Atlas Shrugs: The musical or other scary variations
by Mike Kimel
Cross posted at the Presimetrics blog.
The inimitable TBogg has a clip from the upcoming movie Atlas Shrugs, Part 1. The book is so long and so interminable that the movie has to be done in three pieces.
The clip has to be seen – words don’t do it justice. And while at TBogg’s there – read the comments readers left behind. Some of them are hilarious. In any case, the clip apparently inspired TBogg to search out more information, and he located an interview with John Aglialoro, the producer of the movie:
6. Have you decided how you’ll tackle John Galt’s epic speech in part three?
Well, I’m looking at a number of different things. Having John Galt give that speech, it might be in a casino environment. It might be that he is at a mountain retreat, rather than being where he is captured, not…that violent scene at the end. But we’re going to take a look. It doesn’t have to copy just that.No, it absolutely will be a concentrate of entertaining words with a total, philosophic…But, you know, part three could be a musical…like a Les Miserables kind of a musical. That’s part of the impact and I guess I haven’t said this publicly yet, but I’m looking at it completely different if part three is a musical with quality music that’s done in a certain way that people will like. I mean, if you saw the play Les Miserable without the music, and then with the music, you may go in there saying, ‘oh hell, I would never want to see that great book in a musical.’ That’s going to shock a lot of people to see part three be a musical, and part two may be very different from part three and very different from part one. It has to be new, you know…We get a freshness, a vitality about it, and yet it has the same, rock-solid principles and philosophies that we all know and love.
Which apparently provided TBogg with further inspiration – in a later post he tries to write out some music for part 3:
I am the very model of a modern major industrialist
You people call me selfish, but I prefer ‘objectivist”
The looters and the moochers, they try to take what’s mine
To share my genius with others, I’m afraid I must declineI’m very well acquainted, too, with things that should be taxable
But I will not pay my fair share and on this I am intractable
Push me just a bit too far and I’ll head to Gulch of Galt
Your world will start to fall apart and it will be your fault[chorus]
Your world will start to fall apart and it will be your fault
He’s packing up his bags and he’s going to Gulch of Galt
You people are annoying and it’s harshing his gestalt
The rest of the song is just as good and worth a trip to TBogg’s place to read in full.
Somebody is actually doing a movie on that piece of dessicated…ummm…stuff? A MOVIE? Do they expect people to watch Ayn Rand’s narcissistic fantasy in Technicolor and–Wait a minute! I got it! Do it like Avatar! Yeah, that’s it! Pixar can do the CDI and Galt can be…ummm…Red! NancyO
Well, they’ve already made a first person shooting game about Randian craziness (Bioshock, play it, very subversive, the sequel was also good, and critiqued the opposing collectivist perspective), which was a multi-million seller.
Be Careful
When I was in college more than one person came up to me and said “You gotta read this!” So I did. It wasn’t very good as literature, and it was worse as “philosophy.” But it appeals to a certain person who really really hates paying taxes, and thinks he is one of the natural supermen, just held down by a collectivist evil government.
Give these folks a song to sing and it may sound to them like the Marseillaise. They will run around head chopping Democrats and people who made fun of them on the internet.
And then they’ll turn around and wonder where that fellow Napoleon came from.
But Napoleon was a real “first rater,” not someone who whined about it in a third rate book.
Yea, those citizens who don’t trust their governent will rally around a film trilogy. Just imagine if they ever made The Fountainhead into a movie? Oh wait….
I wonder if the anti-gold bugs said the same thing when they heard that a musical of The Wizard of Oz was in production.
Where did you go to university with that type of student body? Thus Spoke Zarathustra was the only overrated philosophical novel I remember others reading during my years on campus.
Zarathustra was the only overrated philosophical novel I remember others reading during my years on campus. Did you see the musical?
kevin
we had the Thus spake types too. A difference in i.q. perhaps, but both tracts appeal to the reptile brain… oh, look, proof that it’s okay to be bad.
Anyone seen the trailer for this turkey? It’s got stuff like high-speed trains and steel mills in it, the sort of things you see in China nowadays, though not in the US of A. Wonder why that is.
Galt’s Gulch is China?
That’s right. Communism is the new capitalism.
and here i thought it was the new patriotism.