Persistence of Vision

One of MPI's most exciting projects is a short film adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut's short story, "Harrison Bergeron." A dystopian tale about a world where "equality" is repressively and damagingly mandated from above, Vonnegut's story makes some strong points about freedom. The story shows both how fragile and irrepressible freedom is. It also explores what happens when equality of opportunity--which can be legislated--is supplanted by equality of results, which can't. The film will is in post-production now, and will premiere in early 2009. Already, the hype is beginning.

Here is Weekly Standard write Sonny Bunch, at the America's Future blog:

“I’ll go ahead and be a cliché here as a libertarian and quote Ayn Rand,” Chandler Tuttle warned midway through our first interview, “‘Art is a selective recreation of reality reflecting the artist’s metaphysical value judgments.’” In every subsequent conversation I’d have with the aspiring filmmaker, that passage from The Romantic Manifesto popped up. The repetition wasn’t the crutch of a lazy mind, nor was it a function of an interview subject showing discipline and staying on message. Rather, that quote represents a concrete belief – an idea that drives him to create a final product he considers true to himself and his conscience.

The topic of discussion when the Rand quote dropped was Tuttle’s current project, an adaptation of the Kurt Vonnegut short story, “Harrison Bergeron.” Sitting at a dinner table in the Moving Picture Institute’s West Hollywood office, Tuttle was explaining how the project came to be and why MPI was interested in bringing his vision to the screen.

If I can indulge in a cliché myself for a moment, like most great stories, this one started with a girl. “I was dating a girl, and she was really into Kurt Vonnegut … so I went out and, thinking myself clever, got a selection of short stories.” Luckily for him, the collection he picked up was Welcome to Monkey House, and the second story was a four-page, 2,300-word doozy by the name of “Harrison Bergeron.”

For the uninitiated, “Harrison Bergeron” is set in a frightening world of mediocrity and uniformity which Vonnegut describes without wasting a word in the opening paragraph:

The year was 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.

The exception to that equality is the story’s namesake, Harrison Bergeron. An Adonis of a man, Bergeron is too brilliant to be cowed by the state, and too dangerous to be allowed to live. The short story, a stark condemnation of the totalitarian implications of the Left’s drive for social equality, has long been a favorite of the Right; National Review reprinted it in 1965, and John J. Miller, a writer for the magazine, recently recommended it in a piece on conservative science fiction.

For similar reasons, it struck a chord with the powers that be at MPI, a fledgling production and distribution company that is spending more than $100,000 – a rounding error for a big Hollywood studio, but a significant portion of MPI’s annual budget, which totals less than $2 million – to film Tuttle’s 25-minute adaptation.