Who is John Galt?

Brad Pitt, according to Variety. Or at any rate he's reportedly being considered for the role.

It will be entertaining to watch the Rand cultists minutely parse the movie for its faithfulness to the Objectivist gospel. Just as it will be entertaining to see if the producers retain Rand's nearly fetishistic portrayal of cigarette-smoking as a symbol of capitalism. I'm not sure how hard I want to think about how accurately it might portray the railroad industry.

I also wonder how on earth anyone expects to fit anything like the plot of Rand's doorstopper-sized tome into less than, say, a two week miniseries. A key question: will the movie contain the entire text of Galt's 90-page broadcast sermon near the end of the book?

Previous filmic versions of Rand books (i.e., The Fountainhead) have been less than satisfactory, largely (in my view) because the material had to be so compressed and rushed that it sounded like a rapid-fire series of political soundbytes.