No movie on the fall calendar has stoked as much prerelease controversy as “The Apprentice,” an R-rated dramatization of the early years of Donald Trump that hits theaters on Friday, 25 days before the presidential election.
Nearly every major Hollywood distributor and streaming service refused to touch “The Apprentice” after it premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Trump’s re-election campaign has excoriated the project, calling it “pure malicious defamation” and “garbage,” and sent the producers a cease-and-desist letter.
But director Ali Abbasi insists he did not set out to make a political “hit job” about the former president.
In an interview, Abbasi said he believes “The Apprentice” presents the Republican nominee “not as a caricature or a crooked politician or a hero or whatever you might think, but as a human being.” He views the movie as a quintessentially American character study.
“It fits very well with my outsider perspective,” said Abbasi, 43, who was born in Tehran and lives in Copenhagen. “I can look at this story from an anthropological, dramatic point of view instead of a decidedly political point of view.”
“The Apprentice” charts a young Trump’s ascent to the top of the New York City real estate industry under the mentorship of ruthless McCarthy-era attorney and fixer Roy Cohn, who schools his pupil in the Machiavellian dark arts of power politics. By the finale, Trump has leveraged himself into a self-styled master of Manhattan.
Vanity Fair journalist Gabriel Sherman, who wrote the screenplay, draws a direct line between Cohn’s bare-knuckle tactics and Trump’s modern-day political persona. Cohn (Jeremy Strong) instructs Trump (Sebastian Stan) to relentlessly attack, “deny everything” and “never admit defeat.”
Abbasi and Sherman attempt to pull back the curtain on their characters’ private lives, too. They depict Trump’s fraught relationship with his demanding father and his grief after the death of his alcoholic older brother Fred, as well as Cohn’s private turmoil as he dies of AIDS-related complications in 1986. (Cohn denied he was HIV-positive.)
Yet the film, which NBC News saw ahead of its theatrical release, paints an often scathing portrait. In one graphic scene, the dramatized Trump character sexually assaults his first wife, Ivana Trump (played by Maria Bakalova), after a bitter argument.
Ivana Trump, in her 1990 divorce deposition, alleged her husband raped her. He denied the allegation. She later said she was not speaking literally but felt she had been violated by her ex-husband. She died in 2022.
In another notable sequence, Trump’s character goes under the knife for scalp reduction surgery and a liposuction procedure. Ivana Trump said under oath that Trump had scalp reduction surgery in 1989. Trump denied the plastic surgery in the 1993 biography “Lost Tycoon.”
The film also chronicles Cohn’s efforts to defend the Trump family’s real estate company against a federal housing discrimination lawsuit in the early 1970s and the Trump character’s marital infidelities.
In a statement, Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung blasted “The Apprentice” as “pure fiction” and “election interference by Hollywood elites right before November.”
“This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire,” Cheung said.
Tom Ortenberg, the veteran film executive whose company, Briarcliff Entertainment, acquired “The Apprentice” for theatrical release after most Hollywood distributors balked, takes a decidedly different view of the movie’s value in the marketplace.
“The fact that nobody else was willing to distribute ‘The Apprentice’ created a moral imperative for me to step up and do it,” Ortenberg said in an interview. “If not me, then who? Unfortunately, the major studios collectively ran away from ‘The Apprentice’ like their hair was on fire for fear of reprisal.”
Ortenberg has carved out a niche as a distributor of incendiary projects, including Kevin Smith’s “Dogma,” an irreverent satire that was denounced by the Catholic League; Bill Maher’s “Religulous,” a takedown of organized religion; and Oliver Stone’s “W.,” a darkly comedic biopic of former President George W. Bush.
The bigger point we’re trying to make in the movie is that political theater has been going on for a long time in this country.
-Ali Abbasi, director
Briarcliff, which picked up “The Apprentice” in August, previously came to the rescue of “The Dissident,” a documentary about the murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbul in 2018. “The Dissident” struggled to secure distribution for eight months before Ortenberg stepped in.
“I’d say, as opposed to some who like to fashion themselves as free speech absolutists, I actually try to be one,” Ortenberg said. “All movies deserve a chance to be seen. It’s not my place to tell people what they should or shouldn’t see … but it is my place to make motion pictures available.”
Briarcliff has a relatively small marketing footprint compared to other independent labels such as A24 and Neon. In September, producers behind “The Apprentice” launched a Kickstarter to raise money for a longer theatrical release.
The film is buzzy, but it is not expected to be a big commercial hit. It’s arriving in limited release and facing box office competition that includes “Joker: Folie à Deux,” “Terrifier 3,” “The Wild Robot” and “Beetlejuice Beetlejuice.” Box office analysts estimate that “The Apprentice” will launch with $1 million to $3 million from 1,740 theaters in its opening weekend, according to Variety.
Abbasi said he doubts his film will be much of an “October surprise” in the final sprint to Election Day.
“I wish I was that person because that would invest me with a lot of power,” Abbasi joked.
But he said he hopes voters who are considering the “character” of the two major candidates will engage with his movie’s themes.
“You might find some of these character questions you have about Trump answered,” Abbasi said. “The bigger point we’re trying to make in the movie is that political theater has been going on for a long time in this country.”
He thinks “The Apprentice” has “the ability to genuinely surprise people” — including Trump, who he hopes buys a ticket.
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