Atlas Shrugged - Al Ruddy interview


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I put this on another thread, but it deserves a thread all by itself. Fascinating interview.

I just got this link off of another forum.

Shrugging Off 'Atlas Shrugged'

It is a half-hour podcast interview (audio only) of Al Ruddy by Claude Brodesser-Akner conducted on September 8, 2008 for The Business. Here is the blurb:

Hollywood's been sniffing around Atlas Shrugged since Ayn Rand published it in 1957. So why hasn't it been made into a movie? We talk to legendary producer Al Ruddy, the first guy to get the go-ahead from Rand -- in 1974.

Ruddy sure sounds like a smooth talker.

After hearing him be bashed so much on online Objectivist and Objectivism-related sites, I really enjoyed listening to this. I think Ruddy is a wonderful producer. He has a very impressive track record. After listening to him, I believe he would have made a great movie (Clint Eastwood, Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway). He also sounds like he has a firm grasp of the theatrical elements of the book that would sell the movie big time.

His break with Rand certainly sounds like her. He told her he would wait for her to die and then get the rights, and she responded that she would put in her will that he would be the one person never to receive them.

Yup. Those were the days...

:)

Michael

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Michael,

Thanks for posting this. I happened to hear the interview on NPR a couple of weeks ago. Fascinating stuff.

My favorite quote (about various actors in Rand-land, including Leonard Peikoff):

"It makes the Mormons look like an open society."

Robert Campbell

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I agree with Robert. Great interview. Al Ruddy emerges as better than some other Objectivists told me. His quotes about Rand sound very correct.

It will be interesting to see if Atlas ever gets made.

Edited by Chris Grieb
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Thanks, the second link did it.

I have lived in various parts of Manhattan and the Bronx. I grew up in South Jersey. I was born in Brookhaven, while my parents were living in Patchogue. I was conceived in St. Thomas, while my parents were living in Richmond. I was in Luzern, Schweiz, when Reagan bombed Libya. I have a port wine stain in the area where donor grafts are taken for hair plugs.

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Amen!

Mozilla/Firefox is phenomenal!

I will never use the big blue E again...now it stands, to me, as enough hangups, freezes, unlimited

reports to microsoft which never change anything.

Love their portal and such a cute fox on the globe!

Adam

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Chris,

I'm OK with Ruddy's movie productions of other novels. The guy at least knows how to make movies that are destined to become classics. He did all right with The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby.

For those interested, here's some info on him:

Albert S. Ruddy (Wikipedia)

Albert S. Ruddy (Imdb)

Michael

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Chris Baker:

Can you name three things that you have observed that you can applaud and say these are well done.

I have not seen about 80 of your posts, so maybe I am only seeing your hyper critical personality in these threads.

Perhaps you might enlighten me on accomplishments that you have seen that you would laud as greatness.

Michael's point is that the guy has a pretty good track record - both of the films Michael mentioned are in my list of my top 200

American movies ever made.

Not well versed in foreign films to even make a list.

Adam

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I'm OK with Ruddy's movie productions of other novels. The guy at least knows how to make movies that are destined to become classics. He did all right with The Godfather and Million Dollar Baby.

a

Michael

I haven't seen them or read them. The only book-movie combos that I have consumed are The Fountainhead and The Hobbitt. The second one doesn't really count, since it was made into a cartoon.

Ruddy's interview was enlightening. I'm not surprised by the story he told.

If the book is too long, then it could certainly be made into a short series. You could spread it out over ten hours if you need that much time.

My main concern is that people are going to walk out of the theater saying: "The book was better." I don't want to see that happen. And if someone totally butchers the story, it won't be helpful.

Perhaps, a more important question here is: What makes it so important that this movie get made? Does everyone think that the world will change overnight once this film gets out?

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It's Al Ruddy's business to get movies made. The continuing drama over the decades of Atlas the movie on and off continues to generate publicity for the novels of Ayn Rand, so it's not entirely a bad thing.

I don't know about this theory. I imagine most of the sales come from personal recommendations.

What kind of movie do you want to see made? I have no idea what kind of movie Ruddy would make. He did say that he would cut about 80% of the novel. In my opinion, that would be a complete butcher job. I want to see the movie done right.

Edited by Chris Baker
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Chris B,

I would certainly agree that if you are trying to get as much of the detail in Atlas Shrugged onto the screen as possible, only a miniseries would suffice. And there have been serious proposals to do Atlas Shrugged that way—just not very recently.

Al Ruddy's idea, as expressed in the interview, was to make Atlas Shrugged into one feature-length film. He was skeptical of the Baldwins' preliminary notion of filming and releasing Part I and then doing Part II (which doesn't mean it couldn't work... it's just not how he envisioned it).

And he's quite right that you'd have to cut 80% of the novel to make one feature-length movie out of it.

Once in a while, a book translates directly and almost losslessly into a movie. The Maltese Falcon was like that. But such occurrences are rare.

Robert C

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I would certainly agree that if you are trying to get as much of the detail in Atlas Shrugged onto the screen as possible, only a miniseries would suffice. And there have been serious proposals to do Atlas Shrugged that way—just not very recently.

It may be the only way to make it work. It could work well.

What would you cut from the film? Would it be the speeches? I'm trying to think of what you would cut. I guess you could cut Cheryl Brooks and Philip Rearden. I've long thought that Cheryl added nothing to the story.

And he's quite right that you'd have to cut 80% of the novel to make one feature-length movie out of it.

Once in a while, a book translates directly and almost losslessly into a movie. The Maltese Falcon was like that. But such occurrences are rare.

I'm not surprised by this. I have heard that the Harry Potter books have been pretty faithful.

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Chris B,

Al Ruddy pretty obviously anticipated cutting Galt's speech. I should think that most plans for filming Atlas Shrugged have included sharply abridging it...

Ruddy actually criticized the movie of The Fountainhead because it kept all 6 minutes of Howard Roark's courtroom speech. But that's just 6 minutes.

A lot of the subsidiary characters in Atlas Shrugged would have to be pared away, including Cherryl Brooks and Philip Rearden.

Robert C

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Even in a series, if you leave a device in to stay true to the novel, but do not take into account its context in the novel and the flow of the new medium, it gets weird.

There is an image that has stayed with me on this regarding another work. Stephen King wrote a long book called The Standing, which deals with the world falling apart from a disaster and the reemergence of pockets of people into civilization again. This book is based loosely on Christianity and there is a Satan figure. In the novel, he is portrayed as a loner gunslinger kind of image and he would walk long distances in the desert by himself. (There is probably some symbolic meaning in this.) At any rate, his nickname became "The Walking Dude" and King paid great attention to his scruffy boots in descriptions. Over the course of the novel, this became a chilling name for the other characters.

In the miniseries that was made from the book, the loner gunslinger image was scrapped for a more hippy motorcyclist kind of person, except he did not use rough clothes. He was seen more in indoor than outdoor (if I remember correctly) and nobody used the Walking Dude name. Yet in one scene there were two middle-aged men sitting in a car and one said to the other, wide-eyed and terrified, "Don't you know who we're dealing with? That's The Walking Dude!" (Those are not the exact words, but the gist as I remember them.)

If you hadn't read the book, this would be quite comical. I know I burst out laughing.

Michael

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Michael; Gentle correction: The Stephen King novel is called "The Stand".

It has been adapted as a mini-series that is very faithful to the spirit of the novel.

It might also be worth mentioning that after the novel was originally publishing Stephen King brought out a revision where he put back about 200 pages he had cut out of the book.

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Ted,

Go ahead. It's all free game here.

One of the things I like about thinking outside the box is that sometimes these gems pop out.

For example, Kevin Haggerty (a member who posts sporadically) once talked about "guilty by free association."

I might make a small collection of these things as I remember them.

Michael

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I'm confident that this list is incomplete, but it was interesting nonetheless:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_longe...by_running_time

A lot of them are old. Most of them are foreign.

One very long novel adapation is on the list--a Soviet adaptation of Tolstoy's War and Peace. It also ended up being one of the most expensive films ever made.

After I thought about it, I realized the time when the epic on screen ended for Hollywood. It was 1963, when Cleopatra came out. It starred Elizabeth Taylor and was one of the most expensive films made at the time. It almost bankrupt Twentieth Century Fox, which recovered mainly due to The Sound of Music two years later.

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