Looks like we are back in "turnaround" hell.
BREAKING: Vadim Perelman Shrugs off 'Atlas'
by Kim Voynar Jun 19th 2008 // 10:28AM
Filed under: Deals, Newsstand
Well, here's some news I've been hoping to write up for a long while now ... director Vadim Perelman has officially dropped the adaptation of Atlas Shrugged, which is presumably still set to star Angelina Jolie as Dagny Taggart. Perelman signed on to the project last September, and as recently as April ComingSoon.net reported that the project was still a go. It may or may not still be moving forward, but I have it from the most reliable source possible -- Perelman himself -- that it will not be going forward with him at the helm.
CHUD wrote up this piece about Angelina Jolie supposedly telling MTV that Perelman was never signed to direct at all -- something Perelman finds interesting, since he had a signed contract that attached him, and Lionsgate (not Perelman, as CHUD asserts, though Perelman has done interviews about his attachment to the project) had put out many press releases announcing him as the director. Perelman was attached, and 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.
While this may seem like bad news for all those Objectivists out there who were frothing at the bit to finally see Atlas on the big screen, it's great news for fans of Perelman, who directed one of my favorite films ever, House of Sand and Fog, and more recently The Life Before Her Eyes, which I enjoyed, even if 75% of my fellow critics didn't agree. I never felt Atlas was the right project for Perelman -- he's a very visual, artsy, poetic director, and Atlas Shrugged, for what literary merits it does have, is hardly poetic; it's a rationale for and description of a philosophy within the form of a novel.
So many attempts at adapting Atlas Shrugged have been tried and failed that, if I was a betting chick (which I have been known to be, on occasion) I certainly wouldn't put my hard-earned money on the film ever getting done at this point. As Eugene noted back in April, this is one book that's practically unfilmable; the book weighs in at over 1,000 pages, and John Galt's speech near the end rambles on for what would be probably two hours of film time if it were scripted in its entirety.
They'd have to cut the hell out of the speech to put it in a movie, and then there would ensue much moaning, wailing and gnashing of teeth among Objectivist circles over the parts that were left out , no matter how they did it. Personally, I think if you're gonna adapt Atlas Shrugged, suck it up and do it as a week-long HBO miniseries or something, rather than butchering it entirely.
I wouldn't hold your breath for Jolie to stick around on the project either -- it's not like she doesn't have a stack of scripts sitting on her nightstand -- but, who knows? She's said to be a fan of the book, so if she wants to see it on the big screen, perhaps she'll stick around to see who the new director will be.
So, now that Perelman is off Atlas Shrugged, who would you like to see helm the project now, assuming it goes forward at all? I can't imagine that a director who's staunchly opposed to Objectivism as a philosophy would take it on, which pretty much leaves out the hard-core liberals. So who would that leave who might possibly lead the project to completion, without the end result being absolutely wretched?
cinematical.com |
