IIn 1973, Donald Trump was a hungry, confused real estate heir from Queens looking for respectability in New York. He’s not particularly smart, he’s not particularly charming and he doesn’t have a solid plan to fight A.J Federal lawsuit Because the family business discriminated against black tenants, the young Trump was struggling to realize his dream of opening a luxury hotel near Grand Central. That is, until he met Roy Cohn, the attorney general for Senator Joseph McCarthy turned close friend of Richard Nixon and a political reformer, at a swanky New York club.
This is the opening scene of The Apprentice, a new film released this month after a beleaguered trip to theaters. Written by Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair’s longtime Trump historian, and directed by Iranian-Danish director Ali Abbasi, the film charts the rise of a young Trump in New York society in the 1970s and 1980s through Cohn’s brazen tactics, as the lawyer’s health weakens due to HIV. Human immunity. /AIDS. The question haunting the film, which stars a not-so-handsome Sebastian Stan as Trump and Succession’s Jeremy Strong as Cohn, was: Would anyone want to see a Trump movie? After the film entered a long period of distribution uncertainty following some positive reviews at the Cannes Film Festival in May – He was Anyone be able to watch it?
“I’m okay with people attacking us, praising us, whatever,” said Abbasi, who previously directed the serial killer thriller Holy Spider. “What doesn’t sit well with me, and what really hurts me, is the boycott or censorship that we actually experienced.”
Even with two main stars, the indie film has had a tortured road to theaters. Following the film’s premiere at the festival, Trump’s camp issued a cease-and-desist letter — which was not surprising, given the former president’s litigation and the film’s material. “The Apprentice,” among other things, depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana (Maria Bakalova) — a fictionalized account of the alleged 1989 attack — and performing liposuction. Dan Snyder, the billionaire Trump supporter involved in Kinematics, the company that contributed to the film, has reportedly sought to block its release. Many studios and streamers may have been spooked by the legal threats. At the eleventh hour, Briarcliff Entertainment swooped in with Local distribution plan Prizes are paid, although the filmmakers still ask for $100,000 at a time Kickstarter campaign (It’s called “Release the Apprentice”).
According to Abbasi, who is based in Copenhagen, the distribution issue was less the thrilling story of a right-wing billionaire and more the story of an unrepentant liar getting his way than simple corporate logic: “Whatever makes money makes money, and whatever doesn’t make money doesn’t.” Interesting.” The calculation is that even though people will watch the movie, it might turn off more Maga subscribers or customers. “For all the liberal class in Hollywood — and I’m not saying they’re lying or anything,” Abbasi said. “But I don’t think they’re ready to get into politics in any big, meaningful way.”
From the beginning, the film was a tough sell. “Trumpland thinks we’re doing something good against Trump, but when we were making the movie, all our liberal friends in Hollywood thought we were giving him too much oxygen,” Abbasi said. “We had people commenting on us when we were meeting because we didn’t hate Trump enough.”
To be clear, the film—which Sherman first conceived and wrote in 2017—long before Cohn’s rules of “attack, attack, attack,” “admit anything, deny everything,” and “never admit defeat.” Manifested in efforts to steal an American presidential office. Elections – It’s not easy for Trump. It’s a drama based on the historical record, which is devastating as you see it. (For people outside of the MAGA world, this is too bad.) But she is trying to do what may be impossible in America now: talk about Trump without any political baggage, putting aside feelings about the man in the name of truth. Art based. “This book was not written to influence people’s minds,” Sherman said. “It is written as art and what people take from it is their own choice.
He added: “It is a universal story about the superiority of the apprentice over his master.” “I hope people can experience it on its own terms, and not bring all their political baggage to it.”
Nothing in The Apprentice is unknown to anyone who has paid attention to Trump outside of his recent political career. The film depicts his icy, disappointing relationship with his father (Martin Donovan); His most affectionate relationship is with his alcoholic older brother, Fred (Charlie Carrick), who died in 1981; his bumbling flirtation with Ivana; He turned a blind eye to Cohen’s homosexuality and his bumbling attempts to gain respect. Perhaps most damning of all, his cheating, his workarounds, and his outright lies — to the Housing Board, to the press — worked because they were aligned with the self-interests of others, the ways in which New York’s elites legitimized the blowhard. (A New York Times profile comparing Trump to Robert Redford, which his mother Mary read aloud, was taken directly from an actual article that helped build Trump’s reputation as a legitimate New York businessman.)
“There is a system, there is a social Darwinism inherent in American society, that did not come with Trump and will not end with Trump,” said Abbasi, who stresses that The Apprentice “is not a Trump movie.” It is about the transformation of Donald Trump as we know him today, over this specific time. This is a very specific relationship.
Over the course of the film, Trump, as played by Stan in as unadulterated a way as anyone could do, becomes more and more like the character he is known for today — larger, more talkative, and operating with increasingly little sense of consequence. The most disturbing scene to watch – and the one that made headlines at Cannes – is the scene in which he rapes Ivana in the late 1980s.
“I felt like the movie had to address that side of his character — it would be a vindication of the movie if we didn’t acknowledge it in some way,” Sherman said, noting that Trump has at least been credibly accused of sexual assault. Twelve women, and a New York jury convicted him of assaulting former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll. The episode in question derives from a divorce certificate that Ivana filed, behind closed doors and under oath, in 1990. (Ivana, who died in 2022, later made contradictory statements, although Sherman suggested that these were under pressure from a lawyer.) Trump and, ultimately, the campaign team.) .) “I wanted to feel like, ‘OK, this guy is our president and he has a history of sexual assault — let’s look at it, let’s make people see the truth of this,’” he said.
It’s one of many difficult scenes to digest, though it has served to intellectualize Trump’s well-documented misconduct and has naturally drawn Republican ire. Former Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has publicly spoken out He called for a boycott From the movie “Against Trump”. (Abbasi said of Huckabee and his ilk: “They only invoke the First Amendment when it suits them, and they only have free speech when it comes to fascism.”)
Regardless of Trump’s friends, The Apprentice still faces an uphill battle for viewers. ABC and CBS have it Reject air splashes Regarding the film during campaign debates, Briarcliff attributed the decision to “shame and cowardice.” Then there’s the hurdle of getting viewers to watch a two-hour movie about a man whose opinion most Americans hold, and half of viewers would rather see less of. “People have a lot of preconceived notions about this movie,” Sherman admitted, “but if they allow themselves to sit in the cinema and be surprised, I think they’ll have a really exciting time.”
Abbasi and Sherman bring many things to The Apprentice: a New York film about a bygone, formative era. The story of a corrupt system. The classic student becomes epic teacher. Origin story. But it is first and foremost a dramatic portrait of Donald Trump, the person. Trump “is not an alien, he is not from another planet. “He’s a human being,” Sherman said. “We have to look at these people, even if we disagree with them, so maybe the next time another Trump comes along, we’ll recognize them as such.”
Ultimately, the film, like any film, is up to interpretation. “I think the audience is really smart,” Abbasi said. “They can make up their minds if they come and give this a chance.”
. “Professional creator. Lifelong thinker. Reader. Beer buff. Troublemaker. Evil problem solver.”