Another Attempt at Atlas as a Movie?

Several days ago Daily Variety reported that Lionsgate had picked up the worldwide distribution rights for a movie version of Ayn Rand's massive novel "Atlas Shrugged". As my About Me page indicates, Rand's novels (AS plus The Fountainhead) are my all-time favorites, alongside JRR Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. With great movies recently made for the latter, I can only hope that a good movie for Atlas will be produced as well. Many have attempted the project over the years (the novel was first published in 1957), but it has always died off pretty early in the process. It is difficult to come up with a good script for a 1,000+ page philosophical novel, one that is true to the author's message and the basic plot, while updating it (perhaps) for a contemporary audience and technology scene. (A movie version of The Fountainhead was made in 1949, with Rand herself as the screenplay author. It starred Gary Cooper, Patricia Neal, and Raymond Massey. Although it is generally not regarded as a particularly good film, I liked it.)

This most recent Atlas movie news quickly spread around this week: the hollywood news world, the blogosphere, and the Internet in general. This was in part because of two major celeb names attached to the announcement. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are apparently fans of Rand's novels. Pitt has expressed an interest in playing the lead role (Howard Roark) in a movie of The Fountainhead. But now they seem to be interested in possibly getting the leads in Atlas Shrugged, playing John Galt and Dagny Taggart. I can think of far worse to play those roles, and they would certainly draw a lot of attention to the film.

Besides the Daily Variety article, see also Robert Bidinotto's blog entry on this which provides several other good links to articles from the past week on this story (though really a Google News search will bring up dozens!). Particularly fun reading is power-blogger and Rand-fan VodkaPundit's wishlist for an Atlas movie cast. Trying to cast Rand's novels has long been a fun pastime for Rand fans... and I like many of his picks. The comments at his blog on this are interesting too.