It’s still driven by greed and pure self-interest. Ayn Rand rests easy in her grave.
In an effort to further Ayn Rand’s message critiquing altruism and promoting the virtue of selfishness, rejecting all moochers who would dare claim your money by tears, the producers of the third Atlas Shrugged movie have launched a Kickstarter campaign asking for donations, predicated on reminding supporters of the critics who have hurt it. As reported earlier this year, despite the free market repeatedly determining it would rather not have any Atlas Shrugged movies, producers Harmon Kaslow and John Aglialoro boldly refused to relinquish their rational self-interests to a world that would dare take their ideas from them, chiefly by not paying to see them. And because of their indefatigable commitment to film Atlas Shrugged: Who Is John Galt? by the fall—and thus propagate its titular character’s manifesto to “never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”—Kaslow and Aglialoro have turned to asking other men to give them $250,000.
Wait, the producers, who believe that the market is filled with rational self-actualized agents with perfect information, have discovered that the market rejects their incoherent tripe, and they have not listened?
Is there a stronger word than schadenfreude for what I’m feeling?
You have made my irony meter very happy today.
If the Kickstarter fails, I think I’ll have a shadenfreudengasm.
Getting other people to fund your vanity project is a major theme of Atlas and Fountainhead.
@ dantalion:
Oh, it’s worse than that. In the FAQ:
My translation: we don’t need the money, but we figured there were enough well-heeled idiots out there to give us a nice bonus.
They also have a nice riff on how they’ll get publicity for their movie because of people critical of their endeavor. PZ FELL FOR THEIR TRAP!
@ leftwingfox:
They’re already almost halfway to their goal, with 28 days to go. People are actually putting in $10,000 donations to this crapfest (or maybe it’s a scheme whereby the movie funds itself for publicity? Nah, scratch that. Barnum, suckers, and all that.)
Just seeing the $250,000 figure makes me happy (not to mention that they aren’t even halfway there). If they’re asking for that, it has to be a tiny budget. They know it’s going to be no better than a B-movie. And of course they can’t be union actors….
When they are done with Atlas Shrugged, they should film Where No Sheldon Has Gone Before.
Half-full/half-empty, I guess.
They’re not raising a budget for a movie, they’re raising it for the marketing.
Oh but don’t you see? The MOOCHERS have spoken! The masses are keeping away much the same way they kept away from Richard Halley’s music, Henry Reardon’s metal and Howard Roark’s buildings! The ignorant masses will finally see the genius of Atlas Shrugged the Movie, but the makers, disgusted it took so long for their genius to be recognized, will magically disappear only to turn up years later in some libertarian utopia in Colorado, cackling as their strike causes society to crumble and the unwashed beg for more crappy adaptations of Ayn Rand’s crappy novels.
@ consciousnessrazor:
Your glass may vary. Note also that the budget for the movie (as described on the Kickstarter) is $10 million, which is already funded according to them. This is just for endangered-animal cuisine, methinks.
So you’d think. But the Unions are all-powerful moochers! Not to mention the INS, or ICE, or whatever the hell they are this year.
It’s so hard for me to keep the Atlas Shrugged movies and the Left Behind movies straight.
Dang it nich, you coulda tagged that with a Spoiler Alert! Now how am I gonna enjoy “The second most influential novel ever written – second only to the Bible.”???
Yeah, that’s not even close to high production value these days. Which is not necessarily a bad thing, but they also have no story and no characters. I don’t know, maybe the soundtrack will be good and wouldn’t remind me of selfish deluded assholes.
I’m sure they already have something set aside for marketing besides the $250k they may or may not get. But the little they spend on marketing (because it’s absurdly expensive) says a lot on its own. It’s nice that a lot of people will never even have to hear about it.
Yeah, well, an explicit part of their marketing scheme is to become a sensation via social media. I’m not sure they’re aware that that happened with the first two, and most people enjoyed the experience of side-splitting laughter. :)
I keep going back to their KS page because it’s just too funny. From the comments section:
I wonder if they’ll feel that way when they fail — again — to fill a theater. But then, they’ll have a lot of marketing “expenses” to fall back on.
Is it going to have a different cast this time around too?
Doesn’t John Galt have some interminable speech at the end of this one? At least that ought to be cheap to film.
I’d probably watch it if they cast Scrooge McDuck, Mr. Burns, and the Monopoly dude.
Not only are they moochers, but they are asking *men* for money. Misandry!
It’s a 3 hour speech. I hope they speed it up chipmunk style
“never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine”
I’ve actively avoided reading this book, but still…he actually says this?
My understanding of the book was that he was supposed to be some kind of architect? But if this quote is accurate, apparently he must have built all his buildings single-handedly. And apparently is the only one to live in them, as well?
@brucegee1962:
Howard Roark is the architect. John Galt is an engineer who invents a new type of motor that draws energy right out of the air.
FREEDOM!
LOL
Well, they’ve certainly convinced me. I certainly don’t want to fund vile moochers, so I donated. Okay, not to them, but to a random person looking to go to college and seeking donations on indiegogo. I had been on a fence about it for a while, but they convinced me.
It’s all in self-interest, you see. If I gave money to these Ayn Rand fanatics, they’ll just waste it on useless crap like advertising their crappy movie that no one but other Ayn Rand fanatics want to watch. If I give it to this woman seeking a comp sci degree, she may finish a degree and develop something that revolutionizes the software industry.
LOL
Go Ashana!
Just to cheer you up, here is a really good piece of news. New horrible Aus gov’t sacked the climate commission. They are not going quietly: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-09-24/tim-flannery-to-relaunch-climate-commission/4976608
The article mentions $7000 in donations overnight, but IIRC from facebook this morning it’s over $250,000 already.
My translation #1: We don’t want to admit that we need the money to produce this turkey because it would show just how what hypocrites we are when we ask another person to live for us.
My translation #2: We want to see if we can get some suckers to give us money because that’s what selfish people to do.
…Wait! If marketing isn’t about money, then…oh never mind.
@ robro: Either interpretation is quite valid. Of course, neither speaks well for the incompetents/wheedlers.
In short: Heh. Well said.
I don’t know if it’s in the book, but it was a saying of Ayn Rand’s, so it’s an encapsulation of her philosophy.
Why she felt the need to tell other people that they didn’t matter is a good question. If they really didn’t matter, then why say anything? Unless the whole idea is to feel superior to them? Nah.
So she really did think that a man is an island?
I’m pretty sure that’s one of Galt’s lines, yes. Actually, I think he says it twice. He always talked like that, even during sex or under torture. One of the few good literary ideas Ayn Rand ever had was to keep Galt off-screen as much as possible. (Of course, the movie couldn’t be trucking with any good literary ideas – I think they show Galt in like the first five minutes.)
I watched the 1949 movie the fountain head it was awful
there is no way I would watch another movie based on her writing unless the screen play was written by Mel Brooks and directed by Woody Allen
and starred the Muppet’s
uncle frogy
It’s just a publicity stunt. They already have the funding for the movie, but they wanted to use a Kickstarter campaign for PR…and it looks like it worked.
@33: Now there is a Kickstarter I might get behind!
If anybody (like me) can’t be bothered to read Atlas shrugged Adam Lee at Daylight Atheism is selflessly enduring it for you…
Naked Bunny
“It’s so hard for me to keep the Atlas Shrugged movies and the Left Behind movies straight.”
That’s because it’s actually one movie: ‘Atlas Shrugged his Left Behind’
In the third Atlas movies’s big reveal it turns out that John Gault is Kirk Cameron.
These are not the randroids you’re looking for *swipes hand from left to right*.
“I swear – by my life and my love of it – that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.”
The exact quote. Yes, I spent the last few months actually going through Atlas Shrugged. Part 3 of this movie should be exceedingly boring if it’s anything like the book – a good portion of it deals with describing Galt’s Gulch, the objectivist utopia that the producers of society escape to. Add in the fact that there’s literally a 3-hour speech later on, and you have a movie where very little actually fucking happens.
No no the third part will have the torture pornographic descriptions of people dying in industrial accidents with the narrator bringing themselves to climax talking about how they deserved to be decapitated in a train crash
I can understand using the Kickstarter campaign as a kind of advertising, but I assume (as someone already commented up-thread) that there are plenty of Randian rich guys to fund such a vanity project.
Cross-posted from the [Lounge]: … rich white guys being clueless and feeling persecuted, this time from Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi.
Excerpts below [emphasis mine]:
[How apt, except that we might object to the disrespect shown to vampire squid in the metaphor.]
A bit tangential to this post, but apparently the new term for Ayn Rand devotees is “Shruggalos”, which I think would be pretty hard to improve upon.
lolwut
*sniff* *sniff*
Ah. The stupid – *sniff* *sniff* – it burns. :-)
Poe’s Law.
+ 1
Yes, from static electricity. It’s quite revealing, and fun to throw into Objectivists’ faces, that for Rand to make her Galt’s Gulch paradise work, she had to give her heroes all the energy, land, and wealth they wanted. In other words, she took away the things humanity has spent most of its history fighting over.
And then she placed there all the people most likely to start a war over resources. Then made them out to be the good guys. Hmmm…
I have a challenge for anyone who believes in Objectivism: Ingest 500 micrograms of a certain chemical and I will come back in 12 hours or so and gladly listen to your defense of an objective reality
The key point of Atlas Shrugged is that Galt CAN provide energy to the world as easily as he can to his Gultch. He chooses not to and is to be praised for it.
OMG
It’s been a long time since I read Atlas Shrugged.
I’m going to hafta read it again.
Pity me.
(is there a Classic Illustrated Comic?)
Bertrand Russell once made a dictionary of Marxism, and I’ve extended it to Randism:
–
Yahweh = Dialectical Materialism = Objectivism
The Messiah = Karl Marx = Ayn Rand
The Elect = The Proletariat = The Producers
The Church = The Communist Party = The Chamber of Commerce?
The Second Coming = The Revolution = The Shrugging?
Hell = Punishment of the Capitalists = Ruin of the Looters
The Millennium = The Communist Commonwealth = Galt’s Gulch
–
But I find it rather satisfying that the film’s makers have gotten so little support from the Harry Binswangers of the world. One would expect that with all their money, that they’d be glad to part with a little bit of it to make a film that shows how great and indispensable they are.