Vin Suprynowicz

Ayn Rand attempted something so massive in “Atlas Shrugged” that, for 50 years, no one could figure out how to film it. And I don’t mean just that it’s a thousand-page book.

Growing up in late Czarist Russia, Rand saw how socialism could destroy not just an economy, but the moral framework of a nation. She fled to America, the greatest capitalist success story in the history of the world … and promptly saw the same seductive culture of looting taking root here, in Roosevelt’s cynical “New Deal.”

What Rand’s brilliance illuminated was the critical realization that, as bad as the looters and redistributors are, they prevail only by
insidiously recruiting their very victims to become what our modern psychology would dub “enablers.”

How does America treat a self-made man who says “I’m proud of my wealth; it’s the creation of my brilliance and the sweat of my brow and I don’t owe you any of it??

Those producers have enemies, posturing parasites who call themselves “the state,” abetted by a massive support staff in the media and the government-run youth propaganda camps, droningly propagandizing that the producers are greedy and evil, that they operate “just for profit,” that they have no conscience, that as a result we must ever multiply the taxes and regulations that ensnare and sap their vigor and strength and wealth, all under the guise of “making them pay their fair share,” of “spreading
the wealth around.”

The end result? With all the incentives drained away from hard work and productivity and creativity, removing profit as an accurate way to tell producers which of their efforts are found most valuable by their fellow men — while we perversely reward and thus encourage envy, sloth, and a sense of “entitlement,” we get a whole bunch of the latter, and ever less of the former.

Yet the secret of these parasites is that they bring the producers to doubt themselves, to join in their own destruction, wondering, “AM I just being greedy? Are they justified, perhaps, in taking from me and living off me? What is the “fair share” with which I should pay them off? Maybe it’s really not their fault that they don’t know how to work hard and produce for themselves, and this only makes them APPEAR to be lazy bloodsuckers, turning a once vigorous culture into a swamp of suicide and
despair?”

For 75 years, socialism has dominated American culture. Look how easy it is for socialist writers to win Nobels and Pulitzers, ever praised for the way they “expose the plight of and show compassion for the oppressed and the downtrodden” … without ever admitting how the lives even of the poor were improved by the “greedy profit-seekers” who invented and then drove
down the costs of electric light, the automobile, the refrigerator.

Now check to see if any such awards have been won by Robert Heinlein, Friedrich Hayek, Poul Anderson … Ayn Rand.

The challenge of filming “Atlas Shrugged” is to take an audience that expects the “greedy rich fat cats” to be the villains — while those who wish to “cut them down to size” would naturally be the Erin-Brockovich, Woodward-and-Bernstein style heroes — first to get the audience to accept this reversal of the cliche, and finally to get them to join in asking, “My God, what would happen if these long-abused producers simply went on strike, refused to work any longer as harnessed beasts of burden for the Great Collective?”

The book brings the readership around to this point of view with lengthy speeches and internal monologues, discussing values, motivation, the true meaning of wealth and money and self-worth.

But movie audiences expect action, romance, a machine-gun pace. Talking heads droning on and on? That sound your hear is the crowd stampeding for the exits.

One solution would be to make not a film OF “Atlas Shrugged,” but some new confection of chase scenes and shoot-outs and car crashes “inspired by” Atlas Shrugged.

Successful corporate executive (CEO of Cybex International, the fitness equipment manufacturer, since 1997) and poker champion (Atlantic City’s U.S. Poker Championship, 2004) John Aglialoro thought otherwise. He believed a 53-year-old book that still sells 100,000 copies a year, that ranks second to the Bible in polls of “books that have changed my life,” could be filmed “straight.”

MAKE ROOM FOR TAYLOR SCHILLING

So: Now comes the film, produced by John Aglialoro and Harmon Kaslow, directed by TV actor and former (OK, Canadian) Olympic basketball player Paul Johansson from a screenplay by Brian Patrick O’Toole, with surprisingly stirring
music by Elia Cmiral. Not a “movie in theory.” An actual movie, which opened nationwide April 15 (of course.)

At an hour and 40 minutes and billed as “Part I” of a trilogy-to-be, the questions that arise are a) Is this good enough to be considered a “real movie?” b) Is this Rand?s book? c) Is it great?

Objectivity may be hard to find. After writing a fairly even-handed April 10 cover story on the guerrilla marketing techniques being used to get the new “Atlas” movie into mainstream moviehouses, Rebecca Keegan of the Los Angeles Times “e-mailed us that the response has overwhelmed her,” co-producer Kaslow told me Tuesday from Washington. “She says she’s gotten an e-mail from every Randian and from every one of the people who hate the book, and it’s all in capital letters, people yelling at her. If you
look at P.J. O?Rourke, what he wrote in The Wall Street Journal, he said ‘I’m afraid to say anything, because I know these Randians are going to come and attack anything I say.’ …”

And make no mistake, many a liberal “mainstream” critic knows instinctively just how close to the heart of “make them pay their fair share” socialism this enterprise aims to drive the knife. Expect no “objectivity” — in fact, little but outraged pointing and shrieking — there.

In brief, yes, this movie IS Rand’s book. (Or, at least, the first 320 pages.) The huge cast of secondary characters has been pushed back a bit, to let us concentrate on the romance — in several senses — of railroad heiress Dagny Taggart and steel tycoon Henry Rearden. That’s a wise move, which allows a fairly rapid pace.)

We’re spared talking heads droning on about values and self-worth — even at the risk of making some of the motivations a bit opaque. (Though it surely works to the filmmakers’ advantage that these sneering “tax-the-rich” politicians are already so familiar from today’s evening news, real-life politicians who are already self-made Randian caricatures in their own right.)

Instead, we get to see, at a rapid pace, the war of the snarling anti-capitalist crowd, attempting to bring down the very builders of the prosperity they envy and covet, as they pass law after law requiring the rich to divest “all but one” of their companies, requiring every successful steel firm to share its profits with its less successful competitors, etc.

(General Motors Bailout, anyone?)

The screenplay cleverly solves some obvious problems quickly. This is a story about railroads. In 2011, railroads seem a quaint relic of the 19th century. What to do? The film?s introductory montage explains that, in 2016, thanks to wars in the Middle East and a perverse domestic economic policy that’s destroyed the value of the dollar (seem far-fetched, any more?) gasoline is now $37.50 a gallon, leaving railroads the last viable way to move both freight and passengers.

But to accomplish her mighty task, Rand built books that were didactic. Her good guys are attractive, larger-than-life, and very, very good; her bad guys unremittingly scurrilous. That doesn’t leave a lot of room for subtlety and ambivalence. To call the supporting cast a jungle of one-dimensional stereotypes is almost redundant.

And the movie seems sometimes sketchy — in one vital scene, Graham Beckel, a tad over the top as oil giant Ellis Wyatt, visits Miss Schilling as Dagny on the work site as she drives her new rail line of Rearden Metal up the great canyon of the Rio del Norte, and comments that he was wrong about her.

Wyatt has heard there was a landslide along the route and figured that would set back progress for weeks. But then he heard that Dagny had shown up and taken charge and gotten the route cleared in a mere couple of days.

And you go “uh-oh.” Pardon the cliche, but why TELL us about it? Why not stage that scene with Taylor Schilling up to her boots and elbows in landslide dirt — why not SHOW us?

Part of the answer is that this seems to be about a $5 million movie, shot on the fly in about nine weeks, where any normal Hollywood producer in his right mind would have demanded at least twice as long, and at least 10 times as big a budget, in 2010 dollars.

Some have argued, in fact, that this film exists only because digital filmmaking technology has progressed to the point where it enables a visionary with a few million bucks to sidestep the old Hollywood production hierarchy entirely, making films without the “permission” of the doddering — and very Politically Correct — cultural gatekeepers.

Yet this resulting “Atlas Shrugged” is, in the end, a very good movie — a far more important and rewarding experience than 98 percent of the stuff that’s out there, bidding for your entertainment dollar — maybe in part because, as director Johansson told one interviewer, he was raced into the project so quickly he “didn’t have time to be afraid.”

And the very best thing about this movie is the relatively unknown Taylor Schilling (“Dark Matter,” 2008) as Dagny Taggart.

The budget to hire the modern equivalent of Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal — who starred in the last notable attempt to film Rand, “The Fountainhead,” 62 years go — wasn’t there. Maybe that’s good. Here, no time is wasted with the “Longest Day” effect; audience members nudging each other and going, “Look; that’s so-and-so.”

Instead, the film became Miss Schilling’s to own or to ruin. Was it brilliance, good direction, or a lucky break? Taylor Schilling becomes a star before our eyes.

The credit goes to “Our casting director, Ronnie Yeskel,” replies co-producer Kaslow. “At the moment we were casting the movie we needed credibility, and Ronnie brought that. She has the eye for great talent. You’re right, it’s a once in a lifetime role, she (Schilling) came with a lot of courage and delivered a very compelling performance. We’re just over the moon.”

POPULAR GROUNDSWELL

Why the low-budget production, followed by the guerrilla distribution campaign?

“We originally were hoping the movie would get produced by, you know, a studio,” Mr. Kaslow replies. “Well, if they didn’t want to produce it so they could own it, they didn’t have an interest in distributing it.”

And was the lack of interest based on the book’s pro-capitalist theme, or the perception that the producers had put together a “low-budget” package, a “Part One” with only a “more-to-come” ending?

“When they pass on a film they don’t send you, they don’t say, ‘We don’t like the politics.’ It’s speculative. But John Aglialoro believed there was a population out there far in excess of the literary fans and the political fans, that would want to see this movie. When we started, they asked us “What can we do to get this movie into our cities?” So we created an (Online) technology to kind of track that interest. They wanted to talk directly to the exhibitors, so we gave them links to the customer service offices of these exhibitors.

“We didn’t do anything nefarious; we didn’t list any home numbers. AMC Theaters happened to be at the top of the list, because we did it alphabetically. Well, it started to cost them more than $2,000 a day to deal with all the interest in the movie. They asked us to direct people to a different site so it wouldn’t cost them that money. So we did. And pretty soon they said, “If there’s this much interest in this movie, I guess we’d better book it.”

“We’re now in all the major chains. It’s not an art-house movie; it’s not being released as an art-house movie. Originally we started with 11 cities. We’re now going to have 299 screens” in more than 80 markets, Mr. Kaslow reported Tuesday.

“That’s phenomenal. People look at what we’re doing and ask where are all the TV ads, where are all the radio ads? Our answer is this movie has community support.” Thanks to the Internet “We can speak with precision to the people who are interested in the movie. That’s what’s happening. Shows are beginning to sell out. It just seems like we’ve got sort of the right movie at the right time for the right audience.”

The current film is “Part One” of a trilogy?

“We’ve started to write the screenplay for Part Two; we’re going to try to get it into production in June in order to be able to release Part 2 on April 15 of 2012, and then the third part on April 15 of 2013,” Mr. Kaslow says.

And production of those parts will depend on revenue from the first?

“John has the resources to do it” (produce Part Two), “but if there’s no audience for the movie, we’re not on a mission to simply produce the movie simply for the sake of doing it. If there’s commercial value we’re going to take advantage of that. If people don’t support it, there’s no reason for us to throw money at it.”

Everyone in the cast and crew is under contract to make parts 2 and 3?

“No. In the scramble to get this film into production there was no way to do that, so we’re open, who’s going to be in on Part Two is open.”

Including the director?

“John and I think that Paul (Johansson) did a very good job. Whether or not he’s the one for Part Two, that?s going to be a function of the screenplay and a lot of other elements. At this point, we haven’t even approached that topic with anybody. … Once we’ve completed that project, we’re considering filming the whole book as a mini-series that would include every scene from the book. But right now it’s about creating an accessible movie that captures the message of the book.”

Opened Friday at the Century 18 Sam’s Town on Boulder Highway; Rave Motion Pictures Town Square 18 on Las Vegas Boulevard South; Regal Colonnade 14 on South Eastern Avenue, and the Regal Village Square 18 on West Sahara.