Saw a documentary at the theater tonight: Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged. It's professionally done, but I'm sure I wasn't the target audience. I'm too familiar with most of this material. What made it worth watching for me was the interview segment with Al Ruddy, the producer of The Godfather, who explains how he blew his chance to do the movie version of Atlas back in the seventies. (He didn't want to give her final script approval. She insisted upon it. Stalemate. But the details are colorful, and Ruddy is a character.)
I'm not sure why it's being screened tonight and January 26th at selected theaters. I mean, it was shown at a single theater in the entire Chicagoland area tonight - and that showing was in the far South Suburbs. Well, I'm sure it's part of some master marketing plan.
One central thesis of the film is that Americans in the booming 1950's were not in a position to grasp the predictive power of Atlas. Things needed to get a lot worse - and the government's handling of the fiscal crisis reminded a lot of people of the novel's events - thus reawakening interest in the book's warnings of what could go wrong.
It was hard to grasp during the 50s boom,
but easier now midst signs of fiscal doom.
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