GALT III: THIS TIME IT'S PROFITABLE.

Just as the New York Times has to do its "Neediest Cases" and the Girl Scouts have to sell Thin Mints, so libertarian standard Reason magazine has to pimp every installment of the Atlas Shrugged trilogy. Though Reason's Brian Doherty and Shrugged producer John Aglialoro love capitalism, at least one of them is not quite ready to accept the verdict of the marketplace:

I questioned the business sense of Aglialoro’s foray into filmmaking during a February interview on the set of Atlas III. The first two movies in the trilogy were financial failures, losing him millions. 

“We don’t know that the trilogy will not make money,” he corrects me. "We know Part I did not and Part II did not."

Though I saw the first movie and hoo boy did it suck, I'm inclined to side with Aglialoro -- fuck all these nay-sayers, cowboy, make the movie you know will blow their minds! Alas, Aglialoro appears to incline more toward rightwing human product placement:

To further prime the promo pump, they’ve given guest-casting appearances to what Aglialoro says are “almost 10 personalities who have TV shows or radio shows who have a million plus followers who are going to talk to their people" about Atlas III.

I think they could have saved some money by just having Michael Savage, Tammy Bruce, and Peter Ingemi tour the country with a readers-theater version.

The libertarian-entertainment complex are so eager fro ASIII to succeed, they're even promising to make it less like the source material:

Aglialoro thinks Rand was having an intellectual “bad hair day” when she decided to valorize the term “selfishness,” which he thinks blunts her message of individual achievement through freely chosen market cooperation, not “self at expense of others.” Thus, he tried to make their approximately four-minute condensation of Galt’s speech a bit more inspirational, a bit less condemnatory, than the novel’s version. It ended (from what I could hear) with talk of how you should not in your confusion and despair let your own irreplaceable spark go out and how the world you desire can be won. 

With the speech, says [co-producer Harmon] Kaslow, the “challenge was, you want people to feel good” and so they tried to “accentuate the positive aspects as opposed to presenting things in negative”...

So, basically, it'll be like Flashdance, only hella talky. My favorite part is where Doherty explains the Randian morality of the ASIII Kickstarter campaign:

This led many to assume that asking people to freely support something they valued was in some sense un-Randian. Aglialoro sees it differently, as would anyone who understands Rand. Her novel The Fountainhead is a paean to an artist whose work is not rewarded by the marketplace. Rand believed in the glory of trading value—money—for value—a film the giver wants to see.

I understand why he'd see it that way. Me, I don't get why it's worth anyone's money to propagandize themselves. Well, markets in everything and one born every minute, I suppose.