What would you consider the number one priority in the making of Atlas Shrugged Part III?
We want to hear from you. What would you consider the number one priority in the making of Atlas Shrugged Part III?
A. Casting
B. Getting the message of Atlas Shrugged right
C. Cinematography
D. Special Effects
E. Hiring the right Director
F. Other
Leave your answer in the comments below.
A. Casting
B. Getting the message of Atlas Shrugged right
C. Cinematography
D. Special Effects
E. Hiring the right Director
F. Other
Leave your answer in the comments below.
Please, please, please bring back Taylor Shilling to play Dagny and Grant Bowler to play Henry Rearden. Taylor seems to have a confidence and maturity about her that Samantha Mathis lacks. Grant Bowler was also great in the role of Henry Rearden. Would like to see them both return.
My problem isn't that Eddie is black, it's that he's the ONLY black in the cast. Makes him seem like a token. A couple of the disappearing businessmen, like Ken Danagger, could have been black. Better yet, a Denzel Washington type (obviously they weren't going to get the real thing) would have been perfect for Ellis Wyatt.
Making all the leads blonde blue-eyed white folks misleads things. There's no reason any of them couldn't be any race.
It's something the casting of the first movie missed (when they made the money grubbing types snivelling Jewish stereotypes) but the casting of the second caught (when Mouch turned into a well-spoken white guy).
Michael Lerner, Armin Shimerman, Patrick Fischler
meanwhile, Jon Polito's not jewish, but was playing a conniving, big nosed, moneygrubber...
This was a problem in the first film, it was fixed by the recasting (I don't know whether the problem or the fixing was intentional, only that the fixes did occur). This made more sense in the second, the story took place in America, it made sense that the heroes and the villains were predominantly non-jewish white folks.
It's knowing the difference between "There are more villains than heroes", and "The villains are predominantly jewish."
The first casting director didn't seem to know this difference, luckily the second one did.
"A sweep of brown hair fell back, almost touching her shoulders."
I think in the next movie they need to have a new cast again. The reason being that to attempt some kind of actor continuity for the third movie where the others had none will simply cause the 2nd act to be well invalidated, and it was the much better of the two movies.
I would personally love to see the first two acts redone alone with the 3rd with the same actors for all three, in which case Taylor shilling would be great for Dagney. I preferred Jason Beghe for Rearden as he seemed much more the man that worked his way from a coal miner to a industrial CEO; Grant Bowler was just to much the pretty boy to be that person.
In any case that will not happen so I would rather see a completely different cast for the 3rd act.
I am personally of the opinion that using different actors for all three at this point would be more likely to keep it about the story and the lessons of the power of thought/thinking that it presents than going back to either of the previous casts.
The actress that they get to play Dagny in the 3rd act had batter be able to pull it off wonderfully. She will bring the glamor or she wont and the rest of the cast will follow suit.
Here is the issue. Libertarians (and to some degree conservatives) think it's the message that matters. Only the message. But the liberals and progressives know this is not true. In fact how the story is told is way more important than the story. This is the secret that they have used for 100 years to advance their view of how the world should be run and why we are almost always in 2nd place.
Our message is better. In fact far superior. However, if you tell the story in a poor manner, the message does not get thru. Hollywood and the big media outlets know this so well. I have watched debates where they are laughing at our side because the person is stumbling to get the words out. The message is good, but if it's told in a poor manner, the listener only hears/sees a small fraction of the story.
So the STORY HAS TO BE TOLD IN AN IMPECCABLE MANNER. Do not worry about getting the message right. That will come naturally. A good story teller knows this. They use illustrations, imaginations, examples, anecdotes, etc. to convey the ideas. That's the key. You must convey the ideas.
Here is another secret the progressives have used for 100 years, and a serious flaw in the libertarian/objectivist/conservative/independent world: Information that is attached to emotion bypasses the rational mind and goes directly into long term memory. You can research this or take my word for it. But most information we get has to be processed. Is this right? Wrong? Likely? Plausible, etc. But when the information is attached to an emotion, especially a strong emotion, that info goes right into the long term memory, bypassing the frontal lobes. That's why they always tell the story with emotion. It's not just that it makes a better story, or more entertaining, but the secret is that it goes into a persons mind without the normal filtering.
Test this out yourself. Think back about the things you "know" to be true. You will find almost all of them at attached to an emotional memory.
A sad omission, and a lost opportunity to 'spread' the gospel.
All the sadder when it finally fails through no fault of it's own....
Firstly, Rand's novel was a huge success for her contemporary readers, and has held unequaled attention to this day. There has to be a reason for this, since Rand was not a polished 'Hollywood' script writer by any stretch of the imagination. But her story captivated readers, just as I found it to be hard to put down. She cleverly used several literary 'hooks' that made each chapter a cliff hanger. Sadly, the most memorable devices were left out of the first two movie installments (the omnipresent clock comes to mind immediately)....
Secondly, I am not ready to assume that today's entertainment consumers are all that more jaded than those of Rand's time. While it is certainly true that today's moviegoers are expecting more 'bling' than substance (not by choice, but by design), they do react to the latter when given the opportunity. A perfect example of this is the current overproduced film The Great Gatsby...which leaves the audience totally clueless as to the morality play that Fitzgerald originally penned. Anyone that has read the novel, or has seen the rare Alan Ladd version, knows what I mean.
I am not ready to 'dumb' down the message for the sake of reaching the larger mass of media consumers, and I don't think that the end result would be any more life changing for them in the end.
The novel as written was an emotional event for me, and short of the overindulgent closing speech, totally engaging. The message has all of the drama that one could ask for, and the characters carried that message quite dramatically.
The story AS WRITTEN has passed the test of time quite well...and it is an almost impossible task to translate this into an afternoon at the movie house.
Rand's story might have been better suited to a 6, or 7, part mini-series, with installments of 2 hour length. There is so much complexity in her tale, that it becomes a thankless task trying to decide what can be successfully 'trimmed'!
At best we can hope that some of the viewers not familiar with the novel, will be compelled to read the whole story....
"Who is John Galt?"
As far as making a social change the movies are doing some good. I hope that they build a profitable franchise of products and services around and from the movies and long standing interest in the book. It would go far to educate and enlighten people about the evils of big government no matter what forms it takes.
an ideological traffic cop, not letting projects having a theme with which he disagreed (or thought would not draw an audience) come to fruition. This, of course, is the prerogative of a
private company like ABC.
Having studied AR's works & having a hand in the world of film making, I think there is some merit in a 3rd cast change IF there is a compelling improvement that makes the audience care about the protagonists: My wife & I think AMANDA TAPPING would be a standout choice since in Stargate 1 she portrayed a gutsy, strong, brilliant, & beautiful, objective oriented woman as is Dagney. Introduce all at outset with caption identifying "dramatis personae" to underscore the "discontinuity as method of story continuity" - that the story is universal.
Have been thinking about what NOMARK said & as a revisit to this thread, still think those comments are among the most useful;
as well as by zigory: "As to B, I recommend to the filmmakers "Adapting Atlas Shrugged to Film" by Jeff Britting and "Galt's Speech in Five Sentences (and Forty Questions)" by Allan Gotthelf from the book "Essays on Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged" edited by Robert Mayhew. In terms of condensing Galt's Speech, Mr. Gotthelf's essay may prove invaluable."
Others have detailed this: Make screen time by EFFECTIVE use of visual overlays from similar to current events/ headlines etc to get the less than with it viewer to connect the dots: THE NANNY STATE DOES NOT WORK & WHY. & what the alternative presented is.
Make it work at a gut level, hearts & minds, folks...
Post script: For technical accuracy on ZERO POINT ENERGY which Galt was utilizing, contact Bearden, Bedini ( cheniere.org) & Steven Greer (disclosureproject.org) to bring that facet of this story HOME. This is not fantasy land, this is REAL. People need to get that. Other historical references: T Henry Moray, Tesla ( energy); Royal Raymond Rife (energy healing technology), to name a very few...get archival photos etc.
It's a movie, not a lecture.
I was about to write something very similar to this post, but nomark sums it up well. An emotional reaction to this story is what grabbed all of us and never let go. Just presenting a plot on film will be hollow without an attachment to the characters. That attachment begins with casting and acting.
If people who join our cause don't do so based on reason, they aren't ready to join our cause.
Speak only for yourself, dude. Emotions come and go; that's one of the downsides of being Human. However, things you grab onto with your REASON are forever, unless new and contradictory HARD INFORMATION comes down the pike.
"downside'? Emotions react to the thinking one has done or failed to do.............if the thinking is objectively rational (consonent with man's nature), the emotions are pleasurable; if not, then torturous. The mind is man's tool of survival; when used correctly (reality identification) the results, including emotions, are very satisfactory..................including seeing when to avoid or escape from the irrational.
Speak only for yourself, please! Somehow I doubt that ANYONE here has EVER forgotten the book :)
and
F.Have the original cast refilm part II, then release part III as one long film.
The top priority, IMNSHO, is NOT to give in to the temptation to reproduce Galt's radio address in anything even close to its tedious, needlessly repetitive entirety!
This irked me even in the novel, so I've skipped over it every time I've re-read the novel over the past 30-some years. Anyone still reading at that point GETS IT ALREADY!!!!
OTOH, in the Part II film, the story of the disintegration of the 20th Century Motor Company was given ridiculously short shrift. A concrete example like that one will convince many more fence-sitters than a faithful rendition of Galt's so-bored-they-snored radio speech. After all, we are now seeing the 20th Century Motor Company all around us, every day.
I DO like the idea of expanding on Starnesville/Century Motors however. :)
Parts 1 and 2 stuck to the novel, yet they were failures with audiences and critics. How do you explain it?
What about this:
Just because a screenplay sticks to a novel doesn't make it a good screenplay. This is true for any novel-to-film adaptation, not just Atlas.
A screenplay is the blueprint of a movie. If the blueprint is flawed, the building you construct using it as a guide will be flawed. Just ask Howard Roark.
Because no screenplay can really actually stick to a novel. Even a novel as thin as, say, Jerzy Kosinski's "Being There" gets compressed. It takes about eight hours straight to read "The Great Gatsby." Any movie shorter than eight hours has left something out.
No screenplay can truly stick to a novel. This is news to some people, especially when the particular novel is their substitute for the Holy Writ.
Rand is justifiably known for hitting her reader over the head with a crowbar for page after page after page, especially when it comes to her ideology. That's why she was so ill-suited as a novelist rather than an essayist. And that's why the most infamous chapter in the book has one guy not letting anyone else interrupt him for three hours - beyond parody as bad novel-writing.
Now, if the people posting here were really serious about "first and foremost, you've got to get the ideology across," they'd be clamoring for the Galt speech in its entirety. Anything else would be a regrettable compromise, right? But there's no chance that's going to happend. Yet the Galt does represent a serious quandary for the producers. How much should they include? Which parts should they cut? I don't think for example that anybody would particularly miss her cod-Aristotle noodling about existence (except for those who know enough Aristotle to find it as sophomoric as I do). But the line about "His time is over" -- that's gotta stay, if only because that's as far as most rational people make it into the blablablah.
So the reaction is going to go into two camps. The ones who get so starry-eyed over hearing an actor say "Mr. Thomspon will not be addressing you tonight" that they won't care which parts of the speech are included or excluded, and the ones who are going to insist that the lines supporting Rand Dogmatic Point 38.4 subparagraph 129 were inexcusably left out AND THE ENTIRE SPEECH WEAKENED IRREMEDIABLY AS A RESULT, HOW COULD YOU! HOW COULD YOU!
So it's a problem. A big, big, big problem within the ranks of Randites. Which is to say, in the real world, it's no problem at all.
Their message is garbage, but they are winning the race. So clearly the message is secondary to how well you tell the story. We must learn from our mistakes. Learn from their success. And in their movies, they don't just use one or two big scences. There are dozens of big emotional moments in movies with their message attached. They are masters at their craft. We cannot compete with them unless we are at least in the ball park with our skill level. Because our message is superior, it'll put us over the top, but we have to be at least in the ball park with our story telling skills.
Be careful what you ask for.
Also while I know the speech can't be put into a film, it's too long, can we have the whole speech as a DVD extra?
Remember a few years ago when NY State "legislators" essentially tried to pass a Directive 10-289 to prevent companies in the State from laying off employees because it would be a hardship for the employees?! I do.
Among the luminaries in Atlas I were Dagny (Taylor Schiling) and Hank (Grant Bowler). The fellow playing Ellis Wyatt was fantastic, but of course he is not a part of the script for Atlas II.
Lillian Reareden was great in her villany.
.
Among the unsuitables were Jim Taggart (too young), Hugh Axton (WAY to young, and acts like a supernerd), and in particular Hsu Garcia as Francisco - he just doesn't have that REGAL look, same with Axton.
Atlas 2 had a more "even" cast, none were really great (sorry), but no one was a disaster either. And they averaged 20 years older than in Atlas I. One of the best was Hank Reardan, almost indistinguishable from Grant Bowler in A-I.
So, as a conclusion, I would like to see a great many of the A-II cast, but try to bring back from A-I Dagny (Taylor Schilling) and the Ellis Wyatt player (the character not present in AII). And find a distinguished-gentleman-looking Axton.
Please understand my criticism as coming from a friend, I saw A-I in theaters three times (I now have escaped to a Gulch of sorts, Anguilla, which does not have movie theaters) and I have bought several Blu-Ray copies of A-I and A-II, I keep giving them away. .
I would say "get John Galt right." Not backing off the message in any way to appease anybody. As far as the other issues, I would suggest using a few key scenes with Ragnar Danneskjöld to set the value of Galt's Gulch and the underlining message behind John Galt's speech. The film should be about why Robin Hood is a villian, and not a hero. When I think of John Galt, I think of Clint Eastwood films from the late 60s and early 70s. I think of High Plains Drifter when I think of John Galt. Nobody has met John Galt yet in these movies, and he will provide context to the previous two films.
He stole from the thieves and returned to the producers what they had the right to have kept, absent a crushing government with entitlements and taxes to support the powerful.
That's what most critics of Rand don't understand and try to bash her for. She didn't agree with corrupt businesses cheating their customers and employees. Being for something doesn't mean you agree with everything they do, right or wrong.
E. Hiring the Right Director.
A,C,D will then be assured.
I think B is already firmly in your grasp. You were clear that the script was incredibly moving.
I enjoyed Part 1. I thought Part 2 was one of the worst movies ever made. The casting was beyond terrible. It was an insult to Rand and her fans. Dagny/Samantha looked like a common, tired housewife on her way to pick up the kids from soccer practice. What would make anyone cast this actress as Dagny is absolutely beyond me. Hank was not much better. Or Francisco.
A message alone will never make a good movie. And if your movie is poor, your message will never be heard by a wider audience. Wasn't that the purpose of making the movie?
I think that Part 3 should not be made at this time.
Take the time and money to shop Atlas Shrugged as a TV series.
With all the new content needed to feed the cable and newer online producers (Netflix, Amazon, etc.), this should be a no-brainer.
The novel will be better served as multi-year series with fully-fleshed out characters including their back stories.
The first two movies were pretty bad due the limitations of movie length and weren't helped by the flatness of the script as portrayed by the mediocre acting.
If people are willing to follow long-form TV stories from 24 to Lost to Mad Men to Downton Abbey, etc., they should really get hooked on Atlas Shrugged with the right script.
As a detective/mystery story with soap opera elements and Rand's strong cast of characters, this should be an amazing blockbuster TV show.
Given the luxury of time, the story could be told in its entirety, though Galt's speech would have to edited for TV (but included as an extra on the DVDs or download!)
It would probably take 1-2 years to find the right outlet, write a script, cast new actors (and don't think there wouldn't be fierce competition for the main characters) and get the first season produced.
This would be enough time to erase the memory of these movies which were not seen by a wide audience anyway. And "reboots' are so common nowadays, that there shouldn't be much made of the transfer to TV.
I really thought that Atlas Shrugged was going to be made into a miniseries in the 70s when that genre was in its heyday. It never came to be and I thought it would never work as a movie due to the novel's length. I was resigned to the idea that Atlas Shrugged would remain as a book in print and audio.
But today's "limited-run" series have shown the appetite for quality TV if done well and I hope the current holders of the rights to Atlas Shrugged see the value and opportunity to have this great work seen by the widest audience possible.
I don;t really think that many people's minds will be changed by seeing a TV adaptation of the novel, no matter how brilliantly done, but I'd like the chance to be proven wrong.
selection of media; too many in that field are against its philosophy.
2. The movie(s) or TV adaption will not change minds........the goal is to raise interest in the book.........and then in AR's ideas via her other fiction and non-fiction.
Let me add some clarity to this answer. I think the most important part of the movie is the Theme (central idea) and the Plot-theme (central action or central conflict. For those wishing for more emotional content; I would say a well directed movie involves conflict (people going against odds to achieve a goal). Most movies and shows that are addicting have plenty of conflict for the heroes to go through; which pulls at the rational emotions. The court case with Rearden in part 2 was a good example. Galt's message should have the same feeling. The other challenge is that we need to condense the book into essentials. Though I do not agree with the central themes M. Night Shyamalan conveys in his movies; I think that he is very masterful at condensing the ideas of books (Avatar) and weaving the plot and theme together(Signs). We equally need to do the same things for Atlas Shrugged. These goals should help us choose the right writer, director, and actors.
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