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.)

... contd.