After attempts by huge celebrities including Angelina Jolie to make a movie version of Atlas Shrugged, Bruce Watson at Daily Finance tells the story of the Atlas Shrugged movie that finally will get made, with a 5-million dollar budget.

Paul Johansson, who is directing the film and playing John Galt, is best known for his work on One Tree Hill, and most of his previous directing experience has been on the set of the teen-oriented soap opera. Taylor Schilling (Dagny Taggart) and Grant Bowler (Henry Rearden) also boast TV-heavy resumes, as do most of the supporting actors. As for the script, Brian Patrick O'Toole has been tasked with transforming Rand's 1,074-page brick into a two-hour movie. His previous scripts, Basement Jack, Evilution, and Cemetery Gates were all shlocky, low-budget horror films. As if that wasn't bad enough, Johansson has only five weeks for principal photography.

This version of Atlas Shrugged is just a placeholder for the production company to continue to hold onto the film rights, but I really want to see it. Maybe we can arrange a midnight movie screening in Seattle? We could have the next The Room on our hands.

UPDATE: Conservative film site Big Hollywood suggests that the liberal media is out to sink the film before it even begins: Apparently, this film covers the first third of the book, and so this is the first part of a planned Atlas Shrugged trilogy, with a budget of 15 or 20 million dollars for the whole thing. Even better, I say: a 6-hour megafilm on a shoestring budget could make this Atlas Shrugged into a legend of bad film.