Ayn Rand and the World She Made - Anne C. Heller [99]
Rand wasn’t especially interested in meeting those actors and studio luminaries she called “Hollywood people.” In Koch’s memoirs, he recalled that she was almost always hard at work in her office and seemed to keep her distance from the bustle of studio life. One day, before he had found time to introduce himself, her secretary knocked at his door and informed him that Miss Rand did not wish to be disturbed—a prophylactic measure presumably taken because, in 1943, he had written the script of a movie called Mission to Moscow. The movie was based on a book by the same name, written by Roosevelt’s former ambassador to Soviet Russia, that presented Stalin as a defender of justice and a brave opponent of the Nazi onslaught. Unknown to her, and possibly to Koch, the movie had been made at the behest of the Roosevelt administration and on behalf of the war effort—a fact apparently not taken into account when Koch was blacklisted for Communist sympathies later in the decade. He didn’t meet her until one stormy evening when her secretary knocked again and asked if he would give Miss Rand a ride home in his car. She didn’t drive and couldn’t get a taxi. They chatted warily as they rode. When she opened the door to get out of the car, she remarked, “I didn’t know you were this way at all,” and dashed out into the rain. She was slightly friendlier after that.
One person she met immediately was her new boss, Henry Blanke, the Warner Bros. producer in charge of filming The Fountainhead. Blanke was small, dapper, and animated, a German immigrant who, in 1920s Berlin, had worked under two of her favorite silent-film directors, Ernst Lubitsch and Fritz Lang, before going on to assist in the production of movies such as The Maltese Falcon and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He loved The Fountainhead. “It’s magnificent,” he told her during their first meeting. Barbara Stanwyck had brought him the book, he told her, and he had demanded that Warner Bros. buy it. He thought of it as the tale of a great man fighting injustices—a story line that may have had special meaning for him, since he had won a 1937 Academy Award for The Life of Emile Zola. This was only roughly congruent with Rand’s own view of her novel. But as she began to write the script he encouraged her to retain as much of the original story and tone as possible, to test how well the novel in its entirety would translate to the screen, and this reassured her. All in all, she was pleased. Blanke “is almost an Archie Ogden,” she wrote to the real Archie Ogden, adding, “Of course I know that it is too early for me to judge.” Still, the producer’s advocacy at Warner Bros., like Ogden’s at Bobbs-Merrill, had convinced her that “it will be my fate, like Roark’s, to seek and reach the exceptions, the prime movers, the men who do their own thinking and act upon their own judgment.”
By early February, she had completed the preliminary screenplay, a 179-page treatment (later to grow to 283 pages) that preserved all the novel’s major characters and events, including both of Roark’s jury trials. According to her, Blanke and the studio bosses were very pleased with her work; the producer especially appreciated her impassioned love scenes and her stylized dialogue. Unfortunately, the studio executives soon concluded that building the sets for the movie would consume unacceptably large amounts of rationed wood, cement, and metal. They put The Fountainhead on hold, presumably until the following year, but it remained unproduced until 1948.
In January, Blanke had briefly taken her off The Fountainhead and loaned her to his friend and mentor, Hal Wallis, the Warner Bros. producer of The Maltese Falcon, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and Casablanca. Wallis was shooting an ill-conceived sequel to Casablanca called The