>>>>These guys on Atlas III at least put forth the effort.

In art — as in life — you don't get an "A" for putting forth an effort. You get an "A" for results. AS1 and AS2 were rejected by the public (including many Objectivists) and panned by critics. AS3 probably won't be different. Why should it be?

>>>>It would have been nice if Atlas Shrugged could have received the big budget treatment in Hollywood, but they blew it off out of protest.

You're fabricating a mythology about the history of this project to make you feel better about its failure. The producers could have made a single, high-impact movie with a screenplay by Randall Wallace (an excellent screenwriter). Perhaps the final product didn't please "philosophical adviser" David Kelley in terms of strict compliance with mandates for Objectivist purity. Who knows. Instead, they shelved Wallace's work in favor of a "let's throw in everything, including the kitchen sink" made-for-TV-approach, and even that was amateurish.

The producers realized that they could always sell DVDs and merchandise (t-shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) to cultists who made it clear online that they would buy anything, as long as it had something to do with Ayn Rand or the story of Atlas Shrugged. In fact, the bigger the failure at the box office and in critical write-ups, the more Objectivist cultists can cry "cultural conspiracy!" "mysticism!" etc., and the more they would urge one another to buy a 2nd or 3rd DVD, another t-shirt, and one more coffee mug.

I would be very interested in learning how much of the final budget — including monye from the Kickstarter campaign — was in fact spent on AS3. Given a mere 20-day shooting schedule, I suspect not much.

>>>So the suggestion is that Atlas III isn't any good unless an "experienced" director who shoots 1-2 pages of script a day filmed it. That sounds more like a production quota than a testament to production value.

That's because you've never shot (or budgeted) a movie. Movie production — "lensing", as it's sometimes called — is all about detail. That's why multiple takes are often required. Some directors were famous (or infamous) for excessive takes: Stanley Kubrick, for example, often made his actors do 90-100 takes or more for a single camera setup.

In any case, to blow through a feature-length screenplay in 20-days (assuming it's 120 pages) means they're doing an average of 6 pages per day — two whole scenes, possibly three. That's the sort of shooting schedule used in television production . . . and, in fact, as has been mentioned many times by many people, AS1 and AS2 looked more like a made-for-TV movie than a made-in-Hollywood movie.

In fact, to blow through 6 pages of shooting per day, it's probably necessary to use multiple cameras, possibly even a TV-style, 3-camera setup (most Hollywood features are shot with one camera because it's difficult — sometimes impossible — for a cinematographer to adequately light a scene for different camera angles at the same time. Directors-of-Photography prefer to light a scene beautifully for ONE angle at a time (as well as one focal length at a time), especially if the lighting is to play an important story-related role in the picture (setting the emotional mood, establishing time of day, etc.). The way it's done for television (especially soaps) is that the lights are hung from a grid on the ceiling, and most of the lighting quality is "flat" (i.e., lights have some diffusion material over them to scatter the light, disperse any strong sense of directionality, and soften shadows) so that it's fairly easy to shoot a scene from multiple angles simultaneously, since everything is lit.

Anyway, I can tell you know nothing about movie production. Shooting a film is all about scheduling (which means: setting quotas for shooting). That has precisely zero to do with unions.

Stick to setting fire to bull whips and recording it on your iPhone, OK?

>>>excuse me. and your expertise in the movie industry is....?

More extensive than yours.

>>>I agree it was an aggressive and exhaustive schedule.

A 20-day shoot is hardly aggressive and exhaustive. Given a 120-page screenplay (appoximately1 page per minute of screentime), most experienced directors will not want to shoot more than 2 pages per day, since every scene typically requires a master shoot, and coverage from different angles and at different image sizes (close-up, medium, pairs of over-the-shoulder shots during pure dialogue scenes, etc.), and there are usually multiple takes for each camera setup. So that's a 60-day (2 month) shoot.

Then it's about 3-6 months of editing.

A 20-day shoot is typical for low-budget film-student shoots.

In other words, it wrapped on 2/14 — 6 days before 2/20.

So even less time was spent on production than Smigala originally assumed. Excellent.

>>>morgan, Your info is incorrect.

How could it be incorrect? I got it from overmanwarrior — a fountainhead of truth and objectivity.

See:

http://overmanwarrior.wordpress.com/2014...

". . . you will be delighted to know that Atlas Shrugged Part III finally wrapped on Valentines’ Day 2014"

"They said filming started on 2/20, and finished less than a week later. I thought it takes a month or two to film a full length movie."

That's only true if the producers are committed to making an excellent movie that they hope will succeed aesthetically and financially. I don't believe that's the case here — AS1 and AS2 are evidence in support of my conclusion.