Atlas Vlogged

Hey, at least George Lucas and David Lean waited two or three decades before re-releasing special Director’s Cut editions of their movies. But as you may remember back in February, I ran a video podcast featuring an interview with Jennifer Burns, the historian and author of Goddess of the Market: Ayn Rand and the American Right. While Jennifer’s interview was great, I was more than a little unhappy with the quality of my finished video. I had sort of reached the limit of what my chain of software for longer segments such as this one. But with the new plug-ins built into Adobe Premiere Pro CS5, I went back earlier this week and re-rendered just about all of the video elements from the clip, into something that I think is of a much higher quality.

In any case, judge for yourself at the bottom of this post, following the original intro to the video.

Jennifer Burns, the author of the best-selling late 2009 book on Ayn Rand’s remarkably contentious history with the American right stopped by the vast Silicon Graffiti production facilities last week to discuss her book and the research that went into it. We’ll explore Rand’s resurgence last year with the members of the Tea Party, who can pick and choose which elements of Rand’s Objectivist philosophy they agree with in a way that Rand would have found anathema while she was still living. We’ll also discuss Rand’s tempestuous relationship with both the right and the left during the 1940s through the early 1970s, including her look at what she described as JFK’s “Fascist New Frontier” in 1962. Plus some thoughts on what the Fountainhead had to say about Rand’s take on modernist aesthetics, and the socialistic milieu in which they originally emerged, along with clips of the 1949 movie starring Garry Cooper.

And finally, Burns will discuss what Rand would have thought of 2010, a year which pits, on the left, arguably the most collectivist president since FDR, and on the right, the growing Tea Party movement, and their calls for a return to free-market capitalism, the unknown ideal (to coin a phrase.)

Approx. 12-minutes long:

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And for almost 60 previous editions of Silicon Graffiti, click here and just keep scrolling.

Related: And speaking of Rand, as the Rhetorican notes, “’Atlas Shrugged’ Movie Gets A Start Date.”

Let me know when it gets a release date — given that Rand’s book is over a half century old, this is the ultimate example of Hollywood’s development hell.