Former 'Atlas Shrugged' Director Shrugging Back

That Atlas Shrugged adaptation keeps getting stranger; its story is nearly as epic now as the one the movie will try to tell. So, OK, some rich CEO bought the rights to the book 15, 20 years ago. The option was going to expire and rather than lose the million bucks he paid for the chance to make the film, Mr. CEO rushed a movie into production, thereby committing more of his funds to the project, almost all of which he's certain to lose. The new movie costs about $5 million but it's not the whole story in one film. The plan is for a series of movies to wade through Ayn Rand's book. The shooting schedule for the first flick is five weeks and the guy directing it, Paul Johansson, does have some TV experience in that regard, but is better known as an actor on One Tree Hill. Maybe he's the next big thing, but even if that were true, he was hired on the spur of the moment, stepping in to fill the void left by Stephen Polk, unceremoniously dumped around the first of this month. So Johansson had about two weeks of pre-production on a cheap, abbreviated film version of a huge, well-known book that's being turned into a movie by a producer with zero experience. Fabulous. So what happened to Stephen Polk? Funny story, unless he's telling it. Polk says he has hired an attorney and expects to take the case of his termination to the courts, although in his comments to Deadline Hollywood, he never acknowledges why he was let go.

"I had some real names seriously interested, but it had to be a real feature film, and I feel like I had the rug pulled out from under me. When we talked about cast, even B-list cast, they were like, 'we don't need names.' It was great material, people were interested, but there were red flags. It's devastating to me. They replaced me with a TV actor, this has TV written all over it. They've fired other people. I was trying to embrace the spirit of Atlas Shrugged, and it will be interesting to see if they can still pull it off."

I hope the producers don't already have plans for Razzie night.