Via Hit & Run, comes news of an effort by the producer of The Godfather to get Ayn Rand to authorize him to make a film version of Atlas Shrugged:
In 1972, 15 years after the publication of “Atlas,” [Al] Ruddy, fresh from producing “The Godfather,” decided to make a run at Rand, who was already in her late 60s. “‘Atlas Shrugged,’ let’s face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film,” he said.
Rand’s agents warned him to expect rejection, he said, but reluctantly set up an appointment. Ruddy said he warned Rand that it was not her ideas that interested him. “Forget philosophy,” he said. “The abstract of the story is quite lovely: the power and the sustainability of the great individual, of the creative person, of the entrepreneur.” Rand, he said, “thought that was brilliant, because that’s how she saw her book,” as a story first.
But Ruddy refused to grant Rand final script approval, and their courtship quickly broke off. “It’s a fool’s game to spend a lot of money and time only to have her say, ‘I think you should take this out,’” he said. So, he recalled, he told Rand that he would wait for her to “drop dead” and then make the movie on his own terms.
At least part of Rand’s logic, if one can call it that, seems to have been what can only be described as paranoia:
Rand, who had fled the Soviet Union and gone on to inspire capitalists and egoists everywhere, worried aloud, apparently in all seriousness, that the Soviets might try to take over Paramount to block the project.
“I told her, ‘The Russians aren’t that desperate to wreck your book,’” Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.
Rand’s paranoia, as Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie that it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywood’s mediocrity.
Instead of going with the producer of an incredibly successful, well-made film, Rand involved herself in many aborted efforts over the years to bring her magnum opus to the big screen:
With Ruddy out of the picture, Rand began fielding new offers from movie and television producers. In 1978 Henry Jaffe and his son Michael negotiated a deal for an eight-hour mini-series on NBC. Michael Jaffe, now a partner at Jaffe/Braunstein Films, obtained script approval for Rand, and they hired Sterling Silliphant, the screenwriter of the Sidney Poitier movie “In the Heat of the Night,” to adapt “Atlas Shrugged.” But a regime change at NBC ? specifically Fred Silverman’s ascension to the network presidency ? killed the project in 1979.
At the end of her life Rand tried to write her own script, but she died with only a third of her hoped-for mini- series finished.
Rand left her estate to a longtime student, Leonard Peikoff, who eventually sold an option to Michael Jaffe and Ed Snider, a friend of Rand’s who owned the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. But Peikoff refused to approve the script they developed. “Leonard had huge problems with it,” Jaffe said. “He wasn’t Ayn. But he wanted to exercise her control.”
In 1999 Ruddy resurfaced, cutting a deal with TNT for a four-hour mini- series version. But the project was dropped after AOL and Time Warner merged. Ruddy’s exit opened the door to the Baldwins, who optioned the rights to “Atlas Shrugged” while running the billionaire Phil Anschutz’s Crusader Entertainment. But they could land neither stars nor financing.
Now, the project is in the hands of Randall Wallace, writer of Braveheart and We Were Soldiers, who will supposedly be delivering a script this month for a movie that reportedly would star Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart. What is unclear is how you can condense a book like Atlas Shrugged into a movie that would last no more than three hours:
“I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,” he said. “I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read ‘Atlas Shrugged.’ And the movie has to work.”
Personally, I am still highly skeptical that it can work.
