The movie’s publicists are offering free tickets to Atlasphere members! The offer extends to both free members and paid subscribers.

We at ARI are proud to announce a major new online educational initiative: The Ayn Rand Institute Campus. On January 10, 2012, we will beta launch an innovative and interactive learning environment where Internet users can study Ayn Rand’s provocative ideas in unprecedented ways, using a system of learning tools that can be found nowhere else.

ARI Campus will allow students around the world to take courses at their own pace and on their own time—for free. Students at all levels can explore the educational materials that lie at their fingertips within and around each course—from the multimedia experience of a course including audio, video, and supplementary visual and textual content to the “More to Explore” section that offers reading and viewing suggestions for students who want to deepen their knowledge on a particular topic.

Courses have interactive modules that often include quizzes and user interactions. ARI Campus will also offer a site discussion board designed to help students discuss, integrate and digest the information as fully as possible. We have endeavored to enrich the learning environment far beyond the experience of listening to a recorded lecture.

Our initial course offerings will include the following:
• Ayn Rand: A Writer’s Life
• Ayn Rand: Radical Thinker
• The Ayn Rand Bookshelf
• Anthem
• We the Living
• The Fountainhead
• Moral Virtue
• Philosophy of Education
• Philosophy: Who Needs It

New courses will be added regularly—the first release post-launch will be an exciting and in-depth look at the novel Atlas Shrugged, taught by Dr. Onkar Ghate and appearing in February.

Please join us, starting January 10, and explore and try out this brand new learning environment. The full, public launch of the site is slated for September of 2012. We hope to see you soon on ARI Campus!

NPR just aired a long and positive feature on Rand’s ideas and influence. It will probably be repeated throughout the day. The reporter is Andrea Seabrook. Tomorrow: Hayek. Info and archive likely at www.npr.org.

UPDATE: Here is the direct link (thanks, Leon).

Rand biographer Anne Heller discussed Rand’s early life, her fascination with New York’s skyscrapers, and other factors that led to her writing The Fountainhead. Then Donald Albrecht, the museum’s architecture curator, narrated a slide show that compared actual buildings with the buildings and designs in the film.

Of course, Rand’s relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright was covered, including the abortive attempt to enlist him as the film’s set designer. Both speakers treated Edward Carrere, who was ultimately hired for that task, too charitably. I’ve read that he was a studio hack and that Rand and others deemed his “Roark” designs pretty awful … and not awful pretty!

Anne noted that, contrary to Rand’s insistence, many of the events in Roark’s life parallel those in Wright’s. (I can’t recall if she makes this point in her book.)

In the Q&A, I mentioned the favorable review of the novel in The New York Times Book Review. There was a lot of talk about how both the book and film received only negative reviews and I thought this important exception should be noted.

There was nothing really new or surprising in these presentations. The evening was also short—under an hour. Perhaps 30-40 people were in the audience, including a bunch of regulars from our monthly Objectivist Meetup group. An admission fee was charged, and some may have felt shortchanged, perhaps expecting more dancing girls or free recreational drugs!

She’s offering them for sale on eBay, and the proceeds will be used to pay for the mastering and releasing of her new album. If you know a Rand fan who might enjoy a collection like this for the holidays, now is your chance!

The movie will be released “in select cities” on October 7th, 2011. And judging from the trailer below, it looks quite good.

According to IMDB the documentary includes interviews with John Allison, Mike Berliner, Andrew Bernstein, Harry Binswanger, Yaron Brook, Northrup Buechner, Jennifer Burns, Al Ruddy, Ed Snider, and many others. I also recognize Leonard Peikoff’s former wife Amy Peikoff, here at the very start of the trailer.

The movie’s synopsis at IMDB begins:

Ayn Rand & the Prophecy of Atlas Shrugged is a feature length documentary film that examines the resurging interest in Ayn Rands epic and controversial 1957 novel and the validity of its dire prediction for America.

Set in what novelist and philosopher Rand called the day after tomorrow, Atlas depicts an America in crisis, brought to her knees by a corrupt establishment of government regulators and businessmen with political pull the looters and the moochers who prey on individual achievement.

Less a conventional work of fiction than a philosophical manifesto in the form of a romantic novel, over the course of a thousand-plus pages, Atlas tackles no less an essential argument than the one debated by philosophers and theologians since time immemorial: altruism vs. self-interest. Am I my brothers keeper – or not? For Ayn Rand, the answer is an emphatic no. To Rand and the disciples of her Objectivist philosophy, self-sacrifice is as heinous an act as murdermurder of the soul.

For more information about the documentary, check out the movie’s IMDB page, its Facebook page, the Ayn Rand Institute’s site for the Atlas Shrugged novel, and the movie’s official website, where you can sign up to host a screening or to be notified once the DVD is available for pre-order.

Excerpts:

(at around 5:30)

INTERVIEWER: Steve, give us some insight into Steve Jobs’s personality and what it is about him that made him so ambitious and so driven to turn Apple around.

STEVE WOZNIAK: I can only speak to the early days. In the early days, he wanted to have a, you know, a success, and he wanted to be an important person in the world. And he wanted to do it by having a company that was successful and made money. And it sort of like evolved in those directions over time. He didn’t lose that part of his personality.

(around 9:00)

STEVE WOZNIAK: …And he did want to have a successful company, and he had a lot of ideas. He must’ve read some books that really were his guide in life, you know, and I think… Well, Atlas Shrugged might’ve been one of them that he mentioned back then. But they were his guides in life as to how you make a difference in the world. And it starts with a company. You build products and you gotta make your profit, and that allows you to invest the profit and then make better products that make more profit. I would say, how good a company is, it’s fair to measure it by its profitability.

If true, of course, Steve Jobs certainly wouldn’t be alone. Many entrepreneurs have been influenced by Ayn Rand’s novels to push for more entrepreneurial solutions to the world’s problems.

It sounds to me like Wozniak might be a bit of an Atlas Shrugged fan himself.

UPDATE – From Bob Maloney in a Facebook thread:

Mr. Jobs was at the same screening as I on opening night at Shoreline Theatres in Mtn. View a few months ago. I doubt he would have bothered to make it out to a busy opening night showing (especially as frail as he was) unless he was a fan of Atlas Shrugged.

Polish-born Nosek, 36, worked on supercomputers at the University of Illinois in the early 1990s, then entered Silicon Valley working for the computer-services company Netscape, before co-founding PayPal. He cites as a key personal influence the novel Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand, whose ideas picked up considerable traction among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs during the 1990s. “I’m not a libertarian or an objectivist [like Rand],” says Nosek, whose personal collection of elaborately spun theories and stories is �?? like his bank account �?? seemingly inexhaustible. “But the most important lesson I got from Rand was that business can be good or evil. I have realised more and more that great companies, founded for a long-term purpose, such as Google or Facebook or SpaceX, may do more good in the world than any other vehicle that we have.” Nosek became the link-man between Founders Fund and Halcyon Molecular: he is the man who discovered the Andreggs.

See the full article for much more.

The American Values Network, a left-wing group, with considerable funding by George Soros, has launched a media blitz under the banner “Ayn Rand vs. Jesus Christ.” As an Institute founded by Ayn Rand’s heir and devoted to advancing her philosophy, Objectivism, we would like to respond. Since this is an issue Rand faced repeatedly in her lifetime, our response is basically to let her speak for herself.

The AVN campaign is right in saying that Rand opposes accepting any ideas on faith — i.e., in the absence of rational evidence. Reason, based on sensory observation, is man’s only means of knowledge — the knowledge on which his life depends. Accordingly, she considers not only religious faith but any departure from reason to be destructive both personally and culturally.

But the AVN is wrong in bringing religion into politics at all. The American system treats religion as a private matter, not something to shape government policy. This is a corollary of the separation of church and state. The AVN campaign goes to shocking lengths in violating this principle. A recent video shows a young man pursuing Paul Ryan in a parking garage urging him to follow the Bible not Rand (whom he has praised) in his congressional budget proposal. Bringing religion into politics doesn’t get much cruder than that.

See the full article for much more.

I had lunch with Hospers in Los Angeles in 1996, shortly after graduating from college, and enjoyed his gentleness and intelligence.

In 2004, the Atlasphere published a lengthy article by him titled “Election 2004: The Case for Bush.”

Jesse Walker offers a brief tribute at Reason.com.

For more background about Hospers, you can read his bio and also find some of his recent articles available online.

Reviewing the correspondence from Hospers that I’ve seen over the years, I came across this interesting tidbit from him (a reply to Richard Allen on the old We The Living discussion group) about Rand’s take on Charlie Chaplin:

No, Rand didn’t care for the ‘silent comedians’. Several times in our conversations the topic of Chaplin came up — all negative. At first I thought that his political leftism was the main issue — that along with his preference for girls a generation ‘too young’ for him. These all had an influence on her low estimate of Chaplin.

But the main thing was his art, not his life: it was repellent to her that Chaplin celebrated (or seemed to) the ‘hero’ as helpless victim, not in charge of his fate but being buffeted about on the whims of circumstance, always reacting but not initiating action. She didn’t find his antics cute or even funny. Not only did she dislike ‘Modern Times’ as an indictment of capitalism, she found his parody on Hitler in ‘The Great Dictator’ (after the ‘little tramp’ had been abandoned) unworthy of even a single smile.

Rest in peace, Dr. Hospers. And thank you.