Thank You, Ayn Rand
Burbank, California—Thanksgiving is when we celebrate what we've earned. That's how I regard this holiday, thanks to Ayn Rand, who described it as "a celebration of successful production." As the centenary of her birth comes to a close, this is in appreciation of a writer who created a philosophy, Objectivism, that celebrates the best in man.
What has Ayn Rand, who stood for reason, capitalism, individual rights and self-interest, to do with the movies? The answer: not much, not yet, which partly explains and is explained by the state of movies. But the answer is also: more than you think.
Movies were part of her early life, providing a temporary escape from Soviet Russia, where she lived under communism. She kept a movie diary, ranking her favorite pictures—by directors Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang—and she wrote her thoughts on young Gary Cooper, Polish actress Pola Negri and Hollywood box office.
At one point, she gushed: "American cinematography grows, and with it grow the earnings of its producers, employees and the costs of its pictures. Six million dollars in 1925! Americans ask themselves in horror: `What will happen in 1950?' The movies are the youngest of all arts. America is the youngest country on earth. Hollywood is her newest center." Yes, the woman who would declare that money is the root of all good once followed box office.
The young immigrant saw her first movie in America after arriving in New York in 1926. In Chicago, where she stayed with relatives, she went to the movies every day—a relative owned a movie theater—and, having improved her English, she borrowed one hundred dollars, hopped a train to Hollywood and wound up screenwriting for Cecil B. DeMille's movie studio.
Eventually, Ayn Rand wrote several treatments and screenplays, including Love Letters, a 1945 romance with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, and the 1949 motion picture adaptation of her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper as Howard Roark. Her Hollywood years are well documented in writer and director Michael Paxton's penetrating, Oscar-nominated 1997 documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, and in several new books.
Among them are three volumes written or edited by Robert Mayhew, an Objectivist philosophy professor at Seton Hall University. Dr. Mayhew edited Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A, in which she discusses Katharine Hepburn as the "ideal" actress to portray her Atlas Shrugged heroine, Dagny Taggart. Miss Rand also speaks her mind on Jane Fonda and Ronald Reagan—whom she described as a "cheap Hollywood ham" and whose presidential candidacy she completely opposed.
Having just finished reading Dr. Mayhew's incisive introduction, I can hardly wait to read his examination of Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood, which considers MGM's Song of Russia, a piece of pro-Soviet propaganda, and Miss Rand's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. It promises to cut to the core about that wretched Red state Ayn Rand rightly called a slave pen and put Hollywood's Soviet sycophants in clear perspective.
Her first novel, We the Living, which was about Soviet Russia, was made into a powerful 1942 movie starring Alida Valli in Italy during World War 2. Besides The Fountainhead, her other two novels were not adapted for the screen, though Atlas Shrugged is still in play at Baldwin Entertainment, and Miss Rand envisioned a movie version of her poetic novelette, Anthem, as grand scale dramatic fantasy—she wrote to Walt Disney expressing that she wanted to see Anthem adapted on the screen in stylized drawings—according to Ayn Rand archivist Jeff Britting, writing in Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem, edited by Dr. Mayhew.
When We the Living was screened last month at the Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood, Britting—who served as associate producer and composer for Paxton's documentary—introduced the epic with a moving tribute to her applied philosophy of art: "Every writer, every filmmaker who tells a story takes a stand, implies his own philosophy. And whether you agree or not with that stand, the point is, that you take one, too, when you respond. And, in Ayn Rand's view, the most demanding and most interesting stand to take is an art that portrays a moral ideal—not man as he is, but man as he could be and ought to be."
At the end of a horrible year for America—a city in ruins, the loss of individual rights and a war of self-sacrifice—it is obvious that Ayn Rand's noble vision of man is far from becoming real. But on this Thanksgiving, one hundred years after she was born, it is also obvious that she never let that vision go.
In his introduction to Michael Paxton's companion book to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, philosopher Leonard Peikoff quotes Miss Rand's letter to silent screen star Mia May, who was among her favorites. After thanking the Austrian actress for bringing her beauty and relief from communism, she wrote: "I have had a very hard struggle to reach the things I wanted. That I should meet you in person, when I have finally broken my way into pictures, is like a special reward to me, something very personal and precious—because the kind of pictures I want to make are in the style and spirit of the pictures you made. It is a spirit which does not exist in the world any longer—and part of my battle is to bring it back."
Thank you, Ayn Rand, for proving it is possible.
SOURCES
Russian Writings on Hollywood, edited by Michael Berliner, Ayn Rand Institute Press, $19.95.
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, by Michael Paxton, Gibbs-Smith, $34.95
Remarks by Jeff Britting, Liberty Film Festival: 100th Birthday Tribute to Ayn Rand, October 23, 2005
Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem, "Adapting Anthem: Projects That Were and Might Have Been", by Jeff Britting, Edited by Robert Mayhew, Lexington Books
Ayn Rand, by Jeff Britting, Overlook Duckworth Press, $19.95
RELATED LINK
• Official Site: 'Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life'
RELATED STORIES
• 9/2/05 - Scott Holleran: The New Orleans Disaster and the Line on 'John Galt'
• 5/18/03 - 'Atlas Shrugged,' Take Five
• 5/18/03 - 'Atlas Shrugged:' Who is James Hart?
What has Ayn Rand, who stood for reason, capitalism, individual rights and self-interest, to do with the movies? The answer: not much, not yet, which partly explains and is explained by the state of movies. But the answer is also: more than you think.
Movies were part of her early life, providing a temporary escape from Soviet Russia, where she lived under communism. She kept a movie diary, ranking her favorite pictures—by directors Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang—and she wrote her thoughts on young Gary Cooper, Polish actress Pola Negri and Hollywood box office.
At one point, she gushed: "American cinematography grows, and with it grow the earnings of its producers, employees and the costs of its pictures. Six million dollars in 1925! Americans ask themselves in horror: `What will happen in 1950?' The movies are the youngest of all arts. America is the youngest country on earth. Hollywood is her newest center." Yes, the woman who would declare that money is the root of all good once followed box office.
The young immigrant saw her first movie in America after arriving in New York in 1926. In Chicago, where she stayed with relatives, she went to the movies every day—a relative owned a movie theater—and, having improved her English, she borrowed one hundred dollars, hopped a train to Hollywood and wound up screenwriting for Cecil B. DeMille's movie studio.
Eventually, Ayn Rand wrote several treatments and screenplays, including Love Letters, a 1945 romance with Jennifer Jones and Joseph Cotten, and the 1949 motion picture adaptation of her 1943 novel, The Fountainhead, with Gary Cooper as Howard Roark. Her Hollywood years are well documented in writer and director Michael Paxton's penetrating, Oscar-nominated 1997 documentary, Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, and in several new books.
Among them are three volumes written or edited by Robert Mayhew, an Objectivist philosophy professor at Seton Hall University. Dr. Mayhew edited Ayn Rand Answers: The Best of Her Q & A, in which she discusses Katharine Hepburn as the "ideal" actress to portray her Atlas Shrugged heroine, Dagny Taggart. Miss Rand also speaks her mind on Jane Fonda and Ronald Reagan—whom she described as a "cheap Hollywood ham" and whose presidential candidacy she completely opposed.
Having just finished reading Dr. Mayhew's incisive introduction, I can hardly wait to read his examination of Ayn Rand and Song of Russia: Communism and Anti-Communism in 1940s Hollywood, which considers MGM's Song of Russia, a piece of pro-Soviet propaganda, and Miss Rand's testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. It promises to cut to the core about that wretched Red state Ayn Rand rightly called a slave pen and put Hollywood's Soviet sycophants in clear perspective.
Her first novel, We the Living, which was about Soviet Russia, was made into a powerful 1942 movie starring Alida Valli in Italy during World War 2. Besides The Fountainhead, her other two novels were not adapted for the screen, though Atlas Shrugged is still in play at Baldwin Entertainment, and Miss Rand envisioned a movie version of her poetic novelette, Anthem, as grand scale dramatic fantasy—she wrote to Walt Disney expressing that she wanted to see Anthem adapted on the screen in stylized drawings—according to Ayn Rand archivist Jeff Britting, writing in Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem, edited by Dr. Mayhew.
When We the Living was screened last month at the Liberty Film Festival in West Hollywood, Britting—who served as associate producer and composer for Paxton's documentary—introduced the epic with a moving tribute to her applied philosophy of art: "Every writer, every filmmaker who tells a story takes a stand, implies his own philosophy. And whether you agree or not with that stand, the point is, that you take one, too, when you respond. And, in Ayn Rand's view, the most demanding and most interesting stand to take is an art that portrays a moral ideal—not man as he is, but man as he could be and ought to be."
At the end of a horrible year for America—a city in ruins, the loss of individual rights and a war of self-sacrifice—it is obvious that Ayn Rand's noble vision of man is far from becoming real. But on this Thanksgiving, one hundred years after she was born, it is also obvious that she never let that vision go.
In his introduction to Michael Paxton's companion book to Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, philosopher Leonard Peikoff quotes Miss Rand's letter to silent screen star Mia May, who was among her favorites. After thanking the Austrian actress for bringing her beauty and relief from communism, she wrote: "I have had a very hard struggle to reach the things I wanted. That I should meet you in person, when I have finally broken my way into pictures, is like a special reward to me, something very personal and precious—because the kind of pictures I want to make are in the style and spirit of the pictures you made. It is a spirit which does not exist in the world any longer—and part of my battle is to bring it back."
Thank you, Ayn Rand, for proving it is possible.
SOURCES
Russian Writings on Hollywood, edited by Michael Berliner, Ayn Rand Institute Press, $19.95.
Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life, by Michael Paxton, Gibbs-Smith, $34.95
Remarks by Jeff Britting, Liberty Film Festival: 100th Birthday Tribute to Ayn Rand, October 23, 2005
Essays on Ayn Rand's Anthem, "Adapting Anthem: Projects That Were and Might Have Been", by Jeff Britting, Edited by Robert Mayhew, Lexington Books
Ayn Rand, by Jeff Britting, Overlook Duckworth Press, $19.95
RELATED LINK
• Official Site: 'Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life'
RELATED STORIES
• 9/2/05 - Scott Holleran: The New Orleans Disaster and the Line on 'John Galt'
• 5/18/03 - 'Atlas Shrugged,' Take Five
• 5/18/03 - 'Atlas Shrugged:' Who is James Hart?
