Finished The Fountainhead, and am now able to turn my attention to Tracinsky’s readers guide. I immediately found this / these gems:

“ Seeing President Obama echo the sentiments of James Taggart suggests how close the parallels still are. Fans of Atlas Shrugged have long played the game of coming up with a list of our favorite actors to join the ideal cast for an Atlas Shrugged adaptation. But here’s a more interesting notion: How about trying to cast the characters in the novel from real life? You’ll find that’s easy to do with the villains.”

“ For Wesley Mouch, I would cast the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman.”

“ In Atlas Shrugged, Eugene Lawson represents the idealistic “humanitarian” wing of the pro-big-government faction. But he’s a curious kind of humanitarian who talks a lot about love yet seems much more driven by hatred. Which makes him Bernie Sanders.”

“ I once did some ill-fated work on a screenplay for an Atlas Shrugged adaptation, and it gave me the opportunity to spend a lot of time working with the characters’ dialogue, picking excerpts, making cuts, stitching parts together. You begin to get a real feel for the rhythm and style of each character. I spent much of that time working on the dialogue for Mr. Thompson, and I found after a while that I could get him pitch-perfect if I just kept one thing in mind: He’s Joe Biden.”

“ This is a gentle parody of Atlas Shrugged and the way it presents its business heroes as sophisticated, tasteful, and articulate, which I will admit might not always be true of businessmen in real life. But it is much more a parody of Trump, whose inarticulate bluster and contemptuous indifference toward specialized knowledge makes him the exact opposite of an Ayn Rand hero.”

I’ll close this with;

“ Despite the critiques of Ayn Rand’s worldview as being simplistically “black and white,” in most of her novels there is one major character who is not easily classifiable as either a hero or a villain: a man of great potential who has gone astray. She gives us ... Stadler in Atlas Shrugged. Stadler is a man of extraordinary intellect who, under the influence of Hume’s view of morality, abandons the realms of morality, politics, and social interaction to the irrational. This was an idea she got in part from her observation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, whom she interviewed as research for an abandoned movie project on the development of the atomic bomb (which, in Atlas Shrugged, is represented by Project X).”