That's the question Hollywood is asking, as Lions Gate Entertainment underwrites the latest attempt to bring Ayn Rand's objectivist classic, Atlas Shrugged, to the silver screen.
Over the years, so many people have tried--and failed--to convert Rand's 1200 page novel into a feature-length film that journalist Kimberly Brown can't help but make a joke of it. Noting that Rand herself was initially suspicious that the Soviets would prevent her pro-capitalism book from becoming a movie, Brown observes that Hollywood's historical ineptness with the project lends a little bit of credence to Rand's paranoid fantasy: "it could easily strike a suspicious person as evidence of a nefarious collectivist conspiracy. Or at least of Hollywood's mediocrity."
Brown goes on to detail the latest attempt to make a movie out of Rand's masterpiece. Randall Wallace, author of Braveheart, is working on the screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, who co-produced Ray, are managing the project. And Lions Gate is financing it. Angelina Jolie, who bills herself as a Rand fan, has been tapped to play heroine Dagny Taggart. The question of who will play John Galt, the novel's mystery man, is allowed to remain, appropriately, a mystery. (In April 2006, Variety reported that John Galt might be played by none other than Jolie's real-life love interest, Brad Pitt.)
Atlas Shrugged, long dismissed by intellectuals and academics on both the left and right, has long been a popular favorite. Since its publication in 1957, six million copies have been sold. But Rand's reluctance to relinquish control over the script prevented the book from being filmed during her lifetime, and Hollywood red tape has scuppered attempts to do so in the years since her death in 1982.
Still, the folks at Lions Gate are confident that the time has come for Atlas Shrugged to become a movie. They believe in the novel, and they also believe in the power of film to bring great stories to the public.
Although producing a screenplay for the book amounts to a major act of compression, Baldwin is confident that the result will capture the essence of Rand's work: "We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book," he says.
Wallace, who is on pace to complete his screenplay this month, is similarly confident: "I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read 'Atlas Shrugged.' And the movie has to work."
He's right--about both the challenges of translating a work such as this one into the medium of film, and about the enormous potential of film to reach audiences far larger, and far more varied, than the shrinking lengthy-book-reading portion of the public.
As a novel about freedom that finally has the chance to benefit from our most democratic art form yet, Atlas Shrugged is a perfect test case for his theory.