No shit. Just in time for the release this weekend of the nearly universally panned film adaptation of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (even the conservative reviewers are slating it) comes this hilarious information from TIME magazine. Yes Virginia, there is an Ayn Rand fan dating site!
There are about 12,700 dating profiles on the Atlasphere, which Joshua Zader, 37, founded in 2003 after attending a few Rand-related conferences. “I realized that all the single people were using the conferences to search for another Ayn Rand fan they could fall in love with,” says Zader, who modeled the site after Match.com’s pay-to-view profile system. But the Atlasphere also functions as a social network (with some 22,000 nondating profiles) in which members can contribute essays and articles.
I asked Zader how someone who espouses a me-first philosophy can also maintain a loving relationship. “Ayn Rand has a great quote in The Fountainhead,” he told me. “She writes that a person cannot say ‘I love you’ without first being able to say the I.”
It sort of makes sense for Objectivists to have their own dating site, doesn’t it? I mean the rest of us just find them so damned objectionable…. Find your very own Dagny Taggart, Hank Reardon, Francisco d’Anconia or John Galt (chances are it’s a pretty dude-heavy, Republican-heavy and no doubt idiot-heavy crowd) at the Atlasphere. The women there probably all look like Pamela Geller. It’s frightening to even contemplate this.
Well, they’ve released the trailer for the first part of a projected trilogy based on Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. It’s taken over 50 years for the story to get from the page to the screen and from the looks of this, perhaps things were best left that way!
Angelina Jolie, Charlize Theron, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway have all been touted at one time or another to portray Rand’s heroine, Dagny Taggart. Russell Crowe and Brad Pitt have both been bandied about to play the novel’s world-stopping hero, John Galt. So who got these roles of a lifetime, ultimately? Some chick you’ve never heard of and a dude who was on Beverly Hills 90210 and Highlander: The Raven! (He also happens to be the trilogy’s director, bless his heart).
This looks about as good as one of the Left Behind movies. Perhaps that’s fitting.
For nearly 20 years now, Ayn Rand’s mammoth ode to capitalism and self-interest, Atlas Shrugged, has labored to find its way to a place it probably doesn’t belong anyway: the movie screen. Why so long a journey? Well, while some people (Alan Greenspan! John Mackey!) consider it the intellectual equivalent to The Lord of The Rings, that trilogy’s success didn’t exactly wrap up with a 100-page speech to the masses.
But now, in a roll-the-dice move that would make John Galt proud (or Howard Roark laugh), the current option-holder of Shrugged, entrepreneur John Aglialoro, has set a, gulp, June 11th start date on the production.
And while that’s only weeks away, and he’s currently lacking a single cast member (no word yet on Angelina Jolie or Charlize Theron as Dagny Taggart), Aglialoro has at least selected a director: Stephen Polk. Okay, if not Aglialoro, is Polk worried about the film’s casting? Nope!
Polk said they are not intimidated to film a storied book even if stars don’t align. “For more than 15 years, this has been at studios and there has been a whole dance around who’ll play the iconic roles,” Polk said. “Making it an independent film was the game-changer. Everybody is saying, how can you shoot this movie without a star? We’re shooting it because it’s a good movie with great characters. We’ve been in pre-production for months, but kept it a mystery. Part of the reason is because there’s so much crap about how you need a great big budget and stars. We aren’t looking for big names to trigger press or financing.”
For those of you wondering how Polk, whose acting credits far outweigh those of his directing (29 to 1), landed such a gig, what follows is the trailer for his last (and first) film, ‘08’s Cherly Ladd and Barry Bostwick-starring, Baggage:
Okay, now, given the above, we still can’t be sure how the resulting Atlas Shrugged film is going to turn out. But here’s something I do know: it’s gonna have a hard time stopping critics from seizing upon one of the novel’s central images: the train wreck.
