This is one way to get publicity. In a screw-up that Freud would have had a field day with, someone at Atlas Productions screwed the pooch big time on the DVD packaging for Worst Film of 2011 front-runner, “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” by describing the film as “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice…”
The distributor intended to write "self-interest" rather than "self-sacrifice" and is recalling the DVDs to fix this mortal error. Harmon Kaslow, producer of the film, explains why this is hilarious: “As we all well know, the ideas brought to life in ‘Atlas Shrugged’ are entirely antithetical to the idea of ‘self-sacrifice’ as a virtue. Atlas is quite literally a story about the dangers of self-sacrifice.”
While it’s unclear if the mistake was an inside job, Atlas Productions certainly has some egg on their face with this one. Even if someone at the company had switched "self-interest" and "self-sacrifice" as a joke (which we doubt), the DVD packaging must have been approved by a number of people in the company before being shipped. And this isn’t an iTunes Terms of Agreement contract they had to read. We’re talking about a few paragraphs on the back of a DVD box.
This writer actually feels sort of bad for these guys. Their film bombed at the box office, was the laughing-stock of the movie industry, and now this. It seems like a pointless expense to save face now, but the company is going ahead and reissuing the DVDs with a new blurb, which says, “Ayn Rand’s timeless novel of rational self-interest comes to life…”
Any Rand surely wouldn’t have signed off on such an expense as this recall. Does anybody still read the backs of DVD boxes anyway? After this fiasco, of which Atlas Productions’ COO and Communications Director Scott DeSapio has commented, “The irony is inescapable.” At the very least, the people at Atlas Productions will certainly check the DVD blurbs if that “Atlas Shrugged Part II” ever gets made (Oh wait, they already bailed on that one). [via /Film]