New Movie: "Ayn Rand and the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged"

Shades of Atlas Shrugged?

From a speech by Obama:

"Anybody in America should be able to make it if they try. But none of us make it on our own. Somebody — an outstanding entrepreneur like a Steve Jobs — somewhere along the line he had a teacher who helped inspire him. All those great Internet businesses wouldn’t have succeeded unless somebody had invested in the government research that helped to create the Internet. We don’t succeed on our own. We succeed because this country has, in previous generations, made investments that allow all of us to succeed."

Obama might not realize it, but the US was around for about 90 years until we public schools. Highways were all privately built up until around 1900. The subway system in NYC was virtually all built and run by private companies until government regulation drove them out of business and the government took them over (of course once the government took them over the regulations that drove the private companies out of business were then removed).

Atlas Shrugged Part 1 DVD goes on sale

You can buy a copy of the Atlas Shrugged DVD available here.

Atlas Shrugged Part 1 on DVD in Fall, Sequel released soon afterwards

For those who thought that Atlas Shrugged Part 1 was a great movie, you will be able to soon own your own copy.

Atlas Shrugged: The Trilogy is still alive. The producers of the Ayn Rand adaptation will bring the first part of their planned series to home-entertainment platforms this fall, courtesy of a deal with 20th Century Fox, and expect to begin production on "Atlas Shrugged: Part 2" in September. They hope to bring the new film to theaters during the 2012 election season.

"Atlas Shrugged: Part 1," the low-budget adaptation of the first third of Rand's dystopian novel, grossed $4.6 million during its five-week theatrical run this spring. After the film drew scathing reviews, producer John Aglialoro said he was reconsidering whether to move forward with two sequels.

Now Aglialoro has resumed those efforts, according to producer Harmon Kaslow, and will devote all revenue from the release of "Atlas Shrugged: Part 1" to financing "Atlas Shrugged: Part 2."

"John has a much clearer perspective," Kaslow told 24 Frames. "He’s always wanted to have a studio level support for the film and I think feels that his effort in producing Part 1 has been validated by having the largest home video distributor in America aboard." . . .

"What we discovered with the film is that it really doesn’t fit squarely into a lot of business models," said Kaslow. "We got incredible grass roots and community level support for the movie, but what we didn’t have was the polished marketing edge that the studios have perfected. Now we get to use their marketing, their fulfillment capacity. We think that makes more sense for us than mortgaging those rights off for a number."

Deals for TV and pay-TV airings are being negotiated, Kaslow said, and the producers have retained a foreign sales agent to secure international theatrical releases. . . .

Dagny Taggart Confronts the Union, a scene from Atlas Shrugged the Movie Part 1

This was a good movie.
John Stossel on Why Hollywood Was Against the "Atlas Shrugged" Film

Atlas Shrugged Parts 2 and 3 will still be made

This is great news. Despite all the liberal movie reviewers who hated the movie, I thought that part 1 was very good. Could they have spent more than $10 million making it to get snazzier special effects? Sure. Did it really matter? No. The actors did a good job, the script was pretty good (slightly too reliant on the book's dialogue), and the point of the movie was powerful.

. . . In fact, said John Aglialoro, the co-producer and financier, it's the monolithic view from critics that say the movie stinks that is motivating him to make Parts 2 and 3, he told The Hollywood Reporter.
And he defended his film Wednesday by accusing professional film reviewers of political bias. How else, he asks, to explain their distaste for a film that is liked by the audience? At Rottentomatoes.com, 7,400 people gave it an average 85% score.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone, though, gave the movie zero stars, and Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave it one. A dozen others were equally dismissive.
"It was a nihilistic craze," Aglialoro said. "Not in the history of Hollywood has 16 reviewers said the same low things about a movie.
"They're lemmings," he said. "What's their fear of Ayn Rand? They hate this woman. They hate individualism.
"I'm going to get a picture of Ebert and Travers and the rest of them so I can wake up in the morning and they'll be right there. They're revitalizing me with their outrageousness."
Aglialoro said he had to scale down his ambition for the film to be in 1,000 theaters this weekend, so it will likely be closer to 400. During its opening weekend, the movie took in $5,640 per screen but then only $1,890 in its second. Through Wednesday, the film had grossed $3.3 million since opening April 15.
Aglialoro acknowledged that spending almost no money on marketing and relying almost entirely on the Internet and talk radio -- a strategy he boasted of a week ago -- was ineffective in the long run.
"You really need to spend millions to get the message on TV screens," he said. "If I want Part 2 to open on 1,500 screens, I need to decide if I want to spend $10 million on TV commercials." . . .

Atlas Shrugged Movie Premiers this Coming Friday

Atlas Shrugged is one of the best selling novels of all time. Given recent events, I wish that more people would read it today.

Atlas Shrugged Coming to the Big Screen

L ionsgate Vice Chairman Michael Burns has an interview here about the movie. He also talks about redoing the Fountainhead.

Box Office Mojo: What's the project's status?

Michael Burns: It's in active development—I'm reading the script. The challenge has been whether it's one or two movies. We're finding consolidation, trying to get set pieces and other moving parts working together, trying to get the essence of the book. . . .
Michael Burns: We have a talented director, a producing team, we have the rights and we have a woman who's arguably the biggest movie star in the world who wants to play Dagny Taggart—probably one of the greatest heroines of literature. . . .

Box Office Mojo: The novel is divided into three parts, Non-Contradiction, Either-Or and A is A—?

Michael Burns: —But I think it's really in two parts. There's a great moment in the book where Dagny basically steals back her own train—and certainly that would be a great place to break the movie up. It's hard to make one movie from 1,200 pages. . . .

Reminder that Atlas Shrugged was published on Oct. 12, 1957, 50th Anniversary coming up

The New York TImes as a reminder of the influence that Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged has had. In particular, it mentions how the book has shaped the feelings of many corporate executives.