ATLAS SHRUGGED update

You know, I really don’t need an excuse to run a photo of Angelina Jolie on my own blog. But one’s come along anyway.

Jolie, you’ll recall, is slated to play Dagny Taggart in an upcoming Lions Gate movie adaptation of Atlas Shrugged. And I have movie news! The International Herald Tribune reports that Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart and We Were Soldiers for Mel Gibson, is squeezing Ayn Rand’s 1,200-page novel down into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Wallace told the Herald Tribune that he has the material under control and is on course to deliver a first draft this month. But what’ll happen to John Galt’s 60-page speech?

“I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,” Wallace said. “I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read Atlas Shrugged. And the movie has to work.”

Adds producer Howard Baldwin: “We all believe in the book, and will be true to the book.”

Read the whole story here.