I don't know the first thing about author Ayn Rand and her novels like "Atlas Shrugged" or "The Fountainhead" but it always seemed vaguely wacky and cultish to me. Not necessarily the books themselves but the devotion to which people threw at the book and the obsessive following. Also, I don't know much about Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt's recent daliances but that also strikes me as vaguely wacky. So what a great pairing Rand and Pitt/Jolie would make! Lionsgate is teaming with Jolie and Pitt to bring Rand's best-selling ATLAS SHRUGGED to the big screen. The two actors are attached to star in the film as Dagny Taggart and John Galt the book's main characters. Howard and Karen Baldwin (RAY) are producing for Lionsgate with a script by James V. Hart (CONTACT). The current version of the script has the epic ATLAS split into two features but that will likely be condensed into one version now that Lionsgate is aboard. ATLAS was initially designed as a miniseries that was being developed for TNT in the late-90s. The budget for the film will likely be just north of $30 million, high for Lionsgate but low for a production of this scale. The actors who sign on for the film, including Jolie who's been a longtime devotee of Rand, would have to work for scale. Pitt can be seen next in THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES and will begin filming OCEAN'S 13 this summer.
2:08PM on 04/27/2006
Although it was far from complimentary to the author's rather bizarre notions regarding wedlock (wh...
Although it was far from complimentary to the author's rather bizarre notions regarding wedlock (when you try to apply the same ideals guiding architecture and engines to human relations, stark weirdness ensues), it did strike me as believeable and even tragically sympathetic. A good counterpart to the more blindly ardent of her followers.
(As Neil Peart showed, it is possible to respect the goals of her philosophy without slavish submission to every corollary.)