Posted 9:46 PM by Jason
The Unmakable Movie

David Bernstein mentions on Volokh that Variety has an article on yet another attempt to make Atlas Shrugged into a movie, and opens the comments thread to speculation on casting, since the Variety article speculates on the possibility of Angelina Jolie being cast as Dagney Taggart.  It further describes her as a "Rand enthusiast" and in an a turn typical celeb magazine turn mentions Brad Pitt as a possible John Galt.  Now, let's be real here, this thing will never get off the ground, the book is huge.  For the sake of comparison (pages won't say much), Atlas runs 565,223 words, while the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy goes 467,662.  Any movie would thus be either too long to watch or too short to do the story justice.  

There was a time when I thought that an Atlas Shrugged movie would be the sweetest thing ever.  I'm not the Ayn Rand fan that I once was (I remembered that I'm Catholic), but I would probably still see it, though it would have to be in one of those theatres that still does intermissions and sells food and beer.  What really remains of that time mentioned above (ok fine, it was high school, I was one of those kids, happy now?) is my notion of the proper cast.  Brad Pitt was in it, but as the pirate Ragnar Danneskjold (he must have been in his long haired and bearded phase), not Galt.  Oh, and I watched a lot of Law and Order, so I had Benjamin Bratt as Francisco and Angie Harmon as Dagney.  The book has a lot of important characters, almost too many, so I won't go any farther than that, but I stand by my previous judgment.  


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