I have to thank bubbasmith99 for linking me to a site which brought this up. Turns out this has been attempted before.
'Atlas Shrugged,' Take Five
'Atlas Shrugged:' Who is James Hart?
'Atlas Shrugged,' Take Five
- Past attempts to make Atlas Shrugged into a movie have failed, though Crusader president and CEO Howard Baldwin is arguably better prepared than his predecessors...
While Atlas Shrugged is routinely vilified by left-wing intellectuals, who oppose Rand's view that capitalism is the only moral economic system, and repudiated by those on the right, who shudder at Rand's rejection of religion, it remains deeply loved by readers, who named it the second most influential book of their lives in a 1991 Library of Congress/Book-of-the-Month club survey -- behind only the Bible.
'Atlas Shrugged:' Who is James Hart?
- "I hated [Atlas Shrugged] in college," the 56-year-old New Yorker admitted. "It was the peace and love era and the values of the time weren't consistent with Ayn Rand's philosophy. Years later, I read it again and it blew me away. I've read it four times in the last six months."
What changed Hart's mind?
"We're on the threshold of what Ayn Rand predicted," he noted. "Socialism has crept into everything and we're penalizing the thinkers, the movers and shakers for being successful. In a way, the world that Ayn Rand created in Atlas Shrugged *is* the United States today."