“I told her, ‘The Russians aren’t that desperate to wreck your book,’” Ruddy recalled in a recent interview.

Rand’s paranoia, as Ruddy remembers it, seems laughable. But perhaps it was merely misplaced. For so many people have tried and failed to turn the book she considered her masterpiece into a movie. Of course Rand herself had a hand in blocking some of those attempts before she died in 1982. And plans for at least a couple of television mini-series fell to the vicissitudes of network politics and media mergers.

But Rand’s grand polemical novel keeps selling, and her admirers in Hollywood keep trying, and the latest effort involves a lineup of heavy hitters, starting with Angelina Jolie. Randall Wallace, who wrote Braveheart is working on compressing the nearly 1,200-page book into a conventional two-hour screenplay. Howard and Karen Baldwin, the husband-and-wife producers of Ray, are overseeing the project, and Lions Gate Entertainment is footing the bill.

Whether Jolie, will bring the novel’s heroine, Dagny Taggart, to life on screen, or merely wind up on a list with other actresses including Barbara Stanwyck, Faye Dunaway, Raquel Welch, Farrah Fawcett and Sharon Stone remains to be seen. Until now, at least, no one in Hollywood has figured out a formula that promises both to sell popcorn and to do justice to the original text, let alone to the philosophy that it hammers home endlessly, at times in lengthy speeches.

Published in 1957 and set in the near future, Atlas Shrugged plots the collapse of American society after thinkers, industrialists, scientists, artists and other innovators — Rand’s kind of people — go on strike and disappear, refusing to contribute to a collectivist world. Dagny, a railroad heiress, tries to save the country from starvation and total collapse, while falling in love with the mysterious John Galt, who she later learns was the man who started the strike.

Atlas was a best seller. Six million copies have been sold over the years, and it remains a popular title, particularly among college students, according to Penguin Group, its publisher. Many of those copies wind up on shelves on Wall Street, where the book has been affectionately referred to as “the Bible of selfishness”.

In 1972, 15 years after the novel’s publication, Ruddy, fresh from producing The Godfather, decided to make a run at Rand. “Atlas Shrugged, let’s face it, was probably the most important novel of the 20th century that was never a film,” he said.

Rand’s agents warned him to expect rejection, he said, but reluctantly set up an appointment. He recalled meeting her in a room with one small love seat and many empty chairs. Ruddy, 6-foot-4, squeezed in next to the petite ageing writer on the small couch and commenced to woo her.

“I knew from Atlas Shrugged that she dug men, that she was a lusty woman,” he recalled in a telephone interview. “We start talking. It’s instant love.” Before long, he said, Rand was telling him, in her heavy accent, “I want you to do Atlas Shrugged.”

Ruddy said he looked past most of her eccentricities; she insisted on flying only by private plane, for example, because she feared that “if the Russians found out that she was on a commercial airliner, they’d hijack it”, he said.

But Ruddy refused to grant Rand final script approval, and their courtship quickly broke off.

At the end of her life Rand tried to write her own script, as she had done for The Fountainhead, but she died with only a third of her hoped-for mini-series finished.

Rand left her estate to a longtime student, Leonard Peikoff, who eventually sold an option to Michael Jaffe and Ed Snider, a friend of Rand’s who owned the Philadelphia Flyers hockey team. Other producers came and went, and in 1992 a New Jersey investor and Objectivist, John Aglialoro, bought an option to make Atlas Shrugged, eventually paying Peikoff more than $1 million in exchange for full creative control.

In 1999, Ruddy resurfaced, cutting a deal with TNT for a four-hour mini-series version. “A dream come true,” he called it at the time. Then 9/11 worsened the climate for films with apocalyptic visions. “I could have stayed with it and kept pushing it,” Ruddy said. “But now people start jumping out of their seats when a building blows up.”

Ruddy’s exit opened the door to the Baldwins, who optioned the rights to Atlas Shrugged from Aglialoro while running the billionaire Phil Anschutz’s Crusader Entertainment. (Baldwin, oddly enough, had once been a ticket manager for Snider’s Flyers.)

Last spring in a twist that might have amused atheist Rand and Anschutz, the latest deal for an Atlas Shrugged film project had its inception during Mass at the Church of the Good Shepherd, in Beverly Hills.

Baldwin said that a fellow parishioner, Michael Burns — the vice chairman of Lions Gate — approached Baldwin and his wife “right under the nose of the priest”, whispering to them about the rights to Rand’s novel and asking to “meet right away”.

The Baldwins used Hart’s script to interest Jolie in the project, through her manager, Geyer Kosinski. (Kosinski said Jolie declined to comment.) Together the Baldwins, Burns and Kosinski, who is also to be one of the producers, quickly approached Wallace about a new adaptation. And in what Wallace called an uncanny coincidence, he had recently read Atlas for the first time, when he and his college-age son had swapped their favorite books.

“I can pretty much guarantee you that there won’t be a 30-page speech at the end of the movie,” he said. “I have two hours to try to express what Rand believed to an audience, and my responsibility is not only to Ayn Rand, but to the audience, that this be a compelling movie. More people will see the movie than will read Atlas Shrugged. And the movie has to work.”

—KIMBERLY BROWN / NYT