Atlas Shrugged: the movie: scenes from the 38-year struggle to film Ayn Rand's famous novel.

• Author: Doherty, Brian

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

HANK REARDEN, metal magnate, faces a bureaucrat from the State Science Institute across his desk of burnished steel. The bureaucrat tells Rearden that he would bc wise to sell his amazing new amalgam, Rearden metal, to the government. Rearden refuses. The bureaucrat presses him: Why can't he sec the benefit of selling to a government that can and will condemn the metal as unsafe if he refuses? Rearden replies with cool contempt: "Because it's mine"

Mine: rhymes with Ayn. So goes an old joke about the adopted name of Ayn Rand, the Russian-born novelist who invented Hank Rearden and his fictional metal.

I am in the anteroom of Rearden's office, watching one of the last shooting days of the film version of Atlas Shrugged, a project Rand's fans have both wanted and feared for decades. Who gets to call this movie "mine" ?

In one sense, the picture belongs to Rand. It would not exist without her novel and its millions of readers who the filmmakers hope will form their core audience. But the 38-year history of attempts to film Atlas Shrugged shows that the project never could have happened while Ayn Rand lived. Her need for control did not mesh well with the collaborative, compromise-riddled art of filmmaking.

The film's direct father is, like many of Rand's heroes, a highly successful businessman: John Aglialoro, a private equity whiz and CEO of the Cybex exercise equipment company. Aglialoro was named by Fortune magazine in 2007 as the 10th richest small business executive in the country. He has never made a movie before. He is not in the movie business to make movies per se, or to make money, though he hopes to. Aglialoro is in the movie business to make Atlas Shrugged, a book whose message--that individuals do not owe their lives to the collective-"zapped him," he says, when he first read it in the late 1970S.

In 1992 Aglialoro gave Leonard Peikoff-Rand's heir and a disciple of her Objectivist philosophy--more than $1 million for the rights to make a movie of Rand's enormous novel, in which the world's most brilliant and accomplished men and women go on strike against a system choking itself to death on statism and altruism.Very much not in the spirit of Rand, Peikoff relinquished control over any movie Aglialoro chose to make. Nearly two decades later, in a tense race against time that Aglialoro's production partner Harmon Kaslow compares to their protagonists' desperate attempts to finish theft railroad on schedule--"and we didn't even have Rearden metal to help"--Atlas was filmed in 27 days during the summer of 2010. (More precisely, the filmmakers completed photography on Atlas Shrugged Part I. The novel is divided into three parts, and this picture ends where Part I of the book ends.)

It's eerie watching actor Grant Bowler bring Rearden to life as I sit, out of camera range, in the anteroom of "his" office in a sleek industrial space in Santa Monica, California. I've been a fan of Rand's work since my late teens. I wrote a book (Radicals for Capitalism:A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement) that is partly a biography of Rand. Her characters and ideas occupy a special place in my mind, and in the minds of millions of other Rand lovers--and haters. The Atlas Shrugged movie will likely stand or fall in Rand's beloved marketplace on the question of whether people who found Atlas a life-changing experience can embrace the movie as emotionally theirs.

The Many Failures of Filming Atlas Shrugged

Atlas Shrugged was a battlefield on which many of Hollywood's mightiest forces fought and died. The first man to win Rand's trust enough for her to sell him the movie rights was Godfather producer Albert Ruddy. Ruddy and Rand appeared together at a press conference at New York's chic 21 restaurant in 1972 to announce the deal. Ruddy had agreed to the condition of flying Rand out to Hollywood for any necessary meetings in a private jet, lest the Soviets hijack any commercial airliner she was on.

Rand was under the impression that Ruddy agreed to give her complete control and approval of the final cut. Ruddy had to disabuse her of that notion, and thus he did not make a movie of Atlas Shrugged.

Rand then went into business with screenwriter Stifling Silliphant (whose work on In the Heat of the Night she had adored) and producer Michael...