Atlas Shrugged III?

[MarkD]

Apparently last weekend Atlas Shrugged III opened. I didn't find out until Wednesday, and one week later exactly one theater within 50 miles of me is still showing it. One theater closer had it for less than a week. I saw nothing about it before it opened, not even on the blogs that would normally have mentioned it.

Did anyone see it?

I have the other two on DVD, I'll probably get the third just to have a complete set.

[Aesop]

Like this a surprise?
They've all sucked, and when you're making a movie, pages-long monologues only work in bad French art films - which, once again, is all of them.

A screenplay is +/- 90 pages of widely spaced and indented dialog; call it 45 regular novel pages.
Ayn Rand couldn't keep a story to 45 pages if she was writing a limerick.

The current piece of offal has managed a 0% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it only scored that high because they don't allow negative numbers.
(For comparison, even the monumental ScientoloTurd mega-flop Battlefield Earth managed a 3% score there, probably including Travolta's own review.)

There may be some sort of Rand-loving version of Peter Jackson out there who can condense her work down to a movie and do justice to it, but the one thing these movies have proven is they haven't found that person yet.
And based on this trilogy, hell will freeze over before anyone serious risks another dollar to make any more.
The did a Kickstarter to raise the 400K to make this one, and sadly, you can see every penny on the screen.

Until you get the Rand Fanboy Fapp Club out of the process, and hire someone who knows what they're doing, no one's going to do this right.
A number of daytime TV shows are shot in front of a live audience.
This movie is proof that some production staffs should be too.

[Bullspit]

I thought the first one worked. The second not as well. I wasn't willing to drive an hour to see the third one so I will wait until it is in DVD.

[JustinR]

I donated to the kickstarter campaign for the third one, going to go see it in a few days.

It's certainly difficult to translate a novel the size of Atlas Shrugged to the movie screen. A tv miniseries might almost have been better, but probably would have had the same problems.

[BDK]

Oh, Atlas Shrugged could have easily been a 3 hour movie. It's mostly redundant ranting rather than plot.

[Dub_James]

I can tell you this; if it were a Leftist novel, whatever the merits of how the movie turned out, you could be damn sure they'd get their message across in a way that was convincing to the average person, and blindingly obvious to the true believers.

In that area alone, perhaps, the Left is vastly superior to the Right.

[BDK]

Somehow, freedom lost the artistic crowd - which is bizarre, as I've never met a group more inherently libertarian...

[JustinR]

Oh, Atlas Shrugged could have easily been a 3 hour movie. It's mostly redundant ranting rather than plot.

All movies can be condensed into a three minute HISHE episode. (See YouTube.) That doesn't mean that in condensing something like the Bible into an 8 part Sunday mini-series, something isn't lost both literally and in artistic expression.

(I'm not comparing the two books, just trying to make a point.)

[Aesop]

I can tell you this; if it were a Leftist novel, whatever the merits of how the movie turned out, you could be damn sure they'd get their message across in a way that was convincing to the average person, and blindingly obvious to the true believers.

In that area alone, perhaps, the Left is vastly superior to the Right.

If you want to send a message, use Western Union. - Samuel Goldwyn, co-founder of MGM

This is why any movie, left, right, libertarian, scientology, whatever, blows dead whale penis when it's all about the propaganda.
This is why Sergei Eisenstein and Leni Reifenstahl are studied, but mocked, because at least they understood the craft along with the message, but they still came down on the side of the message when in doubt.

Real estate is about location, location, location.
A movie is about story, story, story.
People who forget this make piles of dogshit like Batman and Robin.
People who remember it make The Dark Knight.
Same idea, but one has a story, and one just has a few hundred million worth of parts vomited up onto the screen.
(And speaking personally, WTH, at least the checks cleared...)
A quick check of BoxOfficeMojo will reveal which approach works.

The fundamental problem with all the Randian offal that's been made is they're all worried about keeping everything in, as though the malignant little dwarf were possessed of papal infallibility, either in life or now.
The problem isn't that there's no one who can do justice to the bare bones of the story in Atlas Shrugged; it's that there are 40000 freshman in screenwriting class who could. But until this thing passes from copyright and into the public domain, no one will get the chance, because of the masturbatory fervor with which the minions of the dead author slavishly guard The Legacy.

Nobody had to write in Good vs. Evil and Freedom vs. Tyranny to make Dark Knight, or Lord Of the Rings, or Avengers, or 20 other movies with pretty hardcore right-wing views, yet those messages leak from every bit of them. But first, they had to write a story that people would watch for 90 minutes. The theme comes out of that, it isn't something you put in. And the major decision in making a good movie is what you throw away, not what you keep. Atlas Shrugged is maybe one 90-minute flick.
If somebody like Spielberg, Scorsese, or dozens of others labored over it, it would be to tell the essential story without one bit of extraneous self-masturbatory crap, which would necessitate throwing 99% of the book into the trash (because most of Rand's writing is endless repetitive self-masturbatory crap), and distilling it down to its concentrated essence. You make a movie three times: When you write the story, when you film the story, and when you edit the film.

The people who played around with Atlas Shrugged never did the first one, or the last one, and keep palming off the middle step, done over and over, except succeedingly worse each time, as if the first and last elements aren't the critical ones. The result of that approach speaks for itself.

The Left isn't better than anyone at this, they just mostly have adult supervision - mostly - and no shortage of people who realize that they're in a movie business, not a movie business.

You want to be rich and famous?
Take Atlas Shrugged, distill the story arc to 3 minutes, talking.
That's called a pitch.
Write it up as a (max) 10-minute synopsis.
That's called a treatment.
If you can get someone's interest up with that, write it up in Hollywood screenplay format. Keep only the necessary characters and plot elements and dialogue from the book. And bring it in at 90 pages. Not 89, and not 91. 90.
That's a first draft.
Then have someone, not a friend, but someone you trust and who knows WTF they're doing, critique it.
Then fix what they find fault with.
That's a re-write.
Lather, rinse, repeat.
When you can't make it any better or tighter you're done.
That's a final draft.
Now you're ready to go shopping for someone to make it.
(I just saved anyone $100,000 and three or four years of film school. You're welcome. If you actually do what I wrote above one time, you're well ahead of 90% of the writers in Hollywood. Yes, really. It's that bad. And if you have one finished screenplay, you vault over a crazy huge number of wannabes.)

Oh, but the reason neither you nor anyone else has ever done those first five things?
Because they don't own the rights to the story, and won't until 2049, 70 years after Rand croaked, which is the current extent of copyright.
(Of course, just about the time that span seems to be about to start dumping Walt Disney's stories into public domain, that corporation lobbies to get copyright extended another span, which may happen again, around 2035 or so. Go figure.)

So you can wait until 2049 (I'll probably be dead, so IDGAF), or you can take a 2x4, and try and explain this to the dipshits who hold the keys to the Randian legacy. And try and beat some sense into them to not only cut the rights loose, but give up creative control of them.

This is why Thank God for Peter Jackson, who could get the Tolkien people to unclench their fists, and trust someone. And then not fuck them over, but rather gloriously just the opposite.
We got Lord Of The Rings, and now The Hobbit, and he's got something like $100M, which isn't a bad gig if you can land it.

All movies can be condensed into a three minute HISHE episode.

3 minutes is weak, but tolerable.
Better: 30 seconds. With bunnies.

[Vonz90]

Somehow, freedom lost the artistic crowd - which is bizarre, as I've never met a group more inherently libertarian...

Artist types for the most part could give a rat's rear end beyond whatever either let's them do their thing (act, write, paint, whatever) or gets them rich/famous if that is their goal. If there was a large number of cannibal zoroastrians funding art, then you would be amazed at the huge quantities of pro cannibal zoroastrian artists that would suddenly appear.