ntertainment

At The Movies

Two documentary features — each with its own Jewish twist —
join "The Long Wray Home" in the battle for an Oscar.

CHARLES BRITTON
Special to The Jewish News

y

ears have passed, I confess,
without my giving a second
thought to Ayn Rand. Once
this best-selling novelist-
turned-philosopher was the source of
scandal, a great deal of it manufac-
tured for political reasons, some self-
induced because of an ill-advised rela-
tionship.
Rand died in 1982, but her story is
back on the simmer. Showtime is
working on a telepic about her roman-
tic entanglement in late middle age.
Her first novel, We the Living, has
been optioned to be produced as a
motion picture, and The Fountainhead
and Atlas Shrugged are in various
stages of development. Her play Ideal
is being adapted for the screen.
And with Ayn Rand: A Sense of Life,
written, directed and produced by
Michael Paxton, we have a respectful
biographical piece that is nominated
for an Academy Award for Best Docu-
mentary Feature.
The film is evidently made by and

for devotees of the Rand philosophy,
which she called objectivism. To boil
it down, it seems like a variant of lib-
ertarianism, which would make Rand
a figure well ahead of her time.
She was something like an early
Margaret Thatcher in that she was a
person of enormous force of intellect
who gained a degree of power rare for
a woman. Nevertheless, feminists
refuse to admit her to their pantheon
because she was on the wrong (that is,
the right) side of the political spec-
trum.
The intelligentsia had little use for
her because of her determined anti-
communism. Book reviewers in the
late '30s would lecture this refugee
from Soviet Russia that she didn't
appreciate the glorious experiment
then taking place in Stalin's domain.
Rand hated collectivism and, in those
days, it was all the rage.
Now, of course, the horrors of com-
munism and the disasters of collec-
tivism are so obvious that even intel-

Charles Britten writes for Copley News

Service. Gail Zimmerman contributed
to this story.

Ayn Rand was once asked if she could
present the essence of objectivism
while standing on one foot. Her
answer was:
Metaphysics: Objective reality
Epistemology: Reason
Ethics: Self-mterest
Politics: Capitalism

She then translated those terms into familiar language:
ature, to be
an e must be obeyed.
'Abu can't havec°
yo m ut
t m
t :cakeand
w at e it too. "
"Man is an end in imse
"Give me liberty or give me death.

Reprinted courtesy of the Ayn Rand Institute

3/13
1998

88

Photo courtesy of the Ayn Rand Institute

AYN RAND:
A SENSE OF LIFE

Ayn Rand in Holly-
wood circa 1930: "If
life can have a
`theme-sone — and I
believe every worth-
while life has one —
mine is (best/
expressed in one word.
individualism,"

lectuals acknowledge the facts. Liber-
tarian philosophies get a respectful
hearing, though no one expects the
governing classes to convert from their
inbred statism. Still, a 1991 survey
selected Rand's enormously long novel
Atlas Shrugged as the most influential
book, save the Bible, in America.
Rand's life story would make a
pretty good star vehicle for the right
actress. Born Alice (Alisa in her native
tongue) Rosenbaum to a middle-class
Jewish family in St. Petersburg, Russia,
her youth was traumatized by the
Soviet takeover.
According to the documentary's
associate producer, Jeff Britting, St.
Petersburg was home to only a small
community of Jews, and it was a very
restricted place for Jews during the
19th and early 20th centuries. Rand's
family did not participate in much
formal observance of Jewish traditions,
although they celebrated the High
Holidays, Britting said.

Rand's family managed to send her
to the United States, and this movie-
struck young woman soon gravitated
to Hollywood. Thanks to fortunate
connections, she got an introduction
to Cecil B. DeMille, who took a liking
to her. He called her "Caviar" because
of the Russian accent she never lost.
Ironically, the first job in the
movies for Rand, an almost lifelong
atheist, was as an extra in the crowds
milling around Jesus in The King of
Kings (1927).
Rand was determined to become a
writer in English, and, remarkably, she
made good, a fact that attests to her
intelligence and determination. She
had a long, happy marriage to Frank
O'Conner, a minor actor, and the two
earned enough money to live in con-
siderable style.
She wrote screenplays, most notably
for Hal Wallis at Warner Bros. Her big
success as a novelist was The Fountain-
head, published in 1943 with little
prospect of becoming a hit. Eventually
word-of-mouth boosted it into the
best-seller ranks and, to this day, it sells
some 100,000 copies a year.
The book was made into a lus-

.

I. A bie A4•re C,Tompi-liiift44 Than Fic:ior,

Above: Ayn Rand in the 1940s, the
decade in which she wrote "The Foun-
tainhead"

ciously overwrought movie, starring
Gary Cooper (Rand's idol) and a
young Patricia Neal.
In later years, Rand spent most of
her time expounding her philosophical
and social views in such books as The
Virtue of Selfishness.
She was a supporter of Israel, said
Britting, because she viewed Israel as
"an outpost of civilization [in the
Middle East] with a commitment to `--\
20th century living and as a clear-cut
advocate of Western technology and
reason." Britting added that Rand's
Jewish background is an area yet to be
fully explored.
The documentary, narrated by
Sharon Gless and with original music
by Britting, shows her having the best