I found the article on Sunday’s New York Times on the difficulty of making a movie of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, fascinating (though I have not read the book).

“… Rand’s grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote “Braveheart” and “We Were Soldiers,” is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of “Ray,” are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.”

“…..At the end of her life Rand tried to write her own script, as she had done for “The Fountainhead,” but she died with only a third of her hoped-for mini-series finished.”

It seems to me a familiar story of the artist having control of the final product vs. the studio, investors, the director, etc.

But, then again, I’m not sure a creator, writer in this case, is always the best person to translate their creation into other media.  I don’t know about you, but I found “Eyes Wide Shut“, Stanley Kubrick’s last film, to be very slow and boring - yet he insisted on the longer version. while the novel was written by Arthur Schnitzler the screenplay was created by entirely by Kubrick.  that’s just one case, but I bet you could find 15 other cases where the creator has a vision that’s untranslatable to other mediums - yet the attempt is often satisfying anyway.

Case in point, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy , I think J.R.R. Tolkien’s son rejected the original attempts to translate LOTR into a trilogy of movies.  Yet the result was pretty good, in spite of the fact that Tolkien would probably not have approved of the adaption had he been alive to see it.

And in our age of user generated media - where brands can’t really control their message or content fully anymore - you have to wonder if an Artist’s creation is fully their own?   Can Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” really be in her, or her followers’ control - probably not - if it’s going to be successful today.