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The One with the Fountainhead

The Fountainhead may have been good enough in the 60’s, but we’re in the Information Age now

Abstract

A parody of Ayn Rand’s novel, The Fountainhead, modelled around a two part episode of the Television sitcom show Friends. Somewhat unhappy with the original book, the six friends in the show role-play their own version of The Fountainhead, while trying to improve upon it. Will they succeed?

What was the photo of the Parthenon replaced with?
Why was Chandler happy to play Peter Keating?
Which element is featured in every second-rate romantic novel?
Which piece of advice did Toohey give Dominique Francon?
Why did cruising with Gail Wynand turn out to be a bad idea?
And who were the bad guys in the story?

Read the screenplays to find out.

Read Online or Download (Formats)

Table of Contents

Sources

Suitability

This work was enjoyed by people who were only familiar with either the Fountainhead or the Friends T.V. show.

Thanks

  • Omer Zak (NOTE: the site is based on a very old version of Drupal (5.0), and as such may be unsafe. Make sure JavaScript/etc. are disabled.)

    Omer gave a positive review of an early draft of the screenplays, and gave some useful commentary.

  • Gwen (Chen) Shapira - stumbled across the screenplay after visiting my home site as it was back then, and after mentioning it to her in a real-life conversation, she noted that it was “one of the most horrid things I have read lately”, to which I replied, “Yes, well, I wrote it.”.

    As it turns out, she had not read either The Fountainhead or watched Friends at the time, and then went on to read all of Ayn Rand’s books.

Other Parodies of Ayn Rand’s Works

Other Sources of Inspiration

  • The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Star Trek - The Next Generation - an old Internet cross of the The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek - The Next Generation. Incredibly funny, and inspired me to cross Friends and The Fountainhead in a similar fashion.
  • The Fountainhead - the actual novel by Ayn Rand, which I have read, and enjoyed immensely and it is probably my favourite “Adult-oriented book”. I have heard mixed opinions of it from other people who have read it, but even people who hated the book appear to enjoy my parody.

Licensing

Well, since this work is a parody of The Fountainhead (written by Ayn Rand and now still kept by the Ayn Rand estate), and contains characters from there, I am theoretically protected by the Copyright’s “right of parody” as part of the ”Fair Use” provision. There are other parodies of Ayn Rand works online and possibly offline, and no one was sued yet.

However, I have used characters and concepts from the T.V. show Friends, and while some parts of my work parody the show in some respect, I consider it as an ordinary fan-fiction work of Friends, rather than as a parody of it. As a result, I consider it a derivative work of Friends, which, like it or not and according to the contemporary Copyright Law, may mean it is encumbered by the claims of its copyright holders. Again, I’ve seen other fan fiction of Friends around the Net.

All the text in “The One with the Fountainhead” is original, and as far as I’m concerned can be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence Unported (CC-by-sa), either version 3.0, or at your option any later version, but like I said, the situation is more complicated than that.

I’m putting it here on this site in hope that it will amuse or inspire people, and also because it may encourage people to read the Fountainhead, or watch some episodes of Friends — both of which I can highly recommend. I’m not charging people any money to download, build, or view the works, but I have some web commercials which I’m making some small money from, and which I hope are acceptable to the copyright holders. Please don’t sue me.

Coverage

/r/Objectivism

Objectivism Online Forums

See Also

Credits

Friends Fountain Image

The Friends’ fountain image that serves as the logo was taken from the “Friends Opening (HD)” video-clip on YouTube at approximate time 0m40s.

One can find the intermediate images in a GitHub repository.