On Filming Atlas Shrugged

Piece on the attempts to film Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged (the filmd adaptation of The Fontain sucks me in everytime I catch it on TCM):

The challenge of distilling Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged"

By Kimberly Brown

Thursday, January 11, 2007

LOS ANGELES

Back in the 1970s, Albert S. Ruddy, the producer of "The Godfather," first approached Ayn Rand to make a movie of her novel "Atlas Shrugged." But 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.