| | A cinema adaptation of Atlas Shrugged is superfluous because to me it has always been a movie.
We can all think of movie travesties. This was one of the worst ("going beyong parody..."):
Casino Royale (1967)
Sir James Bond, a spy from the old school (a good spy is a pure spy) is called back to service by the death of "M" and the imminent collapse of civilization. The opposition tries to compromise him, but even as nubile young agents are thrown at him, he remains above it all. Going beyond parody to sillyness, every agent is renamed James Bond, 007 to confuse the enemy, including Woody Allen who plays, Little Jimmy Bond
Peter Sellers .... Evelyn Tremble/James Bond/007
David Niven .... Sir James Bond
Daliah Lavi .... The Detainer/007
Woody Allen .... Dr. Noah/Jimmy Bond
Terence Cooper .... Cooper/James Bond/007
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0061452/plotsummary
To say that it did not follow the book grossly understates any possible criticism. Fear of this kind of outcome was enough to keep Rand from selling the rights.
On the other hand, the movie version of A Beautiful Mind did not follow the book, either, but actually, did translate the book, in that it told the essential story in a manner appropriate to the medium. Relative to this, a movie that I walked out on was Alexander (great cast, boring movie). However, for a magazine article about the classics department at the University of Michigan, I interviewed the professor who teaches "Classics and the Cinema" and she said, "Lives do not make good stories." So, I understand that the "story" of John Ford Nash had to be told differently as a movie than as a book.
That said, Atlas Shrugged is, among many things, very theatrical. If you watch Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, you can see elements of live theater all through the shooting. I believe that she saw Atlas the same way in her own mind. The opening of the John Galt Line is one passage in the book that she herself touted as excellent writing. I do not concur. I found it weak -- not for the writing, but for the medium: the scene was pure cinema. In fact, all of Atlas is like that to a greater or lesser degree.
On the one hand, it begs for the right director. On the other hand -- copyright laws or not -- the future of personal artistic media holds many Atlases to come as it is done, and re-done by future artists, just as Biblical or other mythological themes have been re-approached, re-solved, and re-created by painters and sculptors. Compare and contrast Ulisse (Ulysses), directed by Mario Camerini produced by Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti from 1955 starring Kirk Douglas to the 1999 production of The Odyssey by Francis Ford Coppola (among others) starring Armand Assante. Both were outstanding and neither had direct input from Homer's intellectual heirs -- whoever they might be. In fact, Alexander was terrible despite the presence of historian Robin Lane -- the closest we might have to the intellectual heir of Arrian, Plutarch and Curtius -- who not only advised on the movie, but got a part in it.
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