Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [96]
A day or two later, a Warner Bros. story editor phoned her at home. Earlier in the week he had been in touch with Bobbs-Merrill, he said, and when he inquired who was in charge of movie rights for The Fountainhead he had been referred to her. She immediately passed him along to her new literary agent, Alan Collins, president of Curtis Brown, Ltd. But a suspicion that Mr. Chambers had known about a possible movie deal when he invited her to lunch and had calculated the advantages of proposing a joint effort before she found out about it, too, arose and took hold. She made a note to add this possible deception to a growing list of grievances against Bobbs-Merrill.
Grievances, however, were not much on her mind in late 1943. Mr. Chambers was preparing bold new full-page ads for placement in newspapers, she wrote happily to Paterson, who was on vacation. More surprising, Warner Bros. seemed to be serious about making an offer for the book. Alan Collins, who had demonstrated his good judgment by approaching her to initiate a business relationship after reading an advance copy of The Fountainhead, was conducting negotiations. The sticking point was Rand’s asking price: $50,000. This, Collins told her, was an unrealistic—a fantastic—sum. True, the great Ernest Hemingway had recently been paid $150,000 for movie rights to his best-selling novel For Whom the Bell Tolls. But Dashiell Hammett, the author of The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, and other box-office hits, got only $25,000 for The Glass Key. Six months after publication, there were not likely to be any competing offers to drive up the price. He advised her to ask for $25,000 and settle for $20,000.
Although $20,000 represented years of living expenses at the O’Connors’ current rate of spending, Rand staunchly told him no. She explained her reasons. In the 1930s, Universal Pictures and MGM, respectively, had bought and then traded or resold the rights to Red Pawn and The Night of January 16th. Both studios had made a hefty profit. She had been pleased to discover that her work was worth so much. But she was a mature writer now and did not want to put too small a price on The Fountainhead. She was sure that it would soon be worth much more than she was asking.
Ten days later, to everyone’s amazement, except Rand’s perhaps, Warner Bros. made the hoped-for offer: $50,000. As part of the purchase price, the studio wanted her to travel to Hollywood to write the preliminary screenplay from the novel. It would pay round-trip fare, for both her and O’Connor, and estimated that the job would take a month. In the event it took longer, the studio would pay her $500 a week for every additional week she worked; this was a good rate for a largely untested screenwriter, and she was impressed with Collins for negotiating it into the contract. If Hollywood had earlier blackballed her as an outspoken anti-Communist, it was pursuing her now. The hitch was that Warner Bros. had no obligation to use her preliminary screenplay, and it could assign the writing of the final script to anyone it chose. It could cast Margaret Dumont as Dominique and Gabby Hayes as Roark. It could do anything it pleased. Rand, knowing how bad it could become, agreed. If she did a good job, she hoped the studio would hire her to write the final script. At worst, the publicity from the movie would help to sell the book.
Collins delivered the good news early one afternoon while Rand was at lunch with a proper old businessman who had no intention of writing a check to raise advertising funds for her continuing campaign. When she got back to the apartment, tired and downcast, her husband was waiting in the dimly lit living room, a peculiar look on his face. “Well, darling,” he said, after a dramatic pause, “while you were at lunch