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.

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Pawn Shop 'Atlas Shrugged' Adaptation in Production

Remember the hurried-up Atlas Shrugged that some independent producer is flinging together like so much chimp dung on the walls of a zoo? At one point, the classic 20th century Ayn Rand novel had Angelina Jolie attached to star (and I think produce), with Randall Wallace (Braveheart) writing the script and Vadim Perelman (The House of Sand and Fog) directing. Not anymore, and not by a long shot.

A few weeks back, John Aglialoro, a CEO of a fitness company who purchased the rights to the book 15 years ago, announced that he'd make the movie outside the system, in essence, self-financing it, hiring an unproven director (to direct a script Aglialoro co-wrote), and rushing it into production this month. The reason: Aglialoro spent $1 million on the rights and if he hadn't gone into production by this past Saturday, according to Variety (through Slashfilm), he would have lost the option. Suffering from a major case of forest blindness, Aglialoro didn't want his $1 million to go to waste, so he's spending $5 million to run a movie production, based on one of the most cinematically impenetrable books ever published. Hollywood has struggled with a good way to visualize Rand's book for decades, but this guy thinks he can wrangle Paul Johansson from One Tree Hill to star and direct the first part of a multi-film series and somehow, that's not a bigger waste of even more money than just letting his option expire.

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'Atlas Shrugged'...And Rolled Over In His Grave

Let's see if you or I would do it this way: Let's say you own the rights to what might be an unfilmable novel, and let's say that novel is Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. And let's say you spent $1 million for those rights back in the mid-1990s but despite your best efforts, the movie project just hasn't come together like you'd hoped. What would you do next month?

If you were John Aglialoro, you'd go ahead and throw Atlas Shrugged into production in June, self-financing it, despite the fact that he doesn't have a star attached to play Dagny Taggart, one of fiction's great characters. I'll say it: This guy's going to waste a lot of money on a movie nobody will like. Actually, he's going to waste a lot of money on four movies. According to Deadline, Aglialoro is splitting Atlas Shrugged into four movies, and he's got offers out to Charlize Theron and Maggie Gyllenhaal to play Taggart, although both are already busy next month. So...good luck.

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Charlize 'Shrugged'?

Here's a curveball: Angelina Jolie's pet project, the long-gestating and difficult to execute adaptation of Atlas Shrugged may finally be coming our with. But without Angelina Jolie.

The Hollywood Reporter says the coveted role of Dagny Taggart, protagonist of one of Time's top 100 novels of the 20th century, may instead go to Charlize Theron. It should be pointed out that they're actually two projects, but it's unlikely if the Theron production gets underway next year as planned that the Jolie version would continue to have what little moment it might still have.

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'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?