The Excitement is Building

No iconoclastic architect worth his salt is going to take that kind of crap from a floozy Number Two architecture critic on some dip-shit Gotham tabloid, so that night Coop goes back to her house and non-pneumatically drills her. The lady is impressed. This looks like the start of a wonderful relationship. But then Coop returns home to find a letter offering him a commission to build a fancy skyscraper. The author of the letter is a self-made man who doesn't care about Coop's reputation as a maverick, an iconoclast, and an Ayn Rand character. So Coop, back in the saddle again, vanishes without a trace. This annoys Neal, who can't contact him because she never asked for his name, and thus has no idea that he is really the gifted, maverick, iconoclastic architect Howard Roark. Miffed, she temporarily puts down her riding crop and goes back to work at the Banner. Here she learns that the paper's founder, Raymond Massey, who is madly in love with her, needs to mount a campaign to boost dwindling circulation. Safer streets? Higher wages? More cops? No, Massey eschews these tried-and-true rabble-rousing techniques and instead decides to launch a vicious smear campaign against the building that Coop has designed. Thai's right, a newspaper in New York in the 1920s, read by millions of apple vendors, factory workers, bookies and pimps, is going to boost circulation by mounting a public relations campaign against the architectural indignities being visited upon the public by an iconoclastic architect played by Gary Cooper.

I told you this movie was weird.

Dominique knows that Roark--whom she does not yet realize is Mr. Jack Hammer--has designed a magnificent building. So she goes to her boss/suitor Massey and asks him to call off the smear campaign. Massey reminds her that the Banner depends for its revenues on constantly stirring up the Great Unwashed, And does the anti-Coop campaign ever work! Yes, we actually see legions of straphangers in straw hats devouring the newspaper's architecture column and getting incredibly riled up about the building. Thousands of angry letters to the editor pour in. The public is really pissed.

Just when it seems that the movie can't possibly get any weirder, it goes straight off the cliff. The Banner's Number One architecture critic--can you imagine a New York tabloid with two architecture critics? --is an old fart named Ellsworth Toohey, who writes a column called "One Small Voice.'' Toohey, we discover, is secretly a communist who is using his position as an architecture critic on a daily newspaper to foment sedition among the masses.

Now there's a nick that no one had ever tried before.

Dominique can no longer be a part of this hideous charade. She quits her job in protest. Then, unexpectedly, she meets Coop at a party, realizes who he is, and tells him that she loves him, but warns that the masses will destroy him. "They hate you for your integrity," she declares, Dominique begs Coop to forsake architecture and get an ordinary job, perhaps as a riding crop repairman. He politely declines. In a fit of pique, she now agrees to marry Massey, the pig who heads the newspaper who is trying to destroy the man she loves.

The smear campaign is successful and Coop is again out of a job. He responds by going out and building an iconoclastic gas station. The public really likes it. So do the critics. The next thing you know, commissions to design important office buildings start rolling in. In the twinkling of an eye. Coop becomes rich and famous. He has survived the Banner's smear campaign. Ellsworth Toohey has been crushed.

Years pass, though not enough to make Coop look the right age for the part. Approaching senility, Dominique's husband now says that he wants to build a "temple" where he can shut out the rest of the world. So, even though he has tried to destroy Coop, he now hires him to build the house. As things turn out. Coop and Massey have a lot in common: They're both self-made men, they're both iconoclasts, and they both like women with riding crops named Dominique.

Coop, Massey and Dominique now become bosom buddies, picnicking together, going on exotic yacht cruises--the whole nine yards. But just when things are going swimmingly, an old college chum who has treated Coop like shit for the past 20 years drops by his office and begs him to design an imposing, architecturally appealing housing project and let him pass it off as his own work. Coop will do all the work designing it, and the other guy will get all the money and glory. Hey, what are friends for?

Perfectly cast as a man who would leap at an opportunity like this, Coop agrees to design the housing project, as long as his design will be faithfully executed down to the very tiniest detail. While he's away, his friend stabs him in the back by changing the housing project's design and throwing in a bunch of horrid frills, Coop conies back from his vacation and dynamites the building. Depressed by his latest outburst of maverick iconoclasm, Dominique tries to sever an artery with some broken glass. She botches the job. And then she wonders why she's only architecture critic Number Two.

At this point, Ellsworth Toohey, the People's Architecture Critic, gives a fire-and-brimstone speech demanding that Coop be destroyed for his failure to serve the people. Massey fires Toohey, but the entire City Desk walks out in support. Mobs begin to protest. Kiosks are destroyed. John Q. Public tan only be pushed so far.

In the end, Massey is reduced to putting out an entire newspaper all by himself. Finally, with circulation down to zero, he too caves in and denounces Coop as an enemy of the people, an arsonist and a rotten architect. Things look bad for the Cooperoonie as his trial gets under way. But after he delivers a rousing speech about the rights of the individual, the jury inexplicably acquits him. Massey now closes down his newspaper forever and uses the proceeds from the sale to give his old pal a commission to build the largest skyscraper in New York, which he describes as the last skyscraper before Armageddon. Then he commits suicide.

After The Fountainhead came out in 1949, Hollywood didn't make many more films about maverick, iconoclastic architects for nearly 40 years.

I don't think I have to explain why.

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Joe Queenan wrote about ear torture in the movies for the December '94 Movieline.

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