Hello and welcome to the Fountainhead episode of Slate Money Goes to the Movies.

I'm Felix Salmon of Axios. I'm here with Emily Peck.

Hello. And oh my God, do we have a doozy for you this week. We have Michael Beirut. Michael,

welcome. Who are you? Hello, my name is Michael Beirut. I'm a graphic designer, a partner in the

firm Pentagram, and a recovering IronRand fan.

Iron Rand being one of the great bugaboos of 20th century America. She has huge influence in the

Republican Party to this day. And she wrote this book called The Fountainhead that she then

turned into a script,

which she insisted on being filmed without changing a single word.

This script actually got made into a surprisingly watchable movie starring Gary Cooper.

It's The Fountainhead from 1948, 49, something like that.

That's all coming up on a very fun episode, I have to say,

of Slate Money Goes to the Movies.

So Michael Beirut, where were you, if you remember,

when was it that you first saw The Fountainhead?

The Fountainhead, I can't say where it was when I first saw the movie,

which probably would have been on some late night TV on a UHF channel in Ohio or maybe even

when I first moved to New York in 1980. But the movie is very much and very much a product of

the book upon which it's based.

And that's made clear from the opening frames.

It's basically the opening shot shows like the cover of a book, the pages turn, and that introduces the credits.

And I read the book in the ninth grade in suburban Cleveland, and I just was thunderstruck by it.

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