This week I finally got to see “The Apprentice,” an absorbing,
disturbing movie about the relationship between the red-baiting mob
lawyer Roy Cohn and a young Donald Trump.

Its performances are extraordinary. The “Succession” star Jeremy Strong captures both Cohn’s reptilian menace and, eventually, his pathos, as
he’s wasted by AIDS but, closeted to the end, refuses to admit it. Just
as impressive is Sebastian Stan, who makes Trump legible as a human
being rather than the grotesque hyperobject we all know today.

It’s not a sympathetic portrayal, exactly; this is, after all, a movie
that depicts Trump raping his first wife, Ivana. (The scene is based on
a claim Ivana Trump made in a divorce deposition but later recanted,
saying she felt “violated” but didn’t want her “words to be interpreted in a literal or criminal sense.”) [A serial rapist!]

Unfortunately, you may not get a chance to anytime soon, at least in the
United States. Distributors have bought the rights to “The Apprentice”
in Canada, Britain, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But
the filmmakers have yet to secure a deal to release it here, either in
theaters or on streaming services.

Negotiations are ongoing, and domestic distribution could still come
together. Yet the possibility that American audiences won’t be able to
see “The Apprentice” isn’t just frustrating. It’s frightening, because it suggests that Trump and his supporters have already intimidated some
media companies, which seem to be pre-emptively capitulating to him.

As Puck’s Matthew Belloni wrote after talking to potential buyers,
“several that really liked the film are still out on ‘The Apprentice,’
in part because of the politics of the moment — which is to say fear of
the politics of the moment.” Emanuel Nuñez, president of the production company Kinematics, one of the film’s investors, told me, “Trump
attacked the film and, unfortunately, it appears that Hollywood right
now doesn’t have the stomach to release this film and take him on.”

The fear seems to be twofold. Few want to end up in the MAGA movement’s
cross hairs the way Bud Light and Disney did. And as one distribution
executive told Variety, any company that wants to be sold or to merge
with or buy another company would be hesitant to touch “The Apprentice” because of the possibility that, should Trump be re-elected, his
“regulators will be punitive.”

After all, when Trump was president, his Department of Justice tried to
block AT&T’s acquisition of Time Warner, the company that owned CNN. As
The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reported, the government’s opposition to the deal was widely seen as retaliation for CNN coverage that displeased Trump.

In a second Trump term, the Department of Justice is expected to be far
more aggressive in persecuting Trump’s perceived enemies.

They could go after anyone involved with “The Apprentice” in the same
way. In a cease-and-desist letter to the filmmakers, a lawyer for Trump claimed, absurdly, that the movie is “direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” citing the fact that its director, Ali Abbasi, is Iranian Danish and that the movie received funding from Denmark, Ireland
and Canada.

“If you do not immediately cease all publication and marketing of the
movie, President Trump will pursue every appropriate legal means to hold
you accountable for this gross violation of President Trump and the
American people’s rights,” Trump’s lawyer wrote. Should he become president again, he’ll have greatly expanded options for pursuing this vendetta.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/opinion/the-apprentice-trump-movie.html

Good luck, Americans.

--
"And off they went, from here to there,
The bear, the bear, and the maiden fair"
-- Traditional

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)