John Aglialoro on the Atlas Shrugged movie

Who is John Aglialoro? Probably no one since Ayn Rand has invested so much in Atlas Shrugged. For nearly two decades he has championed the novel — financially, intellectually, logistically — because he was determined to make a movie that would do justice to Rand’s masterpiece.

Ranked by Forbes Small Business as the 10th richest executive of any small publicly-traded company (revenues under $200 million) in 2007, Aglialoro is one of those rare corporate executives who fully “gets” the philosophical message in Atlas Shrugged. And he wants the rest of the world to get it, too — by seeing it on the big screen.

After fifteen years of negotiations and discussions with networks and major studios, in 2007 it finally seemed his efforts would pay off. A version of the movie produced by Lionsgate Entertainment, with Angelina Jolie starring as Dagny Taggart, looked as if it would enter production.

In an article at the Atlasphere, Robert James Bidinotto reviewed those plans in some detail, and saw reason for hope. We published a short interview with Aglialoro around that time as well. According to one rumor, however, the real-life Jolie proved rather less dependable than her fictional counterpart, and the Lionsgate plans fell through.

After further discussions with studios made it clear none were prepared to act within an acceptable timeframe, Aglialoro made a bold decision. As Chairman and CEO of exercise equipment producer Cybex International, he was no stranger to the challenges of managing a massive budget and meeting a hard deadline. By May 2010, faced with the prospect that his rights to the movie would soon expire, he and Harmon Kaslow elected to dispense with major studios altogether and underwrite the movie themselves as an independent production.

With no studio bosses to interfere with the integrity of the story, Aglialoro recruited Brian Patrick O’Toole to create a new script (learn more here) that would closely follow the original novel. And this time, Aglialoro himself would make sure the movie got made.

Taylor Schilling (of Mercy) plays Dagny Taggart

Filming started on June 12th and entered post-production on July 25th.

The movie stars Taylor Schilling (of Mercy) as Dagny Taggart, Grant Bowler (of True Blood) as Hank Rearden, and director Paul Johansson (of One Tree Hill) as the novel’s hero, John Galt — whose face is, reportedly, never shown in the movie.

The movie’s Facebook fan page has grown rapidly as screenwriter Brian O’Toole posts behind-the-scenes photos from the set and members try to guess what scenes from the novel are being depicted.

Aglialoro’s decision to make the film himself, with no help from Hollywood studios, has generated plenty of controversy. Was it a rash choice unlikely to yield good results? Or an example of just the sort of no-excuses reliability and determination exemplified by the heroes in Atlas Shrugged itself?

You can judge for yourself. Next month, at the December 7th event “Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie” in New York City, fans of Atlas Shrugged will have a chance to not only hear Aglialoro talk but also see a 10-minute clip from the movie. Aglialoro is a longtime trustee of The Atlas Society, which is hosting the event.

In anticipation of this event and the movie’s release early next year, Aglialoro agreed to answer some questions for Atlasphere readers.

The Atlasphere: You’ve been working to bring Atlas Shrugged to the screen for seventeen years. During that time, you’ve faced many ups and downs. What has kept you going for such a long time?

John Aglialoro: Let me give you some background first. I had purchased a fifteen-year lease to make a movie of the book in August 1992 from Leonard Peikoff, now the former chairman of the Ayn Rand Institute. I wanted to outsource the project to a studio, a financing group, or some party who would see what an excellent opportunity it was.

Grant Bowler (from True Blood) as Hank Rearden

Over the years there were some great names in the industry who were interested in the project. But year after year passed, and it got to the point where I had to make a decision to finance it myself — and to arrange for the casting and get it done — or lose the movie rights altogether.

One thing that kept me going was that many years back I had made a kind of commitment to Ayn Rand herself. I didn’t make it to her one-on-one personally, although I had actually seen her once, when she gave her last talk at the Ford Hall Forum in 1981. But making the movie was something that I felt as an Objectivist I could carry out one way or another. I wanted to be able to visit Ayn Rand’s grave in New York and say, “We got it done.”

John Aglialoro with his wife, Joan Carter Aglialoro

In April of this year I had to make a decision about whether to pursue the project and get filming going by the middle of June or to let my lease on the movie expire.

My wife pointed out that if I didn’t do it, it would haunt me for the rest of my life.

And that did it.

TA: You’ve been a successful entrepreneur and now you’ve produced a movie. What challenges did you face in the latter role? How is making a movie different from or similar to running a business?

Aglialoro: In business you need a vision and a team with a strategy, and you need the capital. For the movie we had the vision and the capital. We just needed to gather a team together, although we had a very short runway leading up to the filming. But I found the same elements involved in this project that I had found from owning various types of businesses.

Several years ago my kids gave my wife and me a Monopoly game with various properties or companies we had bought or sold over the years substituted for the ones in the game. The names might be different, but the dynamics of businesses and projects are the same.

One difference between many business enterprises and making the movie was the very short time span we had to pull it together and start filming. June 15, 2010 was the deadline when my option on making the movie would run out. As the date got closer I asked the estate, owned by Leonard Peikoff, for an extension. For whatever reason that he thought it was in his self-interest, he kept us to that deadline. So the last three weeks or so leading up to the deadline were mostly sleepless nights.

The Taggart Transcontinental seal, perhaps in the concourse of the Taggart Terminal?

TA: In recent years, Randall Wallace and others have each taken a crack at the Atlas script. Since you opted for a trilogy in this latest version, you could obviously include a lot more material from the book. How else is it different from these earlier scripts?

Aglialoro: Actually, there were some six or seven different scripts through the years when I was trying to make the movie. In 2006 we signed a contract with Lionsgate, and they hired Randall Wallace. He wrote an excellent script. It was for a two-and-a-quarter- or two-and-a-half-hour movie of the whole book, and it was amazing to me how he did it. Some of the other scripts had their great points but fell short to some degree. But the Wallace script really made it.

Taylor Schilling as Dagny Taggart, Vice-President in Charge of Operations for Taggart Transcontinental

The movie was budgeted at perhaps $70 million. They got Geyer Kosinski, the manager of Angelina Jolie, as well as Jolie herself and a number of other stars connected to the project.

Unfortunately, the leadership at that studio couldn’t see fit to carry out that vision of the movie. Ultimately, whether it was politics or something about the storyline or whatever, they didn’t want to put the capital behind the project.

So in the end, in the time and budget we had to make the movie, we simply were not able to carry out Randy Wallace’s script. It would have been a huge undertaking.

The idea for a trilogy came from the talk of a miniseries, which Ayn Rand herself at one point said would be a good idea. We spoke with people at HBO as well as Epic, a new channel connected to Lionsgate.

The latter wanted Atlas Shrugged to be their first large and inaugural work. But that possibility fell through back in February or March of this year.

We couldn’t do a miniseries without a TV station backing the project and we couldn’t do it as a big-budget movie without a studio. So we decided to have a script that pretty much followed the book. The book is in three parts, and 27 percent of the book is part one. We ended part one right at the point where Ellis Wyatt leaves, and it had a tidy ending with a full expectation of the future events.

The offices of Taggart Transcontinental

TA: After completing the filming, what are you most pleased with about the movie?

Aglialoro: I’m pleased that we pulled it off. And that we have an entertaining movie based on such an important book. We had Paul Johansson as director and we had a great team. We asked Brian O’Toole to take a truly great book and faithfully adapt it as a near-great script for Paul and the team to bring to the screen. That effort was successful, and we shot the film in just under six weeks.

There were some changes to the script along the way, and some things I would have liked to have had added. Those who know the book will remember the scene with Phillip Rearden and his mother going to Hank Rearden’s office to ask for a job for Phillip. I thought that would have made a fabulous little two-minute scene. But we were trying to do so much already that various circumstances kept us from doing everything we would have liked.

Matthew Marsden as James Taggart

It was very expensive shooting every day. You’re changing aspects of the script to adapt to realities on the set, and in some cases actors who were not on the set because they were traveling or had other obligations. So it was difficult to bring all of these hundred-and-one things together every day, but I was pleased that we carried it out. And it’s an entertaining movie.

TA: Johansson seems like a passionate individual. How would you describe his style as a director?

Aglialoro: Paul is a hands-on, take-charge kind of guy, and he worked very well with the actors.

Remember, many of these actors came on at a minimum rate just because they wanted to be associated with the project. There was not a lot of rehearsal time. Normally actors get weeks or months to study the nuances of their characters, but for this project time was very short. Paul was able to get them focused on their roles right away.

Paul Johansson (of One Tree Hill) directs the movie and plays John Galt, though reportedly his face is never shown

I remember we were schooling Taylor Shilling right up to the last several hours in the last evening before shooting in the characterization of Dagny Taggart. She’s got that tall, thin look with a tight-lipped smile that’s very beautiful. She’s a big talent.

In fact, she’s now in New Orleans and about halfway through a three-month shoot on a movie with Zac Efron, a very famous young actor these days. I’m sure they know she’s just finished up Atlas Shrugged, and her reputation should be great for our movie when it comes out.

TA: Is the movie still on track for a March release — or June, if accepted at a major festival?

Aglialoro: My initial and lingering aspiration was to have February 2, Ayn Rand’s birthday, be the date when it opens. And I recently saw Night of January 16th, Ayn Rand’s play that ran on Broadway in the ‘60s. So I wanted to have a private movie premiere the night of January 16, 2011, and a couple weeks later have the opening.

That sounds so tidy and poetically justifiable, but I think we’re going to have to take a look at March or April. No later than Tax Day, April 15.

Grant Bowler and Taylor Schilling as Hank Rearden and Dagny Taggart

TA: Some people think there’s no way you can do Atlas Shrugged justice with a $5 to $10 million budget. What do you say to them?

Aglialoro: The full budget is actually much bigger. Remember that in August 1992 I had paid a million dollars or so to Leonard Peikoff for the movie rights. You do add the rights costs to the costs of the movie.

And then there were additional costs along the way. Jim Hart did a very nice script early on. He also wrote Hook and Contact. There were other versions of the script. And there were a lot of other development costs — meetings, travel, legal fees. Those costs since 1992 run between $10 and $15 million.

I think the production costs for this movie are going to run about $10 million. And then we’ll have the marketing costs and some small return on capital.

If the movie does come out in the middle of April we will be costing it right up until then. We still have a fair number of people on the payroll. So we’re looking at total costs of $25 million or more.

But also look at what we got with our production budget. For example, we used red camera technology to film it. It creates digital images rather than images on film. Its software is great for editing. We were able to get the director’s cut of the movie and add some very good visual scenes and other elements in weeks rather than the months it would have taken with film. So it is high tech, and we didn’t scrimp on using red camera.

We also used a fair amount of green screens where we were able to insert some great visual effects and breathtaking scenes. After the director’s cut we had a team that went out to Colorado for two weeks to shoot mountains, valleys, railroads, moving trains, tracks, all sorts of things. I had one professional studio head take a look at the movie, and we think it has the look and feel of a movie with $30 million in production costs.

A scene from the movie that uses green screen

TA: Are there other independent films with a similar budget, from which you drew inspiration for this project? Or did you just do what you had to do?

Aglialoro: I just did what I had to do. As I’ve said, we had the opportunity to hire many of the actors and others at perhaps 25 percent of what they normally make. I mean when you get a famous actor for a movie, you might have a $30 million price right there.

We had some excellent talent and a few of the actors were journeymen who had done a hundred movies, and they came in at minimum. A lot of people wanted to work on this project. I was stunned.

If we had had to pay just standard or going rate for cameramen, production designers, and all of these various parts of a movie, this budget would have doubled. So we got lucky.

The Old Wyatt Junction Bridge, during a tech scout

TA: When will you start filming part two?

Aglialoro: When part one is finished and released. I’m being told I’ll have a lot of options then. Obviously if the movie is successful, as we expect it will be, we should have a few of the larger studios interested in buying the rights and guaranteeing production budgets.

If they see a profitable, successful, and well-done part one, the studios will have the confidence to invest in the later parts. Or we might use our team — we call ourselves Strike Productions, through the corporate heading of Atlas Film Productions — to produce the next parts.

These are still big question marks. We’ll have to see.

The prop used as James Taggart's toy train set in his office is a 1950s relic itself worth over $25,000

TA: The country seems thirsty for the vision that Ayn Rand presented in Atlas Shrugged. What effects would you hope the movie would have in our culture?

Aglialoro: I hope that the political class will be replaced by political leaders with the sense of our Founding Fathers. This is the notion of reluctantly, with great pain and suffering, leaving their farm and their town in order to put two long years into elected office out of gratitude for having the freedom to make their way in the world, to be successful, and to get up every morning and do whatever their sense of life dictates.

Dagny and James Taggart, a Portrait

Those are the kinds of political leaders and statesmen who had self-love and love of their country. Today we have people getting out of law school, entering the political class, making a career in government, garnering power, doing all the things that they must do to stay in office and get reelected.

They have only a vague motivation, if any, to get society moving in the direction where individuals control their own destinies, where government takes a limited approach to governing.

An obvious solution to this problem would be term limits. If terms were restricted we wouldn’t have career politicians with incentives to concentrate more and more power in government so they can pass out money and favors in their bids for reelection.

That’s my hope. It’s a big hope, but we do see that some of the elected folks today seem to be more libertarian and have a great respect for Ayn Rand. So maybe we’re at the beginning of a five- or seven- or eight-decade trend where we repopulate the awful and disgusting political elements that rule Congress, the states, and the regulatory bodies today.

TA: On December 7, in New York, you’ll be speaking at the event “Atlas Shrugged: The Making of a Movie” and showing a clip from the movie. What will we be seeing in this clip?

Aglialoro: We’re going to show the first ten minutes of the actual movie. I can’t be more specific than that, because we’re still in post-production.

The movie is shot and the film is locked, which means the scenes themselves — what is said, what is shot, external scenes, internal dialogue, with the exception of dubbing and things like that — are as they’ll be in the movie. We now are working on the sound, color, and lighting — a multi-week process. And the actors are contracted to come in for a day or two for any dubbing that may be necessary.

I can tell you that the movie opens in a diner, and on the diner’s TV, on CNBC, we see Wesley Mouch and James Taggart in a studio, and from a remote feed is Ellis Wyatt, as three talk show guests discussing oil and other current events.

And while that dialogue is going on we see in the diner Midas Mulligan. Here we’ve taken some liberties. In the book, at this time in the story, Mulligan was actually out of the picture and in Atlantis.

In the movie we have him leaving the diner, and shortly thereafter a figure — who I won’t name right now — speaks to him and then the scene just cuts.

We’ve had several people from the Objectivist movement see the rough cut of the movie, including Atlas Society founder David Kelley, who actually helped with the some of the script analysis.

So I can’t say exactly what ten minutes you’ll see on December 7, but I’m sure the audience will like it. I hope to see a lot of Atlasphere members there.

Publisher's note (8 Dec 2010) - Read Richard Gleave's review for the Atlasphere of what was shown in the ten-minute video clip and what it portends for the final movie.