Here is the rewritten content: After much pre-release turbulence, The Apprentice today opens on 1,740 screens across the country. Inspiring coming-of-
Here is the rewritten content:
After much pre-release turbulence, The Apprentice today opens on 1,740 screens across the country. Inspiring coming-of-age tales are a Hollywood staple, but most are warm and cozy compared to The Apprentice. In this ’70s-set Manhattan tale, an ambitious real estate developer looking to crack the big time finds a mentor and role model in a take-no-prisoners lawyer who during the Red Scare was Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s henchman, and who sent the Rosenbergs to the electric chair.
Donald Trump had no political or even reality TV ambitions; he mostly wanted to prove himself to an impossible-to-please father, who had Donald going door to door to collect rent from hostile low-income tenants. Cohn helped fuel Trump’s rise, even showing him the dark arts that included an office where he surreptitiously taped intimate conversations of his enemies. Cohn used these like brass knuckles, in one scene threatening to expose same-sex trysts of one married man whose vote got Trump and his father a slap on the wrist for discriminating against Black renters in their apartment buildings.
Trump was wide-eyed as Cohn revealed the three rules by which he lived: 1) Attack, attack, attack; 2) Admit nothing, deny everything; and 3) No matter what happens, you claim victory and never admit defeat. Though the events are 50 years old and meant to guide Trump’s growth into a real estate mogul, they’ve proven useful in presidential politics all these years later.
The playbook came into focus as The Apprentice premiered at Cannes, and the Trump campaign widely publicized a cease-and-desist letter that threatened legal action. It labeled the film a "libelous farce," and "direct foreign interference in America’s elections," because some financing came from Canada and Ireland. The whole thing was a bluff, but an effective one. Potential distributors ran for cover. This despite an 11-minute standing ovation at its Cannes premiere, and critical adulation for Ali Abbasi’s direction of Gabriel Sherman’s script that brings to life the seedy ’70s Manhattan before Trump’s name began to dot the skyline, and for Sebastian Stan’s performance as the future ex-president, and Jeremy Strong’s reptilian turn as Cohn and Maria Bakalova’s Ivana Trump, the kind of work that drives awards-season trophies.
As it stood, it was so touch and go that the cast and filmmakers did not know until 48 hours before if a surprise showing at Telluride would happen. With limited P&A, the film is tracking for a soft opening that might be as low as $2 million. Meaning Trump might fall behind two screen villains that also go heavy on the pancake makeup: Art the Clown in Terrifier 3 and Arthur Fleck in Joker 2. The Apprentice hopes to hold screens through the elections, fueling a rosier ancillary future that would be helped by nominations.
The following are interviews done during the film’s twisty road, beginning with Abbasi, Sherman, Stan, and Jeremy Strong right after their Telluride premiere, when they seemed dazed to even be there. A follow-up story will add commentary from Briarcliff’s Ortenberg and producer Amy Baer, who seven years ago started all this by buying a pitch by Sherman, who then was a top journalist who took down former Fox News chief Roger Ailes for his predations against young on-air talent, and had covered Trump for years.
JEREMY STRONG: It was very precarious.
ALI ABBASI: Honestly, I’d ask, how’s the negotiation going? They’d say, We can’t tell…ee on Saturday Night Live. Was there a quality in Trump’s younger years you latched onto as a North Star?
STAN: I guess that was why I offered that story with my mom in New York. I don’t think I’ll be able to explain it as better than Jeremy just did. I think as you get older, you realize that I feel like these things are more and more taxing. You’ve got families, or you’re starting a family. There are aspects in this and there’s a lot of time and effort. You just start to go, if this is going to happen now for the next few months, I want to be with people I trust, who are fearless. I want to be able to have it be a challenging question, a conversation I can learn from.
There are some universal things we all look for in wanting to go there, to make the commitment to begin with. I find that if you don’t have those things anymore, it’s harder. It just happened that each of the things I was involved in were really good collaborations that I needed to get me to a certain place. I look at the people first and who’s going to be there. It is a machine. And I think the last thing I’ll say, because at one point, I think you said it better than me, but it’s weird. You’re preparing yourself to go out there. If you were going to war, you might be seeing a lover, you might never come back, this might be your last time. You’re basically worrying, okay, so I just need a thousand things because I don’t know what’s going to happen out there. You’re trying to arm yourself as best as possible to go out there for whatever’s going to happen. That’s how I think of it. And you may not use 90% of it, you just want to have it if you need it.
STRONG: But you still feel [that preparation] on the screen. You feel that everything that didn’t make it on the screen is informing what we’re seeing. That’s why, to me, [Stan] 360 degrees mastered that man and that history. And I thought, that’s my job as well. But also, acting is not conveying information. He’s playing arguably the most well-known and famous person on planet Earth. The challenge, the degree of difficulty of that is just incalculable. But that’s what I love so much, the risk involved and the ability to kind of block that out entirely and just do it.
GABRIEL SHERMAN: Ali and I had dinner with Tony, during an early scouting trip in New York, and we got some really interesting insights about Donald in those years. Tony was obviously grappling with the role he played in the book creating this Myth of Trump. But yeah, that last scene was just a really kind of a great way to spin the movie forward so that we never obviously talk about present day, but everything we’re living in now is there in that scene.
DEADLINE: My accountant might say different, but I’m glad I didn’t help Trump write that book, given the bankruptcies and lawsuits that put the lie to the idea he was a deal whisperer.
SHERMAN: I was covering his campaign, this was in 2016, and Trump made me an offer. He was doing a rally in Florida. I was going down to cover and I was interviewing him in New York, and he’s like, well, come down, you can stay at my Trump Doral. I’m like, I can’t do that. I’m a journalist. There are rules. “Don’t be a baby. Don’t be a baby. Just do it. Come stay.” And in the back of my mind, I’m thinking, if I stayed there and then I wrote something he didn’t like, he’d be the first person to call up Page Six and be like, this journalist mooched a free room off me. But that seduction is real. There is this tractor beam when you’re in his orbit. I had to consciously say to myself, no, this is not appropriate. And if you turn that voice off, you can just get pulled right in.
DEADLINE: What makes this movie a success for you guys? You’ll probably get beaten up in the New York Post, praised by the Daily News, and New York Times…
STAN: I just hope people see it. The whole point of anything creative and artistic is it frees you to go and have your own experience with it. Ali really said something I hadn’t thought about, and it’s true. It’s like when everybody says, why do we need a Trump movie? Why do we need to watch things that we already know about, and blah, blah, blah? Well, a lot of people actually don’t know about the Roy Cohn-Donald Trump relationship. Beyond that, I would say it’s the experience in the theater. You’re not going to read that in a book or online. It’s this experience of being with these people in the movie theater. That’s what is important, what’s visceral.
STRONG: After working on it, what I learned did make me feel like I was peering into the heart of darkness, a glimpse into a heart of darkness in the American psyche. I think maybe it can serve as a cautionary tale. But the hope is ultimately a humanistic one, which is, and I know a few people who have seen it, who have said to me, the next time I saw Trump, I just perceived him a little differently. Not worse, or in a vilifying way, but just in a human way. But also not in an overly sympathetic way. I forget what age it is, but anyone over 30 or 40 can no longer blame their parents for everything. Choices happen, and define you. So this is also about the formation and the choices made, and holding him accountable for those choices and holding up the mirror, as Ali said. But I just want people to see it and understand better where this all is coming from. There was something, there was a Persian poet named Omar Khayyam from the 11th century that Roy Cohn’s father loved. And in one of the poems, he said “Yesterday, this day’s madness did prepare.” That’s what this movie’s about. It’s about how the madness of today was prepared in this moment in time between these two people. And I think that’s a really important story to tell the world right now.
FAQs:
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