Leonard Peikoff: In His Own Words

I stumbled upon this DVD through Amazon's suggestion list. I love Ayn Rand but I had luke warm affection for Dr. Peikoff based on a brief exchange of comments I had with him during a class of his. He is a brilliant man but I don't like his speaking style so I was unsure if hearing his "own words" would be worth my time and money. For the price of a movie ticket I thought it was worth a try. I am glad I did.

It is an approximately 1 hour interview with Dr. Peikoff. The interviewer is never heard speaking, but based on Dr. Peikoff's responses you can tell he is being asked to reminisce about his life beginning from his childhood. He is well spoken and succinct. The majority of the DVD is focused on Dr. Peikoff's life after meeting Ayn Rand. Interview footage is interspersed with photographs. The DVD concludes with snips from his life after she died.

I found a couple things annoying. At times, the director overlays mood music that is distracting, Dr. Peikoff's comments are so poignant no music is necessary. Toward the end of the DVD there are some silly shots of Dr. Peikoff working out (the camera literally focuses in on his bicep?!?!) and spending time with his wife that seem awkwardly staged. To break up the DVD the interview the director includes breaks where Dr.Peikoff is seen writing a word or two that is than superimposed on the screen, it seems silly.

I think the DVD could of been longer. It is obvious Dr. Peikoff has a lot of great stories to share, I would of liked to hear more of them. I would of liked the director to focus more on the evolution of Objectivism and the Ayn Rand Institute.

Overall, my impression of DVD is that it is great look into Dr. Peikoff's life and you will hear stories told about Ayn Rand that you would not hear anywhere else. I have a new found respect for his work and life.
If you are a fan of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff or interested in Objectivism this is a great buy!

This is a masterful documentary. I am glad I purchased it here, especially since it's at least 700% more on the ARI eStore. This documentary is a great value to me. Thank you Dr. Leonard Peikoff for your work.

It captures Dr. Peikoff's personality very well. As a former student of his, someone who admires him, and certainly who admires Ayn Rand, I cherish this DVD and I highly recommend it.

If you've ever wanted to know everything there is to know about Leonard Peikoff, PhD., then look no further than this biographical documentary film by Northern River Productions, a here-today, gone-tomorrow outfit you can't find on IMDB or by googling. Hmmm. Could this hagiography be a "vanity" production? I really can't tell, but here's a clue: If you enter the name of the cinematographer, Scott Hylton, you won't find this biopic among his credits on IMDB -- but you *will* find "Hot Body Competition: Beverly Hills Naked Cheerleader Competion" and (from the same year as this flick, 2004) "Hot Body Quick Strips: Blondes Tease, Brunettes Please." Odd, when a cameraman doesn't list a PG-rated documentary film, but he *does* list the softcore porn movies he's done. Kinda embarrassing, wouldn't you say?

Ah, but I digress. Back to our subject, Dr. Leonard Peikoff. I didn't know that his life was a heroic one. Apparently, though, he *has* been leading a heroic life. How do I know? It says so on the liner notes on the back of the box.

Thank God! I couldn't wait to open up this video to find out what acts of heroism the good professor has hidden from public view for the 70-some-odd years of his life. I just finished watching another documentary about another American hero, Navy pilot Dieter Dengler, who planned and executed a daring escape from a Laotian POW camp during the Vietnam War. The picture was called "Little Dieter Needs to Fly," and was directed by Werner Herzog. In it, Dengler exclaims when Herzog asks whether he was a hero, "I'm not a hero, only dead people are heroes." Modesty aside, Dengler truly *was* a hero, so I'm really getting jazzed about watching this Peikoff disc, in which the subject tells the whole world he's a hero (or, at least the keepcase does). I'm wondering: What did Lenny Peikoff do? Throw himself on a grenade to save his platoon? Take out a column of Nazi tanks with nothing but an M1 and a bazooka? Perhaps he used his flamethrower to bar-b-que some Viet Cong, to save his own battalion.

So, with bated breath, I put Leonardpalooza in my DVD player, to find out what I've been dying to know.

The first thing I learn is that Lenny's father, a physician, wanted his boy to follow in his footsteps. In fact, the "erratic" old guy (who looked a lot like Ernst Lubitsch) would hit and knock around his son one minute, and then hug him the next (sort of like Gregory Peck does, with another insufferable child, in "The Omen"). Unfortunately, these shots of Leonard looking back on his life are intercut with other shots about what a mama's boy he was, dutifully pleasing the old lady with Chopin Mazurkas. He obviously warmed to Mama's bosom, which brings us to Act II.

His father, having passed on, leaves the family business -- an old Motel off the main highway -- to his wife. Meanwhile, one night, Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) pulls into the parking lot during a thunderstorm, and sensitive young Leonard makes her a sandwich in the family parlor. "An office would just be too...officious," he tells Marion, who's about to take a shower and retire for the night.

Oh, wait a minute! I keep getting my movies mixed up! It's probably because Leonard Peikoff, circa 1955, keeps appearing in the movie in old stills, and he bears a striking resemblance to Anthony Perkins. Actually, though, that's not quite true. Our hero Lenny bears more of a striking resemblance to Anthony Perkins, *if* he'd done a screen test in which he'd have mimicked Bug Bunny playing Mr. Hyde (as in Jekyll and Hyde). There's one black-and-white glossy after another of Leonard smiling with his teeth bared and clenched (you can almost count them all) and his wide-opened eyes, big as fried eggs. You can almost see the pinwheels whirling round and round in his pupils!

Actually, Act II is about the Prodigal Leonard. He doesn't want to operate in surgeon Dad's shadow (he'd probably get shadow boxed into a corner), and he wants to cut the apron strings to Mama, but he finds a surrogate mother in novelist/philosopher Ayn Rand. She, too, had eyes bigger than the Big Bad Wolf playing Grandma. There are also plenty of photographs of her with Peikoff: Put the two of them together, and it looks like a Graves Disease convention.

In this act is my favorite line about his first meeting with Ayn Rand. Not only did meeting the iconoclastic novelist change his whole outlook on life, but suddenly, Leonard had to divide his life into "pre" and "post" meeting of Ayn Rand. Not only did she change his outlook on the moral versus the practical, but -- and I'm not making this up -- he even felt he couldn't *wash his hands in the men's room* the same way again, either. Now, there are very few people I can imagine that would inspire me to think differently about such a prosaic task (Adrian Monk, Pontius Pilate, and Adolph Eichmann come to mind), but from what I understand, Rand had this kind of spellbinding influence on people, so who am I to judge?

Having found a mother figure, he more-or-less latches onto her with a tenacity others in her inner circle couldn't muster: By the time she died, the "Atlas Shrugged" author had no one left around her she could trust. No-one at all in the world, except her only dear son, Leonard.

When nobody's looking, Leonard removes Ayn's corpse from the casket and mummifies it, using his knowledge of taxidermy. Oops, for some reason, I keep confusing this with another movie. Never mind. No, what happens next is Act III, in which our hero proudly proclaims that -- after spending about 50-plus years learning, teaching and espousing his mentor/mama's philosophy -- he wants nothing more than to go down in history than as a footnote to dear old Ayn. Which isn't as bad as it sounds, since she treated everyone else in her entourage like a foot*stool*.

Pretty heroic stuff, indeed. Act III is about what a swell guy Lenny is. Aside from the overtones of the Oedipus myth in the first two-thirds, Act III is all about how Leonard has become his own man. Of course, having been left Ayn's entire fortune, and being named her "intellectual heir" (Nathaniel Branden had hitherto been Rand's intellectual heir, until he got caught giving one of his pillars of self-esteem to a younger, less worthy vixen than his aging, wrinkled, paramour, Mrs. Ayn Rand O'Connor), the dreadful task of pulling himself up by his bootstraps was made a *lot* easier.

Although it largely glosses over how Leonard became the Yoko Ono of the Objectivist movement, constantly reissuing and retreading every last scrap of Ayn's writings (e.g. "The Ayn Rand Shopping Lists, 1936-1982," Michael Berliner, ed., with additional essays by Peikoff and Peter Schwartz), the movie *does* show how Leonard got the beautiful house of his dreams (to the strains of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto), a lovely daughter (good thing her dad, owner of the website "Abortion Is ProLife," decided not to go with the coathanger on that one), a trophy wife (well, for this not-exactly-an-oil-painting kinda guy, Rosie O'Donnell would be a trophy wife, but in fairness, Amy is quite better looking), and a convertible BMW roadster.

There are some rip-roaringly hilarious moments in this movie: I supose that John Little (who "conceived, produced, and directed" this monumental epic) wanted to look visually sophisticated with the constant insertions of titles, being handwritten in real-time by Leonard's hand (get it? "In his own words"). But, in actual execution, they come out more like an instructional video on how to write in cursive, for third-graders.

Another great scene shows the self-admittedly total non-jock doing circuit weight training on his back, curling 10-pound dumbbells. Unfortunately, even after all that pumping iron, Leonard still looks like the poor schmuck who got sand kicked in his face in those Charles Atlas "dynamic tension" comic book ads.

But, my favorite is at the very end, a real Hollywood shot: Leonard and Amy kiss, like 13 year-olds on a first date. The next shot is of a personalized California license plate, bearing the letters AYNRAND. Suddenly, the license plate rolls away from the camera, revealing Lenny and Amy riding off into the sunset in his BMW sports coupe (purchased with proceeds from the Estate of Ayn Rand). What beautiful circularity!

I never did find out about anything heroic Leonard ever did, except going to NYU on his father's dime to play hooky and live off the philosophical crumbs Ayn Rand threw him.

But, I did learn this: That if you attach yourself to someone with money and power long enough, you too can realize the American Dream of inheriting all their money and living like a philosopher king into your waning years in Orange County.

Beats drowning girls' cars in the swamp behind your motel, just to pocket a lousy $40,000, that's for sure!

"I'm ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille!"