Thursday
Jun192008
Thursday, June 19, 2008 at 9:58AM 'Atlas Shrugged' Loses Its Director
Atlas Shrugged, all right, and
Vadim Perelman has
blinked. The writer-director who earned great notices with this debut The House
of Sand and Fog has been attached to
Angelina Jolie's ambitious adaptation for
almost a year now has walked away from Atlas Shrugged, according to
Cinematical's Kim Vonyar.
Jolie has been attached to the project for some time,
and Braveheart writer
Randall Wallace had written a draft of the script over the
last couple of years, but now with a director jumping ship, there's no telling
where that leaves Atlas at the moment.
Here's where this story gets weird: Jolie has told
MTV that Perelman was never attached to direct, despite
the multiple reports that he signed a contract, the lack of immediate rebuttals
of that story, and the director's own interviews talking about the progress of
the film, one of which was conducted last month.
So who's right? Unfortunately, it doesn't really matter
now since Perelman is off the project for good, and as Vonyar writes, "I
can say with as much certainty as one can possibly have about a situation like
this that the decision to step down was on Perelman's side." Hmm, sounds like
there was a falling out, doesn't it?
This can't help the production of an adaptation long
thought impossible. The book is over 1,000 pages, and it's a dense 1,000 pages
at that. I would think just to recreate the world in the story would be fairly
expensive, not to mention how long an epic like this would take to film. And now
that a willing director has fled the scene, it's hard to say where this will go.
Jolie has wanted to do this project since she's had the stroke to make movies
happen on a whim, but she might face resistance from a studio that can't afford
to be very risky these days (Lionsgate) and directors who might be afraid of
touching the script in its current form.
So who should direct this? There aren't many filmmakers
out there who could do the story justice in the first place, but then with a
truncated version, that really makes it tough. Say, does anyone have Brett
Ratner's number?
Reader Comments (32)
Ugh! How long will we have to wait? I believe that I could likely go to film school, and start making multi-million dollar earning movies myself before anything happens with Atlas Shrugged. For sure though, here is a book that absolutely must have proper representation on screen. Here's to hoping some film studio pulls their collective heads from the sand and realizes the money that can be made from the proper adaptation of such a story.
I wondered what was going on. I'm not surprised, I guess. I'm skeptical this can be done well on film, certainly not in the 140 minutes they were proposing. But I even re-read the book in my excitement about an upcoming movie version -- it was worth it even if they don't make the movie. It's even better the second time around!
You have to wonder if there's a way to split it into a two- or three-film franchise. You'd hate to do that at a certain level, but you're doing Atlas Shrugged a huge disservice to decimate it by cutting hundreds of pages. I can't think of a better way to make it than to either make a pair of three hour movies or to make three two-and-a-half hour movies.
When I was a kid in grade school, I. liked the movie "The Fountainhead".
Since then I have seen that movie several times, read the book the movie was based on and "Atlas Shrugged" three times in my life. At age 71 I was hoping to add the DVD of "Atlas Shrugged" and place it next to the DVD of "The Fountainhead".
If someone could summon the spirit of David Lean, this could get made. But, what cineplex would show it? They could fill the house with three screenings of The Love Guru, so why dedicate a whole auditorium for four hours without orcs or Slitherins to keep people's attention? (Okay, the love scenes with Angelina Jolie as Dagny would more than make up for the lack of orcs!) Most movie-goers today have the attention span of ferrets on acid so, who would actually sit through it, anyway?
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE, Atlas Shrugged needs to be presented to a larger audience, and although a Film will never do justice, at least its a start.
I believe many people would sit through a couple of hours of Atlas Shrugged. Most movies are getting longer anyway, like Lord of the Rings, Tarintino movies, and Titanic made mad money. People will sit through it as long as it is done right, that's the most important thing about this movie is that it done right and for the right reasons.
Why make a film? I know this point has been made before, but if LONESOME DOVE taught us anything, it's that an extra four hours can make an epic story more interesting than it likely would have been, told in two or even three hours. True there were a lot of big names in that one, who were also extremely good fits. But that's hardly the case in this one. You don't need buzz-dependent "stars" anymore, like the old days, to fill seats the 1st weekend in big theatres. Get a premium cable station on board for a 5-6 hour mini, hire the right director and cast for fit. That the last point wasn't much of a consideration, is a HUGE red flag that it's already wrong-headed and compromised. I want it, therefore I should have it, don't fly considering the pool insanely skilled acting talent, in the US and especially Britain.