In the fight to publish “The Apprentice”

On the evening of May 20th, I stood in my tuxedo in the famous Auditorium Louis Lumière in Cannes and listened as more than 2,000 people in black tie gave an eight-minute standing ovation for the film I had written: The apprentice. The film is a Frankenstein Origin story about Donald Trump, played by the Marvel star Sebastian Stan in heavy prostheses and a gold toupee. It follows Trump as he rises to become a real estate agent in Manhattan through the gritty 1970s and flashy 1980s under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer Roy Cohn, played with a menacing air Consequence'S Jeremy Strong. The biggest controversy – spoiler alert – revolved around a scene in which Trump sexually abused his first wife Ivana. (Audible gasps could be heard in the room during playback.) Other scenes showed Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery and taking amphetamine diet pills – details were reported in Harry Hurt IIITrump biography from 1993, Lost tycoon. (Trump denied the claims at the time.)

The premiere made headlines around the world. But during the after-party, overlooking oligarchs' yachts anchored in the harbor, I got news alerts on my phone: Trump announced he was filing a lawsuit to block the film's release. “We will be filing a lawsuit to challenge the patently false claims made by these pseudo-filmmakers,” Trump’s campaign spokesman said Steven Cheung said. He called the film “malicious slander,” “election interference by Hollywood elites” and said it belonged “in a dumpster fire.” I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach as I scrolled through the headlines. But I also felt strangely validated. Life imitated art. Trump's legal threat followed the first rule that Cohn explains in the film: attack, attack, attack.

Two days later, Trump's lawyers sent the film's director Ali Abbasi and my cease and desist declarations. The legal document sounded like an excerpt from an unhinged Trump rally speech: “I call on you to immediately stop and discontinue the distribution and marketing in the United States of the foreign-financed and directed hit piece masquerading as a film It warned Hollywood companies against distributing the film domestically: “Any person in the United States who provides services, including marketing services, advertising, legal services, and public distribution of the film, must comply with the restrictions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act consciousness.”

I hoped the controversy would lead to a deal. Normally, studios and streamers compete fiercely for the hottest titles at Cannes. Two days after our premiere, Netflix reportedly paid about $12 million to acquire it Emilia Perez, the genre-bending transgender drug cartel musical, which won the festival's Jury Prize.

But the specter of Trump's lawsuit had a chilling effect on potential buyers. When I flew home a week later, no Hollywood company had made an offer to release the film in the United States.

In the spring of 2017, millions of Americans were coming to terms with the upside-down reality that Trump had occupied the White House. Some turned to therapy. Others drink alcohol. I did it by writing a script. I've been thinking and writing about Trump for 15 years. My first job as a journalist was covering Manhattan real estate for the weekly newspaper New York Observer. So you can imagine my shock, years later, when I covered Trump's first presidential campaign new York Magazine. Longtime Trump employees like Roger Stone told me Trump would win because he followed his mentor Cohn's three rules: attack, attack, attack. Deny everything, admit nothing. And always achieve victory. This insight gave rise to the idea of ​​writing a feature film about how Cohn molds his apprentice into the orange demagogue he is today.

I discovered that their relationship had elements of a Shakespearean drama. Desperate to outshine his provincial father, Trump sold his soul to Cohn in order to learn Cohn's dark arts. Cohn's mentorship fueled Trump's rise to the top of New York society. But instead of showing gratitude, Trump effectively abandoned Cohn while Cohn died of AIDS in the mid-1980s. (The secretive, self-hating lawyer insisted to the end that he had liver cancer.) I felt a chill reading a dying Cohn's quote about Trump. “I can't believe he's doing this to me. “Donald pisses ice water,” Cohn reportedly said. Cohn was widely considered one of the worst people of the 20th century. If Trump could hurt Cohn, what did that say about Trump?

The future president's mentor was a strange and damaged man, as I learned in my research. Cohn's mother forced him to have a nose job as a child, which left him disfigured. Cohn ate cream cheese and bacon for breakfast and liked to mix Sweet'n Low into his champagne. He worked out of a dilapidated Upper East Side townhouse with a secret telephone recording room in the basement. Upstairs, he slept in a bedroom decorated with frog dolls. He did 200 sit-ups every morning. Cohn insisted he was heterosexual but socialized openly with a circle of blonde friends who bore a striking resemblance to the young Trump.

In the fall of 2017, my agent sold the parking space Amy Bear, a former top studio executive who runs a small film development company. Baer believed in the idea for the same reason I did: in our hyperpolarized culture, where Trump is either deified or demonized, portraying Trump as a human being was a radical act. I wrote him as a three-dimensional character with hopes, dreams, fears and (many) flaws.

Baer and I wanted a non-American filmmaker to direct the film. We felt that an outsider's perspective on the ultimate American issue would produce something fascinating. In fall 2018, we recruited Abbasi, an acclaimed Iranian-Danish filmmaker whose Swedish-language immigration thriller “ Border, won the Jury Prize in the “Un Certain Regard” section at Cannes in the spring. I knew that Abbasi would not be afraid of Trump. He also developed a film about the psychopathic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.

This was the point in the film's long journey where I learned that Hollywood has a very different agenda than journalism. Reporters want to hold powerful people accountable; Studio executives want to reach as wide an audience as possible, which often means offending as few people as possible. No major Hollywood studio or streamer wanted to finance the film. “Call me if Trump loses,” a top executive said at a cocktail party after telling me how much he liked the script. But even after Trump lost, the studios remained. The January 6 Capitol insurrection made the issue seem too dangerous.

This meant we had to finance the film independently. The model worked like this: Baer would raise most of the production budget by “pre-selling” the rights to distribute the film in all territories except the United States. An equity investor would provide the rest of the money. We would make the film and show it at a major festival like Cannes, where American distributors would compete to acquire the distribution rights. Baer's ability to pre-sell to foreign buyers depended on casting stars with large international followings to play Trump and Cohn. I wasn't prepared for actors, many of whom were members of the #Resistance, to be reticent about the film. One rejected Trump's role, saying he didn't want to give the president his “humanity.”

Stan was the exception. He read my script in fall 2019 and was immediately fascinated by the role. He had played before Tonya Harding's idiot husband, Jeff Gillooly, In Me, Tonya; a cannibal in the horror comedy Fresh; and hair metal legend Tommy Lee in the Hulu series Pam & Tommy. With Stan on board, we set out to find Cohn and ended up enlisting Emmy winner Jeremy Strong, who was looking for a post-Consequence Roll. Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova, best known for her dedicated work in Borat Subsequent Movie Film, has signed on to play Ivana.