Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [128]
Rand completed the screenplay in late June. As the shooting began in a quarry near Fresno, she remained on the lot to fine-tune the dialogue and explain her characters’ motivations to the actors. In letters, she sounded euphoric. She had turned in her script in a blaze of glory, she wrote to Ogden, and Blanke and Vidor had promised not to make any changes unless she approved and wrote them. Vidor, in whose hands the project rested, was an excellent director. She seemed even more delighted, if possible, in late September, when the filming ended with her plot and theme intact. “For the first time in Hollywood history,” she wrote proudly to Paterson’s friend John Chamberlain, “the script was shot verbatim, word for word as written.” When the first trial screening of the film took place in front of a live audience in January 1949, it went so well, she told her literary agent Alan Collins, that the studio executives decreed that additional screenings would not be necessary. When she suggested a few cuts that could be made during prerelease editing, the executives positively forbade her to touch a single line. They were in an uproar of excitement, she informed Collins. The front office expected The Fountainhead to be the most talked-about movie of 1949.
A decade later, Rand told a dramatically different story about the making of The Fountainhead. In an early 1960s interview she said, “The whole thing was an enormously miserable experience.” Producer Blanke meant well, she said, but constantly caved in to pressure, especially when it came to casting Patricia Neal. Director Vidor was a vegetable, a frightened has-been whom no other studio wanted and whose career was hanging by a thread. Fired from his previous job because of cost overruns, he was concerned only with getting this movie in on time and under budget. She recalled endless unpleasant conferences with the production staff and continual arguments with Vidor over ideological and stylistic issues. Her most nightmarish moment took place during the filming of Roark’s trial. Arriving on the set one day, she found Vidor shooting an abbreviated version of her hero’s speech—the soliloquy that gave the book and the movie meaning, in her view. She rushed to Blanke’s office, “screaming at the top of my voice,” she said. She threatened to take her name off the movie and publish ads telling her millions of readers not to see it. Blanke, speaking for Jack Warner, overruled Vidor, and the scene was shot as written. Warner issued an edict: There were to be no more changes made to the script on the set. Her troubles didn’t end there, though. The Hollywood censorship authority, the studio’s business office, even Gary Cooper’s personal attorney all badgered her to water down her central philosophical theme of the morality of selfishness. Making good use of her aptitude for calling the bluff of duller wits, she defied them all. To the business manager, who fretted that Roark’s declaration that man is not “a sacrificial animal” would alienate (presumably Christian) audiences, she said, “So you think man is a sacrificial animal?” He backed down. Speaking to her interviewer, she explained, “That’s how one should treat all underground pressure that doesn’t dare come out into the open. Make it open. Name what they are implying.” This was good advice, and she used it brilliantly for the better part of her career. Still, after a day of shooting, she recalled, she came home and pounded the arm of her favorite chair in frustration, enraged at being forced yet again into battle with the agents of conformity and pointless compromise. Worse, she knew that the movie was “no good” as soon as she saw a rough cut, long before the supposedly triumphant early screening. The script wasn’t long enough to showcase the characters and theme, she said. The people involved were unworthy of the project. Then and there, she told her interviewer, she decided to wash her hands of the movie industry and never write another movie.