How Cinema Saved Ayn Rand’s Life — and Sparked Her Career

Ayn Rand watched the beginning of the Russian Revolution from the window of her apartment in St. Petersburg. What followed were years of horror and hardship. Her father’s business was seized by the Bolsheviks, and her family was forced to flee back and forth across more than 2,000 miles to escape the Russian civil war. Settling into her new existence under an authoritarian regime, Rand was intimately aware of the threat that the Soviet Union posed to her life, particularly given the kinds of stories she dreamed of writing.

How could Rand have preserved her benevolent view of existence through these horrors? Thanks to documented evidence housed in the Ayn Rand Archives, we know part of the answer: her love of Western cinema.

Decades later, in biographical interviews, now preserved in the Ayn Rand Archives, Rand described Viennese operettas, and later Western movies as having saved her life while in Russia. And once in America, movies continued to be important in her career.¹

A Window to the West

Rand described the period in which the communist regime began loosening restrictions on access to foreign movies as one of her happiest in Soviet Russia, as if she “had a private avenue of seeing the world outside.”² Rand described the films she saw and movie magazines sent to her from family living abroad as like a “voice from Mars . . .  like receiving something from another planet.”³ Movies provided Rand with a view of the world outside of the Soviet Union — a world beyond the regime that tightly restricted all aspects of life. One faraway nation portrayed in those movies was a particular source of fascination for her: the United States of America.

Rand first learned about American history in her final year of high school, and it was American films that helped her to concretize what the country represented: the promise of a society in which men were free to pursue their own happiness.⁴ She recalled seeing the same films multiple times just to catch a glimpse at shots of New York City. She described American adventure films like The Isle of Lost Ships, starring Milton Sills, as “not philosophical,” but as portraying a world where philosophical problems “were already solved,” presenting a “free existence for purposeful men. It was the sense of adventure, and self-reliance, individualism, men accomplishing things.”⁵ Such concretes helped Rand to form what she called “the reality of America . . . the essence of what [America] could be and ought to be.”⁶  

Rand knew that if she wanted to pursue her dreams as a professional writer, she could only do it in a free country like America. If she remained in Russia, writing “anti-Soviet movie scenarios,” Rand estimated that she would likely be dead within a year.⁷  

By the autumn of 1925, she had received permission from Soviet authorities to visit her relatives in Chicago.⁸ Because Rand had stated in a notarized document the previous year about her desire to work in the film industry, one can speculate that the rationale for the trip (in the eyes of Soviet authorities) was to study filmmaking in America (especially because her relatives owned a movie theater).⁹ In January 1926, she left Leningrad and never returned.

Breaking Into Hollywood

Although she could barely speak English, Rand was confident that she would achieve the career that she had always dreamed of, writing back to a friend in Russia that she was pursuing her goals with her usual “straight-line decisiveness.”¹⁰

Six months after immigrating, Rand made her way to the heart of American show business in Los Angeles. After a chance encounter with legendary filmmaker and director Cecil B. DeMille (whose movies Rand deeply admired), she was hired first as an extra and then as a junior screenwriter at DeMille Studios.

While working for DeMille, Rand wrote a film treatment titled “The Skyscraper,” adapted from a story by Dudley Murphy about two construction workers. Rand completely shifted the focus of the story to a new character that she devised on her own, an unconventional young architect named Francis Gonda (later renamed Howard Kane).¹¹ The treatment was an example of Rand’s early efforts to portray a vision of her “ideal view of man and ideal view of existence,” and of the kind of men and events that she could “like, respect, and admire.”¹²  

Though the story never came to life onscreen, a few of the treatment’s basic plot elements would later be used in her novel The Fountainhead.¹³ The treatment also had a major (albeit indirect) impact on Rand’s personal life. While she was conducting research for the story, Rand crossed paths at a local library with an actor she’d met months earlier on a film set. His name was Frank O’Connor. That moment sparked the beginning of a love story that would last over fifty years.

They married in 1929, and throughout this early period, Ayn and Frank worked odd jobs in Depression-era America. Rand got a job as a studio wardrobe employee as well as a reader (searching for books that would be good candidates for film adaptations) at RKO, MGM, and Paramount.¹⁴ In 1932, she sold her screenplay “Red Pawn” to Universal Studios for $1,500.¹⁵ Although the movie was never made, Rand sent a copy of the film’s synopsis to DeMille with a letter of gratitude:

I appreciated your kindness and interest in me at a time when – if you remember – I was a very inexperienced, very bewildered and frightened little immigrant from Russia. . . . I am very anxious to show you what I have accomplished, particularly since it is accomplished in accordance with your ideas as to story construction and situations. . . . It is, in a way, the best manner I know of to thank you for your help to me many years ago.¹⁶  

Decades later, Rand credited her time learning under DeMille as essential toward her development as a fiction writer, particularly in writing engaging plots.¹⁷

The Fountainhead : Novel and Film

Building upon her earlier work in “The Skyscraper” and her longstanding vision to write a story that “[glorified] the American skyscraper as a symbol of achievement,” Ayn Rand published The Fountainhead in 1943, her first bestselling novel.¹⁸ The work brought the goal of her early writing to fruition: the presentation of her ideal man. Five months after publication, Warner Brothers purchased the novel’s film rights for $50,000 (nearly a million dollars in today’s money) and Rand was contracted to write the screenplay.¹⁹

The following year, Rand signed a contract to write screenplays for producer Hal Wallis.²⁰ Their collaboration yielded multiple scripts, including two produced films, You Came Along and Love Letters, the latter being nominated for four Academy Awards. One unproduced project was Top Secret, a film about the making of the atomic bomb.

The film adaptation of The Fountainhead, released in 1949, marked both a personal milestone and a turning point in Rand’s career, one that ultimately closed the door on her Hollywood ambitions. She was satisfied that the screenplay preserved her words and helped return the novel to the bestseller list, and she believed that those involved in the film were (for the most part) earnest, well-intentioned professionals. But she disliked the finished product, which she thought failed to bring her stylized vision to life.²¹ The experience of seeing the film was the moment she gave up Hollywood.

Although Ayn Rand’s experience on The Fountainhead film adaptation confirmed that Hollywood could not realize her artistic vision, it did give her the chance to collaborate with Gary Cooper, one of her favorite actors since she first saw him on the silver screen in 1928.²² From the time of the film’s announcement, Gary Cooper was picked to play the starring role of Howard Roark, a decision that Rand approved of.²³ Though she would later reflect that Cooper hadn’t fully grasped the character’s philosophical depth, Rand nonetheless admired his earnestness and professionalism.²⁴ For her, his presence in the film likely represented the realization of a long-held artistic ideal made real, however imperfectly.

The Fountainhead formally marked the end of Ayn Rand’s Hollywood career, but she would later work extensively on screenplay and teleplay adaptations for her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged. The Ayn Rand Archives houses one such teleplay that Rand wrote, with the first page of the second episode dated January 1, 1982, about two months prior to her death.²⁵

What Movies Meant to Ayn Rand

Rand’s time working on The Fountainhead also gave her a personal and poetic reward that brought her full circle. While The Fountainhead was being filmed, Rand had a chance to meet Mia May, one of her favorite actresses of 1920s cinema, and a living symbol of the kind of beauty and spirit that had first inspired her as a girl watching silent films in Soviet Russia.²⁶

After the meeting, Rand received postcards from May featuring shots of the actress from the 1920s. Rand’s ensuing letter serves as a profound testament to her lifetime appreciation of film:

I have no way to explain how much [your pictures] mean to me. It is my youth brought back — or, rather, a reward for the very difficult years of my youth, when the name ‘Mia May’ and the things you represented were the symbol of the only beauty and relief I had while being imprisoned in hell. You will always remain a symbol of beauty to me. I have had a very hard struggle to reach the things I wanted. That I should meet you in person, when I have finally broken my way into pictures, is like a special reward to me, something very personal and precious — because the kind of pictures I want to write are in the style and spirit of the pictures you made. It is a spirit which does not exist in the world any longer — and part of my battle is to bring it back.²⁷

The arc of Rand’s career from a young movie-goer in Soviet Russia to a screenwriter in Hollywood reflects the lasting power of cinema in her life — to inspire, to liberate, and to shape a moral vision of existence “as it could be and ought to be.”

1. Ayn Rand, Biographical Interview #6 by Barbara Branden and Nathaniel Branden, January 2, 1961, transcript p. 203–204 (Ayn Rand Archives), Rand’s “first great art passion” were Viennese operettas, a style of musical theater known for its benevolent themes. Rand described the genre as “a shot in the arm, practically narcotic. Only it wasn’t narcotic in the sense of escape, because it was the one positive fuel that I could have. My sense of life was kept going on that. A life-saving transfusion,” and that “It really saved my life.” Rand claimed that films later “supplanted the operettas in my life,” providing “a much more specific, not merely symbolic view of life abroad.”
2. Biographical Interview #6, p. 207.
3. Biographical Interview #6, p. 207.
4. Biographical Interview #3, December 1960, 109–110.
5. Biographical Interview #6, p. 207.
6. Biographical Interview #6, p. 207.
7. Biographical Interview #7, January 15, 1961, p. 240–41.
8. Biographical Interview #7, 239–40.
9. State Technicum of Film Arts Question List, filled out by Ayn Rand, September 9, 1924, Central State Archives of Literature and Art, St. Petersburg, Russia; Letter dated April 11, 1926, from Eleonora Drobysheva to Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Archives, 062_024_001; Letter dated August 24, 1926, from Eleonora Drobysheva to Ayn Rand, Ayn Rand Archives, 063_084_001; Russian Writings on Hollywood, ed. Michael S. Berliner (Irvine, CA: Ayn Rand Institute Press, 1999), 10.
10. Letter dated August 28, 1926, from Ayn Rand to Lyolya Bekkerman, Ayn Rand Archives, 166_08x_001.
11. DeMille-era notebooks (ca. 1926–1927), Ayn Rand Archives, 166_031_001 and 166_03B_001. Rand would later re-use the last name “Gonda” for her heroine in the 1934 novella Ideal, and the name “Howard” for the lead character and hero of The Fountainhead.
12. Biographical interview #17, April 19, 1961, p. 590; Pamphlet dated 1945, “A Letter from Ayn Rand to Readers of The Fountainhead,” Ayn Rand Archives, 083_24B_005.
13. For more on the connection between this early film treatment and The Fountainhead, see this article, “Ayn Rand and The Skyscraper.”
14. Biographical Interview #5, December 30, 1960, p. 171.
15. Biographical Interview #5, p. 165.
16. Letter dated July 3, 1934, from Ayn Rand to Cecil B. DeMille, Ayn Rand Archives, 100_12C_015_001.
17. Ayn Rand, The Art of Fiction, ed. Tore Boeckmann (New York, NY: Plume, 2000), 57.
18. Biographical Interview #11, February 15, 1961, p. 353–54.
19. The Hollywood Reporter, October 14, 1943, “Warners Pays 50 G’s for ‘Fountainhead,’” Ayn Rand Archives, 092_11A_004; Biographical Interview #12, February 22, 1961, p. 408–409.
20. Bill Blowitz, press release, Spot News (Paramount Pictures), June 27, 1944, Ayn Rand Archives, (007_13x_004); Biographical Interview #5, p. 176.
21. Biographical Interview #12, p. 444–45.
22. According to Rand’s movie diary, the first Gary Cooper film that she saw was the 1927 silent Western Nevada, directed by John Waters. Rand recorded seeing five more of Cooper’s films in 1928; Ayn Rand, movie diary notebook, 1922–1929, Ayn Rand Archives, 168_05x_001.
23. Biographical Interview #12, p. 426, 431.
24. Biographical Interview #12, p. 433.
25. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged teleplay manuscript 1981–1982, Ayn Rand Archives, 171_01x_001.
26. Rand, movie diary notebook.
27. Letter dated October 11, 1948, from Ayn Rand to Mia May, Ayn Rand Archives, 143_MCx_007.