>>>>I would never expect movie critics to like these films.

That wasn't the point. The point was that you now seem intentionally to SEEK bad reviews as if they were a sign of honor. Even Alyssa Rosenbaum herself shed TEARS when the "left wing loons" employed as professional critics of literature in the 1950s trashed Atlas Shrugged. She obviously craved favorable reviews — as, indeed, any professional novelist would.

It was some consolation to her, of course, that the novel did very well commercially; but she STILL wanted good reviews from professional critics, if for no other reason than craft.

>>>Most are left wing loons.

So what. See, you're making a dumb amateurish mistake. You're assuming that a professional critic would trash a well-made film just on account of its political or philosophical content and implications, irrespective of how well-crafted the film was, and how well told its story was. You're wrong. Any professional critic who knows anything about filmmaking and its history would praise a film like Leni Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will" or "Olympiad" for its brilliant technique, even if they want nothing to do with its pro-Hitler, pro-Nazi-regime themes.

AS1 and AS2 were trashed specifically because they barely rose above film-student levels of basic story construction. THAT was also the reason the public rejected them.

Those are not reasons to be proud of those movies.

And even Alyssa Rosenbaum was able to praise a novelist like Tolstoy for his brilliant writing technique, even though she disliked intensely the "slice of life" subject matter he chose to treat.

That you cannot (or will not) separate form and content in art means you are happy to remain an ignoramus. Only in Objectivism is such intellectual laziness praised as "integrity to one's values."

>>>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?

>>>>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.