Who is John Galt? (hint: he may be played by Brad Pitt)
 

http://www.variety.com/article/VR111...goryid=13&cs=1
So, after The Fountainhead bombed half a century ago, someone has decided to take a 1500-page book, for which the author had writen a script as a TV miniseries, and cram it into a movie fit for US audiences.

Will it be four hours of John Galt's radio address broken up by 15-minute scenes of Angelina Jolie smoking and/or fucking every male character? Can anyone sit through Galt's radio address without running to the concession stand so they can buy Twizzlers with which they can gouge out their eardrums? Will it be worse than Battlefield Earth, or a mockery of the book like Starship Troopers?

I can't help thinking two things:

1: I'll go see it no matter how bad it is because I can't just ignore something like this
2: Christopher Walken should be John Galt.

Because of the length of the book, I was always loathe to try reading it, but I can guarantee this:
Hollywood, being what it is collectively, will tromp all over the narrative, claim 'artistic license' and basically release something of little semblance to the original, yet declare that the "essence" of Rand's statement was retained.

They should make Rand's "Anthem" instead. Small book, very few characters(only two main characters, actually) and not a lot of blatant political pontification.

Maybe John Galt's radio address will be a podcast?

Horrible.

Hhhhhmmmm......can't see any way possible this is going to turn out good. I love the book, but I don't think even the underlying theme is going to get a warm welcome.

~Drego

Hehe well starship troopers was a very political book and look what that got turned into.

I can't even imagine the horror they do to Ayn Rand.

My guess is most of Hollywood wouldn't even understand it well enough to twist it.

Hell, look what they did with Asimov's "I, Robot" The land is littered with good books they've ruined.

*sigh*

By the way, I doubt this will ever actually happen. The idea has been kicking around since Rand had a script written for a miniseries back in the '70s and nothing has come of it yet. If it is made, I'll see it then regret it immediately.

well, there are a few ways to look at this.

in general, why would you look for or expect--or even really want---a "faithful" adaptation of a novel into cinema?
the forms are entirely different: they do not and cannot do the same things.

one that worked kinda is raul ruiz's version of proust's "time regained"----but it was so close to the book that if you hadn't read and remembered it in considerable detail, the film would not make sense.

michael haneke's version of kafka's "the castle" tried and was ok, mostly (for me) because i liked the actor who played barnabas (the messenger from the castle)...and i love haneke's films for the most part--but this one wasn't so great.

straight narrative books are different--"the getaway" and "the grifters" and "black and white in color" are all great adaptation of jim thompson novels...

films that are among my favorites--like kobayahi's "kwaidan"--use the texts are jump-off points, retaining some elements, tweaking others, adding alot. they aren''t the same---they're kind of loosely parallel, addressing the same kind of questions, that sort of thing.

the forms aren't the same so i dont see the point of looking for, requiring or even wanting a translation from text to film.


i detest ayn rand and i really detest this book.
if you want a self-indulgent fantasy that enables an adolescent sense of one's own superiority to be reinforced and routed through a philosophical framework, read nietzsche's zarathustra.

I for one am shocked, SHOCKED I say :eek:

i considered not putting up information that shocking, ustwo...but my inner john waters won out. think "pink flamingos" the last sequence. i do it all the time.

the film adaptation question seemed more interesting than the shock value of my dislike for the purple prose that puts ayn rand in a league that ann rice is these days obviously aspiring to reach...why would anyone want to see a film that tries to very faithfully duplicate a book when they have the book and can read it? film does other things..

I've got very mixed feelings about them doing this movie

I just dont see how they could do it as a single movie and have it work.

if they were to divide the book up into its 3 seperate sections and do a movie on each one then maybe they could have enough of the original into the movies.

I really think that doing the book justice would be practically impossible

I agree that the book can't be minimized into a single film. Even though Atlas has a cult-like and political following, I don't see the needed paying customers to make it into three films, as was done with the Trilogy.

I think this project is doomed to failure either by enforced brevity, or the expense of extending the story into multiple films. The book is primarily cerebral in nature and to reduce it to a movie-friendly action driven plot would be a travesty to the intent of the book.

But how would they justify two more after the first one bombed?

You can't make a watchable film out of a book whose climax is a two-hour speech espousing philosophy that most of the audience would find abhorrent.

I have to disagree, simply look at Band of Brothers. It was not a "film," but the miniseries did the book 100% justice in my opinion. That says a lot, because I absolutely loved the book. The way you get to intimately know almost every one of the original members of the Company, and you follow them throughout the entire war.

This is at the core of the matter. The forms are inherently different. No matter how "faithful" an adaptation, the two products will still stand as vastly different.

Without getting too technical, the reason behind this is based in the function of language. A film tends to simplify things by showing you scenes, whereas in literature, the multiplicity of meaning is rooted in our individual interpretation of words and the values we place on them. There are thousands of words you cannot record on film, especially when you consider utterance as being distinct from symbol. Linguist Ferdinand de Saussure's idea of the sign (sign = signified|signifier) helps us see the relationship between form (signified) and concept (signifier). Consider the variances between the signifiers of film and literature. In film, a signified tree is revealed as a signifier by the filming an actual tree. In literature, the signifier is written as "tree," which brings up all sorts of connotations to various readers. Even in this simple example, we see a disparity in a most common object.

Such is the machine at work when we see the processes that go into filming literature.

I listened to half the "Atlas Shrugged" book. I see they solved the problem of the impossible perpetual growth and prosperity with a free energy machine:) Nothing mentioned about the destruction of the planet for profits, and they try to say that all the people have an equal chance to get rich, but some are just too stupid and can only work for the smart ones - not true

Do you really think that there's nobody out there who doesn't have the capability to succeed? People are not equal in ability or intelligence.

It is true for people who start of with equal chances, but people almost never start like that. How many children from the entire world had the chance to play golf ? Few, that means Tiger Woods is not the best of the world, he is the best from those who had the chance

No hes the best golfer in the world. Maybe hes not the best potential golfer, that we don't know, but he is the best in the world.

Not sure what the point of the discussion on this is really, but thought I'd point that out.

Christopher Walken is the man....and I digress :(

-Will

I hated that book!!! I took me forever to get through it!

This movie will suck...as do most movies based on books. There is way too much to the story to fit it into a two or three hour movie. This needs to be a 15 hour mini-series at least.

For the record: I actually liked the Starship Troopers movie. I just wished they hadn't tried to connect it to Heinlein's book, since the two had little in common.

Some people take the "we're all created equal" line too seriously. Some people are smart. Some aren't. Some have athletic ability. Some don't. Etc, etc, etc.

I have never read anything from Ayn Rand, but I do know that not all movies based on books suck. However, I agree that making a good movie adaptation based on a book with everything told the same way would require a really dumb book (as dumb as those novellizations of movies).
If you're making a movie out of a book, you almost have to change things, but it's not necessarily for the worst. Look at Jurassic Park. Excellent book, good enough movie, even though so much was lost in the process of adaptation.
I want someone to make a faithful-enough adaptation of "The 39 Steps", by John Buchan.

Yeah, not every movie based upon a movie is terrible. From the top of my head I can think of a few that were at least decent: Minority Report, The Virgin Suicides, Blade Runner, A Scanner Darkly, Factotum and Marquez's Love In The Time Of Cholera seems promising. Certain authors writing styles definitely help towards creating movies and adaptations out of their works but it has been done before and in some cases - it's been done pretty well.

The idea that you could produce a good movie by taking a book that took me over a month to read and condensing it down to 2-3 hours doesn't seem like a good idea to me - but even I have some hope.

I really don't know what to say. I really liked Atlas Shrugged but I think a movie about it would bomb.