The 2000s reality competition show The Apprentice made Donald Trump into even more of a household name and propped up the fiction that Trump was a great businessman, rather than simply a grifter and a tax cheat. And there's an argument to be made that the image of him peddled by the show helped him win the presidency in 2016. Now, as Trump runs for president a third consecutive time, Americans might see a much different take on the TV show in the form of a biopic that's being marketed as a "dark and chilling origin story."
The trailer for The Apprentice was released on Tuesday and the movie hits theaters on October 11, a little more than three weeks before Election Day—and it almost didn't happen.
The film depicts Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) as being mentored by fixer Roy Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong), the cutthroat former lawyer for nationalist Sen. Joe McCarthy and, later, for mob bosses. Trump then abandons Cohn after he develops AIDS. The Hollywood Reporter said the movie "contains several disturbing and profoundly unflattering scenes, including a sequence where he rapes his first wife Ivana, gets liposuction and surgery for his bald spot, becomes addicted to diet pills and betrays the trust of many of those closest to him." (Ivana made that allegation in a 1990 divorce deposition, but later recanted. Maria Bakalova plays her in the movie.)
After the film debuted at Cannes, the Washington Post reported that lawyers for the Trump campaign sent a cease and desist letter to director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman, claiming the movie constituted defamation and foreign election interference. The campaign also pledged that they would sue those involved.
At that time, the movie didn't have a U.S. distributor, in part because one of its investors was mad about how it portrayed the former president. Variety reported that Trump supporter and billionaire former Washington Commanders owner Dan Snyder had invested in the film via a production company called Kinematics because he reportedly thought it would be a flattering portrayal of Trump. But Snyder became furious after seeing a cut of the movie in February. Kinematics couldn't kill the movie because it doesn't own the copyright, but it did have a say in sales negotiations—emphasis on the past tense.
In late August, THR said that a producer bought out Kinematics' stake in the film and Briarcliff Entertainment announced that it had acquired the movie for a U.S. release and would mount an awards campaign. And, here we are.
https://twitter.com/ApprenticeMov/status/1833490663574229242
It's not clear if the movie will affect any voters in November, but it will make Trump very mad, and that's a gift of its own.
