Hacker Cinema
The Fountainhead
1949 · Film · 112 min
Directed by King Vidor
An uncompromising, visionary architect struggles to maintain his integrity and individualism despite personal, professional and economic pressures to conform to popular standards.
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20 comments on Hacker News
Atlas Shrugged (and the fountainhead) is like a superhero comic book where the almighty good guys fight the flat, faceless "bad guys" with pure and fully justified moral righteousness. The "bad guys" are a slobbering caricature of a boogeyman that everyone can easily despise - wanting to do nothing except take from others like a bridge troll or a grey goo disaster scenario.
Nothing wrong with that I suppose but the second someone implies it has something to say about real life capitalists or social welfare or anything else then it gets weird; that makes as much sense as any of the marvel movies helping you decide how to vote for exactly the same reason.
I expect it's for this reason you're being downvoted - these books are often used as a motte and baily to imply something about real life (or often to ironically excuse their own selfish/bad behavior) and they just don't hold up for that in my opinion.
at least LOTR's lightweight fans watched the movies!
Oh, there’s movies for lazy Rand fans, too.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0480239/
More of a Fountainhead fan, are you? Do ya like Gary Cooper and Patricia Neal?
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/?ref_=ext_shr_lnk
I read both The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and wasn't impressed by either. The author never got the "show, not tell" memo. Long, long speeches.
(In the movie version of The Fountainhead, Howard Roarke's architecture is terrible. His buildings resemble 1960s US housing projects such as the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. There's good minimalism, but that's not it.)
Oh, no, not The Fountainhead.
(The 1949 movie version is amusing today. Roark's architecture is bad early brutalism, now a cliche. The art deco office interiors are great.)
More than a Roman character, Catalina reminded me of "Howard Roark" from The Fountainhead. It's been at least a decade since I last read it, but I thought the movie was quite influenced by that book.
The contrary argument, that a creator has the right to destroy their creation, is made in the Gary Cooper movie "The Fountainhead" (1949).
It's hard to name just one, but off the top of my head, a few obvious possibilities include:
The Selfish Gene (Dawkins) - helped nudge me over the line in terms of really identifying as an atheist, by satisfactorily refuting any lingering hints of the "irreducible complexity" argument that were lodged in my brain.
The Fountainhead (Rand) - I actually saw the movie before reading the book, but the Howard Roark character is a real role model character to me.
The Four Steps to the Epiphany (Blank) - As far as I'm concerned, this is THE book for startup founders / entrepreneurs. Very detailed, very logical, iterative process for building a company, defining a product, finding customer base, etc.
Nineteen Eighty-four (Orwell) - Read this one my senior year in High School and it left a profound mark on my psyche. I was already leaning towards a very individualistic / libertarian worldview, but 1984 really enflamed my hatred for big, heavy-handed, oppressive government(s).
Yeah you're describing me. I found Tom bombadill incredibly cheesy and just could not get past it.
I can appreciate the Lotr film trilogy as a fun war epic. And the cavalry charge was filled to the brim, with a kind of grace.
Opened Atlas Shrugged and a couple pages in, instantly knew I would intensely 'unenjoy' that book. There is a sharp, weaponized dryness to her style of writing. I watched a documentary about her life later on and her troubled love life made an equal amount of sense.
The Fountainhead made a good film though. The emphasis on excellence and images of skeletal verticality were fun. I am guessing cutting down her books to fit a film length helped to make a more friendly viewing experience.
In case someone actually wants to read Atlas Shrugged, I did actually read it. It's a fictional world where the strawmen business people are happen to always be good and moral, and are oppressed by the strawman government people who are bad and greedy. Also the author occasionally has her characters go on multi-page speeches, for instance about how we ought to be using gold for currency.
In case it's not clear, Atlas Shrugged is a piece of fiction and using it to draw parallels to reality is like saying "I recommend watching Disney's The Lion King. Zoos keep hogs apart from lions because they think they can't get along".
As a sidenote to balance my scathing review, I rather liked one of her earlier novels, Fountainhead. If you want to read an Ayn Rand novel I'd go for that one, as it's more about a type of "rugged individualism" than an economic system. It directly grapples at the question of the nature of invention/innovation: whether as a product of individual genius or standing on the shoulder of giants. Obviously the novel has an answer but it's not exactly a solved question in real life, and at least some of Ellsworth Toohey's quotes aren't half bad.
The funniest scene of the Fountainhead film is about this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RlIIx4Zq2Lc
One should read "Atlas Shrugged". That way, you can avoid seeing the appallingly bad 3-part low budget movie version. The book is preachy, and the movie is faithful to the book, which means long monologues.
"The Fountainhead" was made into a movie in 1949. It's a decent movie, and Amazon has the DVD. It's amusing today because the protagonist, who is an architect, designs buildings that he insists are insanely great, but are just slab-sided office blocks. (His hatred of decorative spires has something going for it. There used to be a thing for putting useless pointy spires on top of office buildings, the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building being the classic examples. That's mostly died out in the US, although it still has a following in Dubai and some Asian cities.)
Taking Ayn Rand seriously is not good for you.
Haven't you ever seen the Fountainhead? :-)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0041386/
(or read it...)
I'll be upfront with my bias: I strongly oppose Ayn Rand's politics, I find them abhorrent and morally vacuous. Furthermore, I thought "Atlas Shrugged" was god awful, and this was after having just read "The Fountainhead" and somewhat enjoying it. I also think Ayn Rand as a person was not just hypocritical, but also generally repugnant.
That said, I'm a sucker for a good movie. I'll gladly watch a film which disagrees with my politics, and even recommend it to friends, because cinema is that important to me.
However, this just doesn't look very good. The cinematography looks adequately epic, but some of the acting and dialogue, and even the shots, look like a decently-produced television series at best (and that may be generous in terms of the dialogue), but nothing on the level of something for the big screen.
A farmer who has difficulty plowing straight lines because his oxen are recalcitrant doesn't get his feelings hurt and write lengthy books in oxen language for the oxen to read whining about how he is a superior type of animal and why can't they just realize that! Then the farmers says "I'm tired of being unappreciated!" and leaves the farm in a huff just to show the oxen that if without him, there'd be no-one to feed them or clean out the stables. The reason this doesn't happen is that the farmer really is superior to the oxen, so he doesn't need to prove anything - for him, recalcitrant oxen are just one of many obstacles involved in farming.
Despite all claims to the contrary, the very fact that Rand even bothered to write a book at all betrays her secret, perhaps unconscious need for recognition. Here, the medium is a message - if Rand's audience is the superior people, why did she choose to communicate her ideas in the format most accessible to the "oxen" of society, the novel, instead of a dense philosophical treatise? She even helped to make the movie version of The Fountainhead, an even more accessible format.
Did anyone else see that movie and feel that this had been portrayed? The Zuckerberg in the movie obviously wanted to be part of the social group, but I also got that 'building' vibe. Maybe it is just because I compared the entire movie to The Fountainhead.
Agreed; maybe the point is that Hollywood seems disproportionately interested in explaining the urge to create (especially when the ambitions are grand) as sublimated need for intimacy.
This may be in part because Citizen Kane casts a long shadow on Hollywood film, e.g. over The Social Network & There Will Be Blood.
I do appreciate the rarer films where ambition seems substantially driven by a person's interest in problems, tools, and intrinsic desire to create or innovate: e.g. The Fountainhead (better than the book), Ratatouille.
But why should not an author be happy to see people exposed to his ideas, to their benefit, in the cases where it does him no material harm?
It's not my place to tell the IP owner what he should or shouldn't do with his property. The copyright holder has ultimate and absolute ownership of their IP, and while I think there would be great benefit in the works of Rand* going public domain, it's not my property to dispose of.
I respect the owners' terms by which their IP is distributed.
What meaning does copyright have if someone can copy something and say "I wasn't going to pay for it anyway"?
* Less so for The Fountainhead movie, as it's honestly not that good, imo. Gary Cooper had admitted (citation needed) that he didn't even understand the courtroom monologue at the end, which accounts for his delivery lacking the proper emotion. It's worth seeing if you're a fan of Rand, but if you want material to chew on, read the book.
Maybe you could link a legitimate copy, rather than the pirated copy?
Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Fountainhead-Gary-Cooper/dp/B000HWZ4A2/ref=pd_bbs_sr_3?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1238713949&sr=8-3
Netflix: http://www.netflix.com/Movie/The_Fountainhead/70055755?trkid=222336&lnkctr=srchrd-sr&strkid=521871131_0_0
FYI The Fountainhead has a movie:
http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/4619025/The_Fountainhead
For those who catch the reference, i'll throw Steve a porkchop.
The piece is an easy target for ridicule and jokes, but read something like "The Fountainhead" or at least watch the fairly faithful movie. You might soften your opinion a bit.