you pleasepleaseplease loan us the money to make this wonderful movie that will make scads of money because people have been panting to see it for the past fifty years” (and to do it properly, that should all be run together at “chip ‘n’ dale” speed)

    Yer Hollyweird Reporter

  • Brad Pitt is a total liberal.

    But I agree, if this movie is made, It Might Change America!!!

    Oh, no, please don’t do it…..movies are so very powerful and effective at fomenting political change. Ayn Rand’s grandchildren will be Presidents! Run away!!!

  • This isn’t such an eyeroller, IMHO.

    First of all, it could be used to remind everyone of Rand’s atheistic principles & secondly, it’d be nice to also remind everyone that this is a work of fiction.

    Fiction, fiction, fiction! That’s why the world in the book works – because it doesn’t exist.

  • Whether you like Rand’s philosophy or not, “Atlas Shrugged” is still THE single most boring work of fiction ever published in human history, bar none. I gave up reading it halfway through, after screaming for the five thousandth time “I GET IT, AYN! I GOT IT 200 PAGES AGO!” Rand makes the Incredible Hulk look like a master of subtlety. I predict the movie will be “Waterworld Redux”. And I have to admit that I’ve never seen an Angelina Jolie movie that I didn’t hate, so it’s got THAT “it factor” going for it too.

  • I hear you, Greg. Back when I was a young, impressionable 23-year-old I tried about six times to get through Galt’s 100+ page speech toward the end of the book but was never able to do it. And I almost never put a book down without finishing it. Talk about beating a dead horse. If the book had been around in ancient times I’m guessing Atlas might have been assigned a different task. (“Here you go, Atlas, read this book, every last m-fing word of it! And then read it again, and again, and again until the end of time…”) And then someone else could have come along and written “Atlas Yawned.”

    Can’t imagine this movie would be anything but a disaster, unless it’s bad enough to be hysterical and not just tedious or annoying.

  • Not to digress too much,but is Debbie Schlussel (the United 93 reviewer) the reincarnation of Roy Cohn?
    Her bio section should be titled “Bush Stooge”

  • I’m with GMF on this one. Atlas Shrugged is a fantasy which is why it appeals to coming-of-intellectual-age young people. Soon thereafter they realize that it was a fantasy. Except for the neo-cons and libertarians who think they are acting like John Galts when they’re really only acting like Wesley Mouches.

    I thought it was a fairly well-written adventure story (I skipped the big speech in the middle the first time I read it–I also skipped the geological part of Michener’s Hawaii when I first read it) It probably will be a disaster on the screen, but there are redeeming elements to the book.

    Ayn would have cried when her protege Alan Greenspan sold out to Bushism there toward the end of his career.

    Then again this movie could be Red Dawn II 🙂

  • Question about “United 93” – do they mention that the Bush administration knew that hijackings were possible in the near future (summer of 2001), but did nothing to beef up security at the airports or warn US citizens of the possibility?
    Just asking.

  • Debbie Schlussel is indeed a member of the Bushwa kool aid klub. Certifiable. She used to appear on Howard Stern with her latest Al Qaida in American bulletins (that was till Stern turned on bushwa.) Her place in infamy was cemented when she teed off on an American Peace Activist who was killed in Iraq and looked like a total bitch in the process.

    As for Ayn Rand. Her books filled the shelves of every used book store I’ve ever known. Like many who posted here, I’ve tried to read Atlas Shrugged and failed. More like Atlas Snored.

  • I couldn’t finish “Atlas Yawned” either. Nor “Fountainhead”, though I tried several times. But then, I can’t finish much sci-fi. Used to love it when I was a kid, but it bores me to tears now.

    Every sci-fi book I can remember has The Speech. It’s an annoying conceit. Even 1984 was burdened with it: the long “exerpt” from Goldstein’s “book” that stopped the story dead for an entire chapter.

    In the middle of every sci-fi/futurist/fantasy book somewhere, some scientist/alien/sage/protagonist goes through a lengthy speech, outlining the whole history of how this “future world” got to where it is, and pounding the author’s moral or hpilosophical point over the head of the reader. Zzzzzz.

  • Ebert gives out stars now?

    Re: #3: I very much doubt that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are Rand acolytes at all. They are big liberals, for one. And the quote is from Variety, which I’m sure like every other Hollywood rag and watercooler conversation, regularly hopes that the current biggest names in Hollywood will sign onto project X, and it doesn’t actually mention that either expressed interest. If they did you can be sure they would point it out. At the end of the article it mentions that Brad had expressed interest in playing Howard Roark if the Fountainhead was remade, but that film, expect for being another Rand book, is entirely unrelated speculation.

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