In A Brave Heart for Atlas Shrugged, David Boaz looks at the new Atlas Shrugged script by the fellow who penned Braveheart:
Randall Wallace’s script for the movie Atlas Shrugged is 129 pages long, according to an interview in Script magazine. That seems pretty short for such a massive novel. [...] Wallace says he has finished the screenplay, and it’s been “greenlit” by the studio. Angelina Jolie has been signed to play Dagny Taggart, and the movie may be in theaters next summer.Wallace was nominated for an Oscar for his script for Braveheart, another movie popular with many libertarians. He first read the novel when his son at Duke University recommended it. Wallace gave his son C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, which suggests some interesting dinner-table conversations.
“Wallace himself does not claim to be an Objectivist or a libertarian,” but he did find a familiar them in Atlas Shrugged, one also found in Braveheart:
The assertion that change occurs when heroic individuals are willing to stand up–and further, that people in the herd want to be heroic individuals but aren’t encouraged to do so until they find a leader worth following — is very much in Braveheart, and it’s something thoroughly ingrained in the American psyche.
Is there any chance the final movie will be true to Rand’s philosophy and politics?