The Fountainhead


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The Turner Classic Movie channel (TCM) will be showing The Fountainhead this Thursday.

Check with your service provider for the times in your area.

-J

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Howard is too old and dumb, Gail too wrongly played but fixable, Dominique too much Patricia, the story too compressed and all the architecture a disgrace. Ellsworth is great and Peter not bad. Ayn wanted, Nathaniel said, 30 more minutes to open up the story and flesh out the characters. Gail did get happy well enough with Dominique as his wife and Howard as his friend. The dialogue is more stilted than in the novel. Fewer words to get the message across. Howard getting morally and esthetically didactic on Peter--and at length--well, I pushed the mute button. Boys and girls, read the novel first. Rand improved Love Letters, not her own novel. The basic fault of that is its length and the plot was right to begin with. If the plot hadn't been right she'd then have made it right and improved her novel.

--Brant

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According to the biographers, there was briefly a prospect of Garbo coming out of retirement to play Dominique (a phone call or two) and a more serious prospect of hiring Frank Lloyd Wright as designer. That would have been a movie worth watching.

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Howard is too old and dumb, Gail too wrongly played but fixable, Dominique too much Patricia, the story too compressed and all the architecture a disgrace. Ellsworth is great and Peter not bad. Ayn wanted, Nathaniel said, 30 more minutes to open up the story and flesh out the characters. Gail did get happy well enough with Dominique as his wife and Howard as his friend. The dialogue is more stilted than in the novel. Fewer words to get the message across. Howard getting morally and esthetically didactic on Peter--and at length--well, I pushed the mute button. Boys and girls, read the novel first. Rand improved Love Letters, not her own novel. The basic fault of that is its length and the plot was right to begin with. If the plot hadn't been right she'd then have made it right and improved her novel.

--Brant

1. Cooper is wooden as Roark, but what other star in 1949 could have played him? John Wayne? Robert Taylor? Ray Milland?

2. Massey is perfect as Gale. If he seemed too patrician as a kid from Hell's Kitchen, remember that the nouveau riche often took on the manners of aristocrats. Wynand/Massey built a cold exterior and allowed the passions to flicker inside it.

3. Neal delivers as good a performance as one could expect in a role that is fundamentally mystifying. I fell in love watching her in The Fountainhead. So did Cooper. Their affair went on for several years.

4. Some of the architectural drawings and models are bland, but the Enright Building is quite good, as is a house based on Fallingwater.

5. The film's running time is 1:54. This was not an epic feature and there was no reason Warner Brothers should have been expected to give it more time. Sure, there are many omitted characters and scenes. But Rand's screenplay delivered the message, and in film it is always safer to err on the side of brevity.

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I was not interested in going back in time and making a better movie. Cooper was a hell of a lot better than Clark Gable would have been. That novel was too much for Hollywood but Hollywood choked it down anyway. Hollywood knew what to do with Gone with the Wind and had it half right with The Fountainhead with the stylization. Massey works and would have worked better if his intro to Cooper as Roark hadn't been so compressed. One of the best parts of the novel was Gail running into Howard and finding out Howard was a rock.

Are you sure about the running time? The versions I used to watch before cable may have been cut for broadcast. That may have ironically helped the viewing experience by making it all go faster, for I enjoyed the movie more then. I'm referring to the stylization being made stronger by increasing the story speed. Contra that making the movie longer than what was done might have tended to work against it. Stylization of the extreme demanded, I think, of such a novel is not something Hollywood ever embraced enough to make it an esthetic hallmark of how its movies were made and which has gone downhill more or less since the talkies came on line with their inherent naturalism. There are two types of stylization: visual and character. Rand's novel demanded both because she wasn't very good with real psychology. She peaked as a screenwriter with Love Letters which shows all her strengths and none of her weaknesses. In Gone with the Wind those were real people talking with the visuals stylized perfectly for color. I think that's the best film imaginable for color. It would not have worked without color. Vice versa for Citizen Kane.

Anyway, since I could go on and on with this, perhaps getting too much wrong, I should stop here.

--Brant

I stopped!--honest!--even in my own mind it's all completely stopped! (but I was working on something even greater off this incredible base!)

(heh, heh--I'm the master of evil and only I know it!--you see really evil people are mastered by evil but I'm a really good people--get it?--so I use evil for good for evil + good = good [now I'm confused] as in Hitler's evil head meets a good bullet even if he pulled the trigger [it could have been from a GI's gun; it's all the same]--"If you only knew the power of the Dark Side" [i know, I know: Star Wars got it right ["Only a master of evil"] and my idea of right [and evil] is all wrong and this entire paragraph should be deleted, but I've worked too long and hard writing it so all you can do now that you--whoever you are--have read it is curse me for having fun t your expense--hey!--maybe I'm evil after all! [oh, joy!])

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  • 6 months later...

From Letters of Note:

http://www.lettersofnote.com/search?q=ayn+rand&max-results=20&by-date=true

In May of 1948, author Ayn Rand received a letter from a fan named Joanne Rondeau. In it, she asked Rand to explain a sentence in her bestselling 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, which reads:

To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I'.

Rand responded with the following letter.

(Source: Little Big Book Of Life; Image: Ayn Rand, via.)

May 22, 1948

Dear Ms. Rondeau:

You asked me to explain the meaning of my sentence in The Fountainhead: "To say 'I love you' one must first know how to say the 'I."

The meaning of that sentence is contained in the whole of The Fountainhead. And it is stated right in the speech on page 400 from which you took the sentence. The meaning of the "I" is an independent, self-sufficient entity that does not exist for the sake of any other person.

A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.

The usual (and very vicious) nonsense preached on the subject of love claims that love is self-sacrifice. A man's self is his spirit. If one sacrifices his spirit, who or what is left to feel the love? True love is profoundly selfish, in the noblest meaning of the word — it is an expression of one's highest values. When a person is in love, he seeks his own happiness — and not his sacrifice to the loved one. And the loved one would be a monster if she wanted or expected such sacrifice.

Any person who wants to live for others — for one sweetheart or for the whole of mankind — is a selfless nonentity. An independent "I" is a person who exists for his own sake. Such a person does not make any vicious pretense of self-sacrifice and does not demand it from the person he loves. Which is the only way to be in love and the only form of a self-respecting relationship between two people.

Ayn Rand

I have employed that statement and been clear about it with every person...predominantly female since I finished Atlas and then read the Fountainhead.

A...

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I have it on VHS and DVD, so I have seen it a few times. Recently, I re-read a large section to settle a challenge on Galt's Gulch. (I was wrong.) When I read the book, I see the actors from the movie. They were all chosen well.

You can read all you want about the filming. Wright wanted the same complete control that Rand had, so that was not going to work out.

The scene where Roark tells Dominique that he always loved her has a quality that is deeper than acting.

They had to shoot the courtroom scene twice because Cooper did not understand his lines.

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They only had to shoot it twice?

I had to read you more than once before I could agree with anything. Twice.

"Deeper than acting"? You could say that because the actors were getting it on off screen, but then it was deeper than acting--it was real--whenever they shared a shoot.

I agree with Rand--I trust Branden on this--wanting to open up the screenplay for character and story development, but she had an overall time limitation. The movie is rendered in a rush. While Cooper was too old for Roark he made it work. He essentially replayed the character in High Noon with Jeff Bridges playing the Peter Keating character against him. First-hander vs second-hander. It was not the real American West. In that American West a town full of Americans shot up the Jesse James gang in Northridge, MN. They didn't cower in church. (And all the marshal needed was a repeating carbine to take down the three bad guys, but I digress; that's Hollywood.) "The west at its best" was Shane.

--Brant

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"...in High Noon with Jeff Bridges..."

--Brant

That would be:

MV5BMTIzNjM5NTQ4MV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwMzgw

Lloyd Bridges (I) (1913–1998)

Actor | Director | Soundtrack

The star of many land and underwater adventures, Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Jr. was born on January 15, 1913 in San Leandro, California, to Harriet Evelyn (Brown) and Lloyd Vernet Bridges, Sr., who owned a movie theater and also worked in the hotel business. He grew up in various Northern California towns. His father wanted him to become a lawyer, but ... See full bio »

Born: Lloyd Vernet Bridges Jr.

January 15, 1913 in San Leandro, California, USA

Died: March 10, 1998 (age 85) in Los Angeles, California, USA

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0000978/?ref_=ttfc_fc_cl_t3

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