So Donald Trump Threatened to Sue Your Movie — Now What?
'The Apprentice' writer Gabriel Sherman tells me how he captured the person before he became the persona. Plus: Todd Phillips' 'Joker' hangover
Happy Monday to all of us, except possibly David Zaslav, or whoever signed off on letting Todd Phillips spend $200 million of Warner Bros. Discovery money on Joker: Folie á Deux. Most of today’s newsletter is devoted to my conversation with Gabriel Sherman, my former Vanity Fair colleague and the screenwriter behind The Apprentice, the biopic of a young Donald Trump that debuts in theaters this weekend.
But first, a bit of a post-mortem on the Joker sequel that will come nowhere near the success of its predecessor — and the odd footnote of Oscar history it represents.
Folie á $200 Million
An actor or director’s follow-up to an Oscar success is almost always a fascinating thing to witness. Two years ago, I did an entire episode of the Screen Drafts podcast about it, sifting through the films that directors made immediately after best picture winners to find the diamonds (The Best Years of Our Lives, Apocalypse Now) amid the inevitable disappointments (most recently, Nightmare Alley and Eternals).
Joaquin Phoenix is the first actor since Anthony Hopkins to reprise his best actor-winning role, and unlike Hopkins’s return as Hannibal Lecter, Phoenix has reunited with his original director, Todd Phillips. Not just that, but Joker: Folie á Deux is in direct conversation with — or maybe even a repudiation of — the original Joker, the biggest hit of either Phoenix or Phillips’ career. Five years later, they’re back to more or less ask audiences why they liked them so much in the first place.
The answer seems to be that the audience doesn’t really know, either: The film’s opening weekend disappointed, with $40 million domestic, less than half of the original’s $96 million in 2019.
There will be much to say about the second Joker in terms of comic book movies, of big-budget studio gambles — and why in the world Phoenix made this movie but walked away from Todd Haynes. But I’ll remain fascinated by this odd outlier in Oscar history, a sequel to a runaway success that is poised to be thoroughly rejected this go-round.
The good news for pop diva obsessives is that there are still two more pop stars in the mix now that Lady Gaga can be considered out of the running. Ariana Grande has some good buzz for her turn as Glinda in Wicked, and Selena Gomez earned the best reviews of her career in Emilia Pérez. There’s still hope yet!
The Apprentice Files
Some people took to the streets when Donald Trump officially became the 45th president in early 2017. Some people fell into despair. Gabriel Sherman started writing.
Writing about Trump is something Sherman’s been doing for a long time, whether he wanted to or not. He remembers his New York Observer editor Peter Kaplan banning reporters from quoting Trump because he was so eager to offer up a soundbite. By the time of Trump’s election, Sherman was on the national political beat for New York magazine and would soon become my colleague at Vanity Fair. He was a reliable deliverer of blockbuster headlines with quotes from Trumpworld sources like “Don Jr. Thinks Trump Is Acting Crazy” and “F–k It, I’m Firing All of Them.”
But that’s the modern Trump, a man who Sherman agrees is probably so deeply invested in his own lies that he actually believes them. What about the actual human being he was before all of this, when he was a striving outer-borough real estate developer who could be reasonably said to look like Robert Redford?
That’s the version Sherman focused on in those early years of the Trump administration, and who became the focus of The Apprentice, Sherman’s first screenplay, now a film from Danish-Iranian director Ali Abbasi. Starring Sebastian Stan as Trump and Jeremy Strong as Trump’s slithery mentor Roy Cohn, The Apprentice premiered with a flurry of attention at Cannes, and even the more negative reviews singled out Stan and Strong’s performances. Sherman and the rest of the team had every reason to expect a distribution deal shortly after. Instead — silence.
“I found it incredibly disappointing that the big studios and streamers just thought the film was too risky,” Sherman tells me now. “Someone told me, no one wants to buy a lawsuit.”
Within hours of The Apprentice’s Cannes premiere, Trump had threatened a lawsuit, in typical blustery fashion, against “these pretend filmmakers.” No legal action has actually emerged, even now that Briarcliff Entertainment has picked up the film and is releasing it this week. As Sherman and I — and anyone else who has worked in media — knows perfectly well, Trump is fond of threatening lawsuits at the slightest provocation; at Vanity Fair, there was a longstanding policy that said any story that mentioned Trump even obliquely had to go through mandatory legal review. As Sherman puts it, “He threatens to sue the mailman.”
Sherman and Abbasi were both eager for The Apprentice to be released before the election, timing that Sherman acknowledges may have been even more significant than the threatened lawsuits. “I think the bigger fear that these Hollywood companies had was that if Trump won the election, he could use the government — I can’t believe I'm even saying this out loud, that we have to even say this in America — but they were worried that Trump could use the government to punish their businesses.”
Briarcliff, founded by former Open Road exec Tom Ortenberg and named for his hometown in suburban New York City, was the distributor to take the risk; though Ortenberg had experience backing Spotlight at Open Road, The Apprentice is the most high-profile release by far for the fairly new distributor behind such left-leaning docs as Michael Moore’s 2018 Trump film, Fahrenheit 11/9, as well as a number of Liam Neeson action movies. “He’s got guts,” Sherman says of Ortenberg. “Briarcliff is small, but it only takes one to have the courage to do it.”
'He's Arrogant and He's Ambitious, But He's Insecure'
It was perhaps inevitable that any film about Trump would be overshadowed by the former president’s efforts to make it all about him. But what about the version of Trump who is actually in the film?
Viewers might be surprised, and a little uncomfortable, to find themselves feeling sorry for him. Sherman’s script introduces him in somewhat recognizable form, taking a date to the exclusive, members-only Le Club and bragging about the important people in the room, paying careful attention to his sculpted helmet of hair.
But this young Trump is also suffering under the thumb of his dismissive father, Fred (Martin Donovan), and trying to look after his older brother Fred Jr. (Charlie Carrick) as he slips into alcoholism. Yet he possesses enough charisma that he really does win over Ivana (Maria Bakalova) in the early days of their courtship. Even as he falls under the spell of Roy Cohn and his “attack, attack, attack” philosophy of life, this Trump is someone you can actually imagine winning over the New York elite of the '70s and '80s.
“I watched this video — it’s on YouTube, you could watch it. It’s Donald Trump’s first TV interview with Rona Barrett. I was struck by how quiet and eloquent and kind of sane and down to earth he seemed,” Sherman tells me. “So I decided, let’s meet this character when he’s that person and he’s kind of a blank slate. He’s arrogant and he’s ambitious, but he’s insecure.”
It’s certainly not hard to imagine that it’s this depiction, maybe even more so than scenes like the alleged rape that Ivana Trump described under oath and later recanted, that is so getting under Trump’s skin. With The Apprentice, Sherman captures how an actual flesh-and-blood human evolved into the calcified demagogue we know today, more or less trapped in the persona he first established in the mid-1980s, where the film ends. “Up until that point, he was still finding the version of himself that he wanted to portray in the world,” Sherman says. “Now I feel like he’s been living in that character so long that I don’t even think he remembers what he was before.”
The question remains if moviegoers, the ones who hate Trump and the ones who love him, actually want to meet that version. Sherman cribs from the Barbie trailer in insisting that The Apprentice is for you, no matter which side you fall on. In yet another election season of extreme polarization, how many things involving Trump can you say that about?
Katey, I’ve read a ton of previews of The Apprentice since its debut in Cannes, but I have to say, you eloquently captured the essence of this film and its tortuous journey to US theaters. A great piece of writing!
Sherman couldn’t have a found a better director for this?