Slate Money Goes to the Movies: The Fountainhead
S1: This and free podcast is part of your Slate plus membership. Hello and welcome to The Fountainhead episode of Slate Money goes to the movies, I’m Felix Salmon of Axios. I’m here with Emily Peck. Hello. And oh my God, do we have a doozy for you this week? We have Michael Bierut Michael. Welcome who I am.
S2: Hello, my name is Michael Bierut. I’m a graphic designer, a partner in the firm Pentagram and a recovering Ayn Rand fan.
S1: Ayn Rand being one of the great bugaboos of 20th century America. She has huge influence in the Republican Party to this day. And she wrote this book called The Fountainhead that she then turned into a script which she insisted on being filmed without changing a single word. This script actually got made into a surprisingly watchable movie starring Gary Cooper as The Fountainhead from nineteen forty eight forty nine, something like that. That’s all coming up on a very funny episode, I have to say, of Slate. Money goes to the movies. So Michael Bierut. Where were you, if you remember, when was it that you first saw the Fountain Fountainhead, The Fountainhead?
S2: I can’t say where it was when I first saw the movie, which probably would have been on some late night TV on a UHF channel in Ohio, or maybe even when I first moved to New York in 1980. But the movie is very much and very much a product of the book upon which it’s based. And that’s made clear from the opening frames. It’s basically the opening shot shows like the cover of a book, The Pages Turn, and that introduces the credits. And I read the book in the ninth grade in suburban Cleveland, and I just was thunderstruck by it and I believe I read it. God forgive me. Seven more times people turned twenty. Wow. So I so ask me anything, you know.
S1: So I mean, the first thing I have to say is in terms of like visually inventive opening titles, I don’t even know if they existed before this. But in this movie you have a skyscraper, which is a beautiful, modernist, sleek skyscraper with vertical lines quite similar to the World Trade Center, the original one, but long before it was built. And then sort of the camera moves and the pin, it turns out to be the spine of a book. And the book is The Fountainhead. And it’s a glorious visual pun. And I was like, OK, there’s some inventiveness. There’s people are having fun with this movie, even though I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that this is the. Clunky script of any movie ever made in the history of Hollywood. There are other aspects to the movie. If you go to get away from the script that are kind of cool.
S2: Yeah, the other unprecedented is the clunky a script perhaps. And Ayn Rand claimed it was the first time in Hollywood history that the screenwriter got absolute final approval of what was put on a film and not a word was changed. And those two things may have been interrelated, actually.
S1: Yeah, please, God, make it the last time. Because, I mean, there’s a formative scene at the beginning of the movie where our hero, Howard Roark, wins the commission to build a skyscraper. And they’re like, but we want to make some changes. And he’s like, never. I must be pure. And it’s the same thing, right? He is to his architecture as Ayn Rand was to her script and. Quite obviously, in the case of the script, the desire for purity was a terrible idea, and I’ve seen reports that the studio heads the director and the actors were all begging her like no one talks like this. This is the worst screenwriting that we have ever seen in our lives. Please let us make it better. And she was like, No, I shall not. I am pure. I am Howard Roark.
S3: The worst part was when Howard work gets up and makes a speech to the jury, the insane, impenetrable argument that really does not make any sense. And you’re just like, oh, my God. And then I did read that Ayn Rand, they cut the speech that that was shorter than she wanted it to be. And she was mad about it.
S1: I think I went off and took like four transatlantic trips and came back and made a cup of tea and wrote a novel. And he was still talking. But enough like this thing ever end.
S2: Well, Emily that that speech was the pace of a notorious showdown where the producer indeed just looked at probably just started flipping through the pages and think this is preposterous. No one will sit still for this and started doing what any sensible filmmaker would do and just shortened it. And Ayn Rand found out about this and had a deal with Jack Warner and said, we don’t agree with that. Nothing would be cut. So Jack Warner from Warner Brothers called up the producer and said, do whatever Mr Rann says. And I think there was always this vague threat that the book had a cult following and that the passionate readers of the book, which much later would include the likes of me, would rise up in protest and burn theaters down if a word was cut. I think she’s somehow kind of she believed that certainly and probably was able to convince the other people at the studio that was a going threat. But it’s a very Ayn Randy trope. Eventually the protagonist will get up and deliver a very long speech that in painstaking detail, reiterates every bit of subtext, if there is any subtext at all. To reiterate, in the course of the thing, if you’re a very committed Ayn Rand person, which I was in my teens, you also have to read Atlas Shrugged at least once. And I did more than once. And there is a famous speech in that that runs literally unbroken for hundreds of pages, I think for something like 200 pages or so. John Galt speech.
S1: He’s an architect as well.
S2: Right now. He’s a physicist, mechanical engineer or something. But but a man of action. A man of science. A man of the mind. And Emily you criticize that speech, but it did get him acquitted. So checkmate Emily Peck.
S3: No, I’m sure. Obviously it works.
S1: Exactly. The jury was hanging on every word. They weren’t falling asleep.
S2: I guess you haven’t seen the movie. The crime that he is being charged with is actually dynamiting and leveling a multi block housing development that was changed against his will. And he just felt that no one changes my work and I will therefore blow it all up. Explained that clearly to the jury who said, you know, the guy’s got a point, make sense, not guilty. You know,
S1: and in terms of the mob rising up in defense of the singular vision of Ayn Rand, whether or not that would have ever happened with regard to this movie, it certainly happens in the movie, like the degree to which the normal man on the street in New York cares about the finer points of like architectural decoration is absolutely stunning.
S2: Yeah. So I was thinking I was imagining as I was watching you two media types marveling at the idea that a tabloid newspaper and sort of a fairly tawdry New York Post style newspaper, The New York Banner, which is owned by one of the several protagonists in the movie publishing titan Gale Winin that paper actually has not one but two architectural critics, Dominick Francom and Ellsworth Toohey. And excitingly, I think further for you media types, the unequivocal evil villain in the entire movie is the lead architectural critic of the paper who is using his his influence to affect world events and eventually to dominate the world through some quasi fascistic.
S1: Yeah, exactly. Global domination through architecture criticism. I mean, it is really the profession you choose. If you want world beating, domination and control over the planet, you become an architecture critic, because the one thing I know about architecture critics is they always get regular placement on the front page of the bigger mass market newspapers in the world.
S2: Exactly. And they connive with the editor in chief to sort of concoct some scandals that’ll sell a lot of papers. You’ve seen it happen over and over again. We say facetiously,
S1: we have to talk a little bit about the production design here, his amazing triplex apartment at the top of his amazing modernist building with these swooping staircases and these beautiful glass everywhere and terraces. I mean, the idea is that he is the lone architectural genius. But that was a beautiful set. Yeah. I mean, the one thing which is weird to me and I need to ask you about this, because you have a much better idea than I do, is was there ever a time like that? Put that first building later on in his career, he becomes a bit more of a kind of Frank Lloyd Wright character and does stuff. But like early on in his. He’s a full on like Mizzy in international style modernise, and that is the style that people are objecting to. Was there ever a time when popular sentiment just hated museum? International style modernism wasn’t always considered to be like this glorious vision of the future.
S2: There’s a two degree while well, very overtly. Ayn Rand was basing Rourke’s story on the biography of Frank Lloyd Wright, who did indeed work originally for Louis Sullivan. Louis Sullivan’s career in the late 19th century sort of got derailed by the mania for neoclassicism that arose after the Columbia and Exposition in Chicago at the end of the 19th century. So most civic buildings then were thought to have to be built in the form of temples, columns, grand staircases, etc.. A lot of the buildings we admire in New York from that era are surprisingly modern. They look like they were built in the 19th century. But as you develop from the 20s and 30s, you know, all those Stanford white buildings, those are all 20th century buildings. Yet what’s weird is that I think in the movies, one would often see through the 30s these glamorous art deco rooms for Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers concoctions seldom happening in Georgian mansions, much more likely happening in penthouse apartments. And so I suspect that both the readers of the book and the viewers of the movie didn’t have much of a clue about where where does this stuff come from or what’s the history of the part that rang true to me was that part that you referred to before, Felix, where he has a client and they’ve accepted his design with a few small changes, and they actually have gone to the trouble of making models to demonstrate how they will take his Mizzy and Box and festoon it with a couple of neoclassical kind of Roman pediments and strings of columns and stuff. And the things they say leading up to that are things that clients say all the time. This is good, but it’s like, you know, the public won’t accept something quite this crazy. We need to do something a little bit more acceptable to popular taste. And in the Rand formulation, only the heroic figure who stands to thought all this is the person who is responsible for our human progress.
S1: Michael, you are the perfect person to ask this as someone who gets commissioned to create works of genius for multinational corporations and then they come back to you and they do this and they say, well, we love what you did, that we won a few changes. And there’s actually a scene in the movie where they’re basically selling come member who it was who says this is like they’re the client. The client is the client. You have to do what they want. And the romantic idea is always the genius created the genius, the client system. And if the genius winds up doing what the client wants, that’s just like ultimately bad for everyone. That’s clearly the message of the movie as a fully fledged creative genius yourself. Is this true?
S2: I’d like to say that it’s all hogwash, but there’s a reason why some of these ideas have endured. There’s a reason why if you meet an architect and ask him or her their opinion of that of The Fountainhead, a lot of times they’ll make a face that kind of admits their own sort of ambivalence about it. They know they have to roll their eyes a little bit, but in their hearts, they know there are parts that really resonate. Rourke has a single line, which is probably like the real climax of the movie for architects, where he says, I don’t build in order to have clients, I have clients in order to build
S4: a building has integrity, just like a man and just as seldom. It must be true to its own idea, have its own form and serve its own purpose. But we can’t depart from the popular forms of architecture. Why not? Because everybody’s accepted them. I haven’t. You wish to defy our common standards. I set my own standards. You intend to fight against the whole world if necessary. But after all, we are your client and it’s your job to serve us. I don’t build in order to have clients. I have clients in order to build.
S2: And he also says, interestingly enough, he said some of the effect of I’ve never worked with I don’t work with committees or with foundations or with groups. I only work with a single man who knows what he wants and can trust me to respond to that vision. And I mean, I’ve been in lots of late night war story sessions with other designers and working with committees is not easy. If you have a single patron who miraculously decides that you are a genius, that’s that’s what every person who does creative work secretly wants. I think. I think most of us, though, kind of end up. Going into the world, having Howard work on the inside and putting a little Peter Keating on the outside and just trying to split the difference between them, God help me. I say that only knowing that Ayn Rand is dead and spinning in her grave to hear someone saying that in her name.
S3: So I feel like in journalism, I know some Howard work types, like I’ve worked with the Howard Roark type who submits his piece and better not mess with it and they’ll fight you on every word change and just committed to the vision. But like nine times out of ten, they’re wrong. They need the editing help and there’s things to be fixed. Although, of course, Howard works buildings didn’t need like the extra curlicues or whatever these people want to put on them. But I don’t know. It just there are quibbles here.
S1: I’m a great believer in design by committee when it’s done well. So The Wizard of Oz is a great movie and no one can name the director because he didn’t really have a director. There is no, like, directorial vision. If there was, it was it was directed by five different people, all doing different bits. And it just kind of gets thrown together and it doesn’t matter. It’s a great movie or even in the world of architecture. Look at my favorite building in New York, possibly the world is the UN building on the East River, which again was like a whole bunch of architects, including Oscar Niemeyer and Corbusier. And look at and they all kind of worked together quite well. You can do work by committee and it can be glorious when it works.
S2: There’s something about architecture where the stakes are higher in a way and a mistake can kill people, certainly, or more mild mistake can just be an eyesore that a whole city will have to live with for decades. Whereas my worst logo or the most inept bit of copy turned in by a journalist is going to make it as far as it makes it right. And I think that’s why I mean, I’ve met a lot of architects through the years and all of them have to channel a little bit of that Howard Roark arrogance because they’re trying to talk people into taking this gargantuan imaginary leap with them. When Emily if you hand in a finished piece or a piece for editing. Right. Kind of showing a client a logo, I have to I sort of want them to trust me. But on the other hand, they can just look at the thing. And the way it looks is the way it’s going to look. The way your piece reads this way is going to read architects. They just show people models and they say, picture this except really big. And millions of dollars later and months and months later, it’s going to be there. And trust me, it’s going to work. Right. And every bad building you’ve ever seen was the result of someone saying that and borrowing building ever seen is the result of someone saying that. And to make that claim just demands so much trust and confidence to be placed in you as a professional that I just think all of them kind of in their own way. Most architects learn a way to kind of be bigger than life when the occasion calls for it. Some of them are more wheeling and charming. Some of them are just more like godlike in their presentation. Some of them are cerebral. Some of them are kind of just a blunt force of personality. But they’re all they all sort of are. So many of them are larger than life. It’s not just a coincidence, I suspect, and they also make great subjects from movies. You already had an architect as a protagonist earlier in Slate. Money goes to the movies in The Indecent Proposal. Indecent Proposal. Yeah. And I actually looked it up. The list of actors who have played architects on film. There’s a website where they round up. Some of them include Paul Newman, Towering Inferno, Steve Martin and housesitter Woody Harrelson, Indecent Proposal, which you covered, Adam Sandler in Kallick, Liam Neeson in love, actually, Wesley Snipes and Jungle Fever. Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle, Michelle Pfeiffer in one fine day. Henry Fonda in 12, Angry Men at the very end. They say none of them have names such as juror number one or whatever they say. By the way, what do you do, fella? He says, I’m an architect and that’s so gratuitous, but it’s just meant to cement in the public mind. Oh, he must be great. He’s an architect. It’s just amazing. That was and that’s why George Costanza wants to talk people into being an architect. You know, I’ve always wanted to pretend that was an architect.
S3: Yeah. I was going to say there are some famous TV architects, but the only two I can think of right now would be Greg Brady of The Brady Bunch. Mike Brady, sorry. Mike Brady, Greg’s dad was an architect and he was very trustworthy and patriarchical. And so that makes sense. And of course, George Costanza’s alter ego, when he wanted to impress people was Art Vandelay. It’s like the fall back, like, trust me.
S2: But what’s so funny about Mr. Brady is that his house was crap. He lived in this Ray’s ranch that really looked like my house in Parma, Ohio, in the 70s. And I was like, wow, is that what architects build for themselves so they can do anything they want? I guess. OK, so what is it? You know, but I suppose there’s something about the idea that is both artistic and a business. You know, you can signal to your audience, this guy or this woman kind of has an artistic dream, but they’re not like crazy, like a painter. They actually can show up and earn a paycheck because they’re doing something that requires them to sit at a desk and use math. And so I think that sort of seems like let’s let’s make that profession an architect for that role.
S1: So can we talk about the architecture in this movie, since it on some level is a movie about architecture? The billionaire Gail Wineland, who claims that he has never built a work of genius and he’s been sort of cowardly in his commissioning of the pizza eating types his entire career. And then, like, the last thing he does before he dies is commission the genius, how it worked to build the greatest skyscraper in the history of skyscrapers. But his office is like the most amazing architectural marvel. That’s like he got something, right?
S2: Yeah. Yeah. No, it’s got that great little moment where all his newspapers are kind of arrayed around in kind of a semicircle. You’ve done Hudsucker Proxy. That’s, I mean, the production designer. So that must have looked at movies like The Fountainhead, where you sort of get that view of the impossibly, you know, the senselessly vast expanse of carpet that has to be traversed to reach the CEO’s desk, which is backed by these impossibly tall windows which open out onto the cityscape. No, I thought I mean, it’s just I think the production design in this movie is great. Again, Ayn Rand was not impressed. She really wanted them to hire Frank Lloyd Wright to be the production designer. And frank hydrides conditions were not acceptable to the folks at Warner Brothers. And so he didn’t get the job and she actually wanted it to feel much more like Frank Lloyd Wright, a much less like this sort of stripped down Moderne look. But I actually think it’s ravishing. There’s a sequence that happened. They do a little montage where they’re kind of like showing him crawling back to success, building by building. And he yeah, she has this thing that actually I think is very touching where no one’s hiring. And then a guy with a guy who’s building a gas station calls him up and says, you know, Mr. Rourke, I just like the way you you make buildings. And I’m not sure you take on a little job like mine. It’s just a gas station. And he says, no, there’s no such thing as small buildings. Every building deserves to have great design. You know, he says this thing that I think is actually kind of admirable.
S4: It’s great wisdom, Art. It’s wonderful. Ever since I saw the Enright House, I knew you were the man I wanted, but I was afraid you wouldn’t do an unimportant gas station for me. I have to doing skyscrapers. Nobody is unimportant. I’ll build for any man who wants me anywhere so long as I build my way.
S2: And then that leads to this little montage where he keeps showing a sketch by Howard Roark, then the built thing, a sketch in the building. I think those are one after another are staggering and beautiful. They’re just amazing how cool they look. And considering that it was just sort of concoctions by the Warner Brothers production design department, I think they really sort of nailed that thing, particularly as it would be presented to an audience back in the late 40s when this movie came out. That would have seemed like plausible modern architecture to them, I would say.
S1: And then the final big commission that he gets, the culmination of that sequence of commissions comes from wanting to build a house in Connecticut. And he winds up building this like clunking great yachts that just kind of plunks down in the middle of a field. He’s done all of these great buildings in this in the sequence. As you say, he’s done this wonderful, beautiful museum skyscraper. And then what the hell does he give? Wynans is terrible.
S2: You know what’s funny, Felix? Well, you know, I had the same reaction. And my guess is I think the production design was sort of overthought it. They thought, OK, this billionaire, it’s already established that he has a yacht. He’s been shown on a yacht. He’s actually been shown on a yacht wearing kind of versed how the third kind of like a captain’s a double breasted jacket. And so, like, maybe work would make his house look like a yacht. So I think that earlier sequence, I think they just were knocking that stuff out and thinking, OK, we need we need building number four now. We need it by four o’clock. And I think that when they think, oh, this is going to really be the big one, we’ve got to spend a few extra days getting this right. And I think they ended up just it’s overly complicated. They never really show it. Too much is looming in the background and not, as I agree, not particularly nicely. And of course, that commission leads to the other kind of delicious romantic dramedy sort of mix up where he hires Rourke for this thing as a temple to his new wife, who is, again, the Dominic Francon, who sort of his assume it as a teenager. I was I didn’t understand girls much at all. And trying to kind of figure out what women wanted by reading this book was really baffling to me,
S1: because the expression on Emily face, you know, this is a note here.
S2: It’s a little bit so Emily what did you make of sort of the the sexual dynamics in this? Did they ring true to you?
S3: Well, yes, I often begin my relationships by slapping a man in the face with a riding crop and then hovering menacingly over him at the quarry. I liked I mean, the movie was made in nineteen forty eight and I feel like Dominique Francon comes across, as, you know, self-assured woman who kind of knows what she wants, even though it seems bananas like the first scene when we see her, she’s throwing a statuette out a window because I don’t know why. It’s something that’s just
S2: too beautiful for this horror.
S3: Two beautiful girls, right? Sure. But she is still kind of like a pawn in the movie. I mean, she’s the only woman in the movie and her fiance is Peter Keating, the the shrubby architect. And he likes to just love
S1: get a commitment, doesn’t she? Yeah.
S3: Yeah. Everybody wants this lady. I mean, she’s the only one in the movie, so it makes sense. You know, he kind of he ditches her to build a building and just making clear to me, like, OK, she’s a self-confident, self-assured woman and everything, but she’s still just like a someone’s possession to be bought and sold basically. So that was disheartening and also was disheartening to me that like Ayn Rand, she’s it’s all about men for her. There’s no project around women for this woman. I don’t know that much about her. And Michael, maybe you can enlighten me, but like, it’s all about genius men for this woman. That was kind of depressing to me.
S1: My wife did a whole project about conservative women in the twentieth century, and Ayn Rand was one of the women she picked out and did a portrait of really as a prime example of a woman who spent her entire career trying to prop up the patriarchy and being sort of feminist.
S3: Yes, that’s exactly the the message you get. Like the men are the geniuses and you’re supposed to act selfishly. That’s her big message. Like it’s OK to be selfish. You have to act in your self-interest always. It doesn’t matter. Yet the woman in the movie does not really act in her own self-interest. She’s all about Howard work. She’s all about supporting him no matter what. So that’s kind of like there’s kind of a flaw in the machinery there for Ayn Rand. In my opinion,
S2: she does this weird thing. I mean, Dominique’s motivation, like, I think that’s actually I mean, I have two main quibbles. Well, I have two main quibbles with the movie, neither of which is the one that Felix mentioned. I actually like the dialogue. It sort of has that film noir. No one talks like this kind of thing where it’s a. 40S movie in black and white, of course, no one is going to talk naturalistically, and it’s the kind of thing that one can actually take off on.
S1: Sure. I mean, granted, like, you watch a great Billy Wilder movie and no one talks like that. But that’s because the way people talk in Billy Wilder movies is just so much smarter and faster and cooler than anyone could talk. In reality, the way people talk in the Nine Rande movie is by delivering like completely deathless chunks of concrete prose and dropping them on their foot and going, wow, what am I meant to do with this?
S2: It is like that short essay answers every every little line. And, you know, it’s funny is, you know, she was born in Russia, English as a second language, learn to speak English through the movies, fell in love with America through the movies, moved originally to L.A. and kind of her first jobs were working as a script girl on film wants. And so she really, yeah. Knew her way around Hollywood and she
S1: worked on Hollywood scripts. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She was like I’m not surprised about the English as a second language thing, like, you know, Vladimir Nabokov and indeed Billy Wilder had English as a second language like that, that if she dies, she worked on scripts you like, surely she should have learned something about how to write dialogue.
S3: The movie is good though. Yes, there is a lot. I mean, the jury scene alone, I didn’t I denounce it, but there are some like fun lines and little things like Elsworth to his column is called One Small Voice. That to me is just delicious. Like, Oh, he’s just he’s just one small voice, but he’s, you know, destroying people’s lives or whatever. And they people say kind of fun things. I wrote a few down, like one guy says, I play the stock market of the spirit and I sell short like I enjoyed that.
S2: I don’t remember Elsworth too. He says that Elsworth to it.
S1: Elsworth, that’s a good thing. I will give you that.
S3: And when they’re trying to come up with something to cover at the newspaper, I think it’s the editor in chief who says, like, I’ve racked my brain, I can’t think of anything to denounce. And I just I enjoy that a lot. And despite the wooden dialogue, this is a very watchable movie. Not only does it look good, but the acting is really compelling. Like I was comparing it to Hudsucker a lot because it’s kind of like similar themes and similar setting and all this. And I was trying to figure out like what the difference is. And I think the acting is just a lot better. Like Patricia Neal and Gary Cooper are really good. And even though they have the weird wooden things that they’re saying, I believe it all. I believe Patricia Neal’s character is the unique person that she is. You know what I mean? Like, I believe that they are really into each other. I read that Ayn Rand is thinks that sexual attraction comes from like a meeting of the minds or something. But obviously these two are just like super hot for each other. And I believe, you
S2: know, it’s a very horny movie.
S1: Yeah, it’s oh, my God. The final scene where she, like, rides the elevator up to the oh, my God. Like Emily. What were you doing? Like described? I was just like the final scene.
S3: Well, the final scene is so winand shoots himself in the head. But this is oh this is Emily.
S2: Excuse me. Excuse me for saying he that wasn’t in the original script originally. He simply gets divorced from Dominique, but the Standards Board said we can’t show divorce in a movie, have him blow his brains out. So divorce, we don’t want to get into that suicide. Yeah, sure makes sense.
S3: That sounds crazy because. So people suicide you that leads to more suicide. So anyway, so he shoots himself in the head because he is so upset that he turned on his friend Howard work. So yeah, that means that Dominique Francon can marry Howard Roark and it’s a happy ending. I’ve never seen a suicide as part of a happy ending before, typically, but there you go. And then in the last scene, Howard, work is building this like monument to himself, a giant skyscraper. It’s super phallic. And Dominique Francon gets into the elevator on site. It’s like an open elevator, looks kind of scared.
S2: And she’s alone on it, too, oddly enough. Yes. No hard had come with me.
S1: And my my wife has a fear of heights and was watching this movie with me. And she was like she couldn’t watch. It was like the scariest scene in the movie. It was pretty
S3: scary. And yeah. And then she’s like looking up and he is, you know, at the top of the the phallic symbol looking down on her. She’s riding up the skyscraper and it’s the happiest ending in Hollywood right there. And it is Bob, you’re right.
S2: It is like a really watchable movie. And I would say Felix the dial. Almost all the bad dialogue I believe is given to Gary Cooper is hard work because he’s the one who has to kind of keep keep making the speeches about the ideology. I actually think that, like elsewhere, too, we and I think everyone else gets like great kind of like snide, cynical things to say,
S1: oh, who’s that Louis Sullivan guy at the beginning? He just does not speak like a. Also, Wallace thought that crazy speech about self-sacrifice was something that Gail Wynans winds up dictating as a front page editorial.
S2: I mean,
S1: it makes no sense whatsoever. Also, can I also say it like this was made in 1948, long before postmodernism was a gleam in the eye of anyone. But the thing that they wind up creating, the kind of hodgepodge of neoclassical stuff and balcony’s and references to the version of the housing estate that ends up being built in that Howard Roark hates and wants to dynamite. Is this incredible postmodern vision beautiful?
S2: It’s so amazing. And it’s Michael Graves’ meets Quindlen. Terry. It is
S1: so good.
S2: Yeah, it’s great. And the thing is, the only moment I wish that movie was in color, because you can tell that would have really driven home the improvement
S1: to women like Harry Farrell, like lime green and pink.
S2: Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Terry Farrell. Like, yeah, exactly like that. And so then how it worked then exercises his undocumented. But gentleman’s agreement that the contract has been breached by blowing up a vast multi block housing development for a reason that I never quite figure it out. And I don’t remember in the book what the reason is. He causes Dominique to be on the scene and be injured if she
S1: wants to send the guard away so he can sneak in with his dynamite.
S3: Oh, I thought it was so he didn’t die, but it’s just so he can sneak and with the.
S1: My my one of my favorite bits is that there were demonstrations against the newspaper when it takes the pro-war position and people are like walking around with signs on sticks saying look down with Howard Rook because they care so much about modernism vs. prestige
S2: and the signs that say reinstate Ellsworth Toohey, who’s been fired from paper wise. But so, I mean, it really it’s I think it’s just kind of remarkable in so many ways. But I agree with Emily. I actually I hadn’t seen it in about 15 years, I’m guessing, and have grown more measured in my opinions about things. Certainly got over Ayn ran before I turned 20 and I was actually thinking, oh my goodness, what did I get us into with this thing? And I was actually surprised at how compelling it is. It also has another great line, which is, as you know, all the characters have to meet each other and have these confrontations. And at one point when he’s at his low point in the movie, Rourke is walking around in New York and comes upon a big commission for the New York Lyric Opera that he had interviewed for, been rejected from and have been given to his quasi rival, Peter Keating. And he’s standing at the construction barricades, gazing at the work being done. And it says On this site shall rise, the New York Lyric Opera, Keating and Frank on architects. And he’s looking at it expressionless. And then a figure next to him says, We’ve never met, have we? And it turns out to be the evil Elsworth to me. And then he says, this should have been your source buildings all over this city that are rising. That should have been Uros, and they never will be. You know why? It’s because you must be destroyed. And I love his performance. I just think it is so delicious. He just kind of like really digs in
S1: is a good moustache twirler, isn’t he?
S2: Yeah, he totally is. He sort of is. If you know all about Eve, he really is sort of like the prototype for Addison to the evil theater critic who shows up in that one night is failing to get a rise out of Howard Roark. And finally, he says, we’re all alone here. Why don’t you tell me exactly what you think of me and then Gary Cooper and what I think is his best line reading in the whole movie says, But I don’t think of you. And then I’ve seen and what’s interesting is I’m doing a mad rewrites right now. And there’s an elevator scene where one of the junior copywriters says to Don Draper, Yeah, why don’t you just tell me exactly what you think of me? And he just looks straight ahead and says, you know, I don’t think of you. And you can tell that Matt Weiner is actually consciously doing a little bit of Omeje. And in fact, Don Draper is very much a latter day Howard Roark. And put me in the room and I’ll get my idea over. No one changes my copy, et cetera, et cetera. So and more Titanic, the creative geniuses in the business world for us to model ourselves on with some degree of futility, I guess.
S4: Hello, Mr.. I hope that Major, someday like this alone, you shouldn’t mind talking to me. What about there’s a building that should have been yours and a building is going up all over the city, which are great chances. Refuse to you and give them to incompetent fools. You’re walking the streets while they’re doing the work which you love but cannot obtain. This city is close to you as I would have done it. And you want to know my motive. No, I’m fighting you and I shall fight you in every way I can. Agree to do what you please, Mr. Rocawear alone here. Why don’t you tell me what you think of me and any words you wish, but I don’t think of you.
S3: OK, so two things about the way the public acts in this movie. They’re hot. There are times when a building goes up in Manhattan and people freak out about how they don’t like how it looks like. For example, I believe the World Trade Center people really hated everything about it when it went up. The Twin Towers. The Twin Towers, yes, the Twin Towers. People hated the Twin Towers.
S2: They weren’t beloved.
S3: It took a while. And the people get worked up about architecture in New York City. I would say one and two if someone blew up a housing project because of their integrity in New York City and got caught and then a newspaper like every day drumbeat was defending this person, I feel like people would get upset about it and rightly so.
S1: This is a good point. That’s crazy. Oh, yeah. This is actually true because these days, I mean, the housing project, it’s like Qaboos in X shaped tower in the field kind of housing project that like nowadays we look at with a degree of, oh my God, what were we thinking? But back then, in the 1940s, really was considered to be the utopian future of working people’s housing. And I think the working people, you know, who are being upgraded from literally slum conditions into strongly well-built projects with elevators and solid walls and indoor plumbing and all of that kind of stuff and heating and even sometimes air conditioning were like, this is such a great step up from what we’re used to.
S3: Yeah, actually, I can interject and say that my mother and her family were one of the first to move into a housing project in Williamsburg when it was brand new. And my aunt, who’s still alive, still talks about how amazing it was and how they had like washing machines. And the rent was really good and it was super clean and they were so proud to live there. And she just was on and on about how awesome the housing project was.
S1: And people like the housing project, they might not have like the slum clearances, but they did like the the building they were moving into. And yeah, they didn’t want to see them being blown up by some ubermensch. She was convinced that he was potent than any of them.
S2: Yeah. And in the movie, some of the best kind of expository dialogue, there was a couple of passages where on two occasions, first Chewey and then walk himself sort of describe the challenges of building really good public housing. And this really beautifully written passages that are quite accurate and kind of illuminating. And I sort of in a way, you have to admire Ayn Rand’s hutzpah of kind of making this calculation. OK, so I think the climax should be they change his design and he blows up the building. What kind of building could it be? What it was a housing project for poor people. Why don’t we just take the most extreme thing that kind of sets him up to be the most ostensibly the most villainous sort of character in the world. And then his ultimate triumph will be even more of a vindication of my philosophical position. And it’s also quite weird, Emily that the same sort of regular people who were protesting in the street presumably serve on the jury. And like we said before, they just sort of needed to explain to them what the you know, what he was all about. Oh, yeah, OK. Yeah. So you have nothing against poor people. I guess it just was you didn’t like them adding those multi-color balconies to the building. OK, got it. OK, I don’t
S3: understand what hard work is supposed to be a man of integrity, but what is so commendable about agreeing to design a building for some other architect secretly and making this weird deal behind the scenes? That seems to me to be unethical, but of course, my moral compass is different from Ayn Rand’s. But I don’t understand. That is like a man of integrity would do that. Explain that to me, Emily.
S2: You were meant to attend to an earlier soliloquy that Rourke delivers, I believe, to Peter Keating in which he says, I forget. Who knows? He might have been talking. Actually, he’s one, but he’s interviewed by a reporter at the end of that montage. What are you all about, Mr. Arkin? This guy’s taking notes and he says something like, I don’t build for the poor, I don’t build for my clients. I’m not thinking of the users. I’m not thinking of the press or claim. I’m just doing it because I want to do the work and I want to do the work right, that’s all I care about is doing the work. And the reason I have clients is they let me do the work and the work is what I love and the work is what I’m dedicated to. And so I really do think that sort of is, you know, like if agreeing to do something, not be credited for it, not be paid for, but simply see your vision rise and have the private satisfaction of knowing that was my work. That’s, I believe, what you’re meant to that’s meant to kind of dispel your confusion about that. And I think that that speech coming after so many other similar speeches, they all sort of start to run together in your mind. And I think it’s hard to kind of like keep the worldview kind of perfectly on track the whole time.
S1: If you’ve read The Fountainhead seven times, then like at that point, you kind of understand.
S2: Yeah, at a certain point, you sort of internalize the whole thing. You’re not used to just more absorbing it than than reading it. Unconventional sense.
S1: So, so Michael, thank you, first of all, for having done the work to just absorb it over the years in your formative adolescent years. And for me, watching this for us. So like, yeah. What is your your verdict? How would you rate this movie?
S2: I would say surprisingly watchable. It’s compelling. The performances are all over the top. And if you want to see an architect in a movie really being an architect, this is for you. Tom Hanks and Woody Harrelson are not delivering.
S1: Woody Harrelson was not a believable architect. He did terrible, postmodern, late 80s, terrible things like this. You get much better buildings in this one. Gary Cooper, who is a much more believable architect that will give you that. Oh, my God. You know who we forgot was Jeremy Irons in high rise?
S2: Oh, that’s right. Yeah, yeah. No, it’s ah, it is the classic wrong classic.
S3: It’s always except you mentioned Michelle Pfeiffer except voice. Yeah.
S2: And by the way, you know that this movie, it’s very telling actually this movie is constantly being buzzed about as someone’s going to do a reboot of it and update it. And it’s always like actually seeing as what’s funny is that the first time I heard that was Michael Cimino while he was doing Heaven’s Gate. There’s a fantastic book called Final Cut, which is one of the best business books ever written. If you ask me about the disastrous making of this movie, Heaven’s Gate by Michael Cimino, and they find out that his dream project is to do The Fountainhead and they realize, oh, damn, that explains everything. Why are we working with this guy? And then Oliver Stone was in talks about doing it. And then most recently, Mike Snyder, the only
S1: profession that has a greater percentage of completely insane egoists is film directors.
S2: They see their their reflection in the hard work and they want to inhabit it and make a movie all over again.
S1: How about you, Emily? What’s your verdict on The Fountainhead?
S3: I like this movie. It’s not for me. This movie is not for me. This is a celebration of male power and patriarchy. Maybe, I guess. And as discuss, the dialogue was ridiculous and wooden at times almost. You couldn’t listen to it. And yet it was so watchable. I just I, I loved Gary Cooper. I love Patricia Neal. They’re great at act. They’re really good at acting. And it was so compelling to watch. I really the contrast to Hudsucker Proxy was intense in my mind. It was just so well done and so much better and smarter and so many ways
S1: as we know. I enjoyed The Hudsucker Proxy more than you did. And I love the production design of The Hudsucker Proxy, possibly even more than if the founding had. They had like more technology to work with and color, which is very helpful. I also probably just found it harder to get over the clunking, great political aspect of the whole thing. And the politics of it is so hard to swallow that it makes the whole movie to me kind of unpleasant, not to mention the fact that, like the steaming clunks of dialogue can be like also very hard to swallow. That said, I will agree that the actors are good at acting. The production design is excellent. The director did a very good King video, did a very good job of directing this script. I don’t think anyone could have done a better job with this script than he did. And if someone asked me, like, should I watch this movie, I wouldn’t say no.
S2: And do you think Felix? Because you mentioned the political kind of implication of
S1: propaganda, right? It is unappeased. It’s got that like Leni Riefenstahl thing going on. And, you know, are we going around saying, oh, yeah, we should all be watching the triumph of the will because the production design is awesome.
S2: The one thing that I it strikes me just about this movie, that book and Ayn Rand’s oeuvre, is that it just seems to decades and decades later, despite everyone’s sort of acknowledgement that these are all deeply flawed works of art, it just seems to really have such a. Hold on the imagination of politicians, business people, certainly there’s no shortage of Silicon Valley types who have built businesses who obviously had it, had some sort of fateful encounter with with one of these books or movies at an impressionable age. And somehow that shaped their imagination. It’s sort of really seems like as a as a template for kind of a lot of attitudes about how business is conducted that Howard Roark actually is exert some sort of influence today. Right. Don’t you think? Am I over
S1: now? No, he absolutely does. Ayn Rand will will never die even though she’s dead. On which note, Michael, thank you for suggesting this movie. It was an absolute genius suggestion. Thank you for making me watch it, which I honestly think I probably would never have watched this movie were it not for your suggestion. And thank you for being the expert on all things Ayn Rand, because it’s hard to find a smut expert on all things lying around who doesn’t just drive you up the wall and
S2: thank you or will admit it. Yeah. Oh, it’s an honor to be on the show and a real blast talking about this or anything else with you and Emily. So thank you for inviting me.
S1: So that’s it for The Fountainhead next week. We have a real treat today. You’re talking about parasite.
