Vanity Fair – The Donald Trump biopic was one of the hottest tickets at Cannes this year. So why did it take months, and a minor miracle, to sell? As the movie finally hits theaters, its screenwriter, VF special correspondent Gabriel Sherman, has some ideas.
On the night of May 20, I stood in my tuxedo inside the storied Auditorium Louis Lumière at Cannes and listened as more than 2,000 people in black tie gave an eight-minute standing ovation for the film I wrote: The Apprentice. The movie is a Frankenstein origin story about Donald Trump, played by Marvel star Sebastian Stan in heavy prosthetics and a golden toupee. It follows Trump as he rises in Manhattan real estate during the gritty 1970s and gaudy ’80s under the tutelage of right-wing lawyer turned fixer Roy Cohn, played with dead-eyed menace by Succession’s Jeremy Strong. The biggest controversy centered on a scene—spoiler alert—that depicted Trump sexually assaulting his first wife, Ivana. (There were audible gasps in the room when it played.) Other scenes showed Trump getting liposuction, undergoing scalp reduction surgery, and popping amphetamine diet pills—details reported in Harry Hurt III’s 1993 Trump biography, Lost Tycoon. (Trump denied the claims at the time.)
The premiere generated headlines worldwide. But during the after-party with views of oligarch-owned yachts anchored in the harbor, I began getting news alerts on my phone: Trump announced he planned to sue to block the movie’s release. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend filmmakers,” Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said. He called the movie “malicious defamation,” “election interference by Hollywood elites,” and said it belonged “in a dumpster fire.” I felt a pit in my stomach as I scrolled the headlines. But I also felt strangely validated. Life was imitating art. Trump’s legal threat followed the first rule Cohn elucidates in the movie: Attack, attack, attack.
Two days later, Trump’s lawyers sent the film’s director Ali Abbasi and me cease-and-desist letters. The legal document sounded like an outtake from an unhinged Trump rally speech: “I demand that you immediately cease and desist distribution and marketing in the United States of the foreign-funded and directed hit piece masquerading as a movie.” It warned Hollywood companies against distributing the movie domestically: “Any person in the United States providing services, including marketing services, publicity, legal services, and public distribution of the movie, must be mindful of the restrictions of the Foreign Agents Registration Act.”
I hoped the controversy would translate into a deal. Studios and streamers normally compete fiercely to acquire the buzziest titles at Cannes. Two days after our premiere, Netflix reportedly paid approximately $12 million to acquire Emilia Pérez, the genre-bending transgender drug-cartel musical that won the festival’s Jury Prize.
But the specter of Trump’s lawsuit had a chilling effect on would-be buyers. By the time I flew home a week later, no Hollywood company had made an offer to release the movie in the United States.
In the spring of 2017, millions of Americans were processing the upside-down reality that Trump occupied the White House. Some turned to therapy. Others booze. I coped by writing a screenplay. I had been thinking and writing about Trump for 15 years. My first journalism job was reporting on Manhattan real estate for the weekly New York Observer. So you can imagine my shock years later when I found myself covering Trump’s first presidential campaign for New York magazine. Longtime Trump associates like Roger Stone told me Trump was winning because he followed his mentor Cohn’s three rules: Attack, attack, attack. Deny everything, admit nothing. And always claim victory. The insight sparked the idea to write a fictional film about Cohn molding his apprentice into the orange-tanned demagogue he is today.
I discovered their relationship had the 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 pinnacle of New York society. But instead of showing gratitude, Trump virtually abandoned Cohn while Cohn was dying from AIDS in the mid-1980s. (The closeted, self-hating lawyer insisted to the end he had liver cancer.) I felt chills when I read 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 regarded as 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, I learned in my research. Cohn’s mother forced him to get a nose job as a child that left him disfigured. Cohn ate cream cheese and bacon for breakfast and liked to put Sweet’n Low in his Champagne. He worked in a crumbling Upper East Side town house with a secret phone-recording room in the basement. Upstairs, he slept in a bedroom decorated with frog dolls. Every morning, he did 200 sit-ups. Cohn insisted he was straight but openly socialized with a coterie of blond boyfriends who bore a striking resemblance to young Trump.
In the fall of 2017, my agent sold the pitch to Amy Baer, 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, in which Trump is either deified or demonized, portraying Trump as human 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 movie. We felt an outsider’s perspective on the ultimate American subject would yield something fascinating. In the fall of 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 that spring. I knew Abbasi would be unafraid of Trump. He was also developing a film about the psychopathic Nazi doctor Josef Mengele.
This was the point in the movie’s long journey that I learned Hollywood has very different goals from journalism. Reporters want to hold powerful people accountable; studio executives want to reach the widest audience, 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,” one top executive said at a cocktail party after he told me how much he loved the script. But even after Trump lost, studios still passed. The January 6 Capitol riot made the subject seem too dangerous.
That meant we would have to finance the movie independently. The model worked like this: Baer would raise most of the production budget by “preselling” rights to distribute the movie in every territory except the United States. An equity investor would provide the rest of the money. We would shoot the movie and show it at a major festival like Cannes, where American distributors would bid to acquire the distribution rights. Baer’s ability to presell to overseas buyers depended on casting stars with big international fan bases to play Trump and Cohn. I wasn’t prepared for actors, many of whom were #Resistance members, to be reluctant about the movie. One turned down the role of Trump saying he didn’t want to give his “humanity” to the president.
Stan was the exception. He read my script in the fall of 2019 and was immediately intrigued by the role. He had previously played Tonya Harding’s goon husband, Jeff Gillooly, in I, 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 went in search of Cohn, eventually signing Emmy winner Jeremy Strong, who was looking for post-Succession roles. Bulgarian actor Maria Bakalova, best known for her fully committed work in Borat Subsequent Moviefilm, signed on to play Ivana.
Even after we found our cast, the movie died and was resurrected many times. Trump’s Muslim travel ban made it virtually impossible for Abbasi, an Iranian citizen, to work on the movie in the United States. Production was also delayed by a global pandemic, the bursting of the Hollywood content bubble, and dual writer and actor strikes.
In the spring of 2023, we found the final piece of our financing. Abbasi was at Cannes that May promoting his Iranian serial killer film, Holy Spider, when he was contacted by a 29-year-old filmmaker and producer named Mark Rapaport. Rapaport told Abbasi to meet him on a boat. At the harbor, Abbasi found a small motorboat waiting. It didn’t seem promising. But the boat drove him out to a 305-foot yacht. It belonged to Rapaport’s father-in-law: the billionaire (and Trump donor) Dan Snyder. Onboard, Rapaport told Abbasi he wanted to finance the movie. Snyder had loaned Rapaport millions to help grow his production company Kinematics.
At this point you might be asking: Why did Snyder, who donated $1 million to Trump’s 2016 inauguration, allow his money to go into an R-rated movie that depicts Trump as a sex predator? The answer, as best as I can tell, is that Snyder didn’t know what kind of Trump movie his son-in-law was making. (A lawyer who has represented Snyder in the past did not immediately return a request for comment.)
You might also be asking: Why would my producers finance a dark Trump movie with money from a pro-Trump billionaire? As studios limit output to superhero franchises and IP plays, filmmakers seeking to finance adult dramas have to look elsewhere for money. One enduring source of capital comes from the children (or spouses of the children) of the .1 percent. The problem, in our case, is that people with extreme wealth often have a connection to Trump.
The 32-day shoot began on November 29, 2023. Remarkably, it went better than I expected. For budget reasons, we filmed entirely in Toronto, but production was able to find every patch of the Canadian city that looked like 1970s New York. The danger of making a Trump movie is that it easily could turn into an SNL parody. Abbasi drew performances from Stan, Strong, and Bakalova that felt fully lived-in. Aesthetically, the movie, especially in the early scenes, paid homage to 1970s classics like Taxi Driver and Dog Day Afternoon. A couple weeks into the shoot, a producer told me Rapaport was “elated” by the footage Abbasi was getting. We wrapped production in late January.
The plan was to premiere the movie at the Venice Film Festival in late August. It would be a rush to finish postproduction in seven months, but doable. But then our financier made a shocking request. Rapaport told Abbasi to get the movie ready in just three months to play at Cannes to quickly recoup Kinematics’ investment. Snyder planned to host a party in Cannes on his $192 million yacht, Lady S. (Snyder’s boat was the first in the world to have a certified IMAX theater on board, added at a cost of $3 million.) Rapaport agreed to invest $450,000 more in the film.
In late March, Abbasi delivered his rough cut to producers. That’s when I became aware of a war playing out between Abbasi and Rapaport over the content of the film. The biggest issue was the sexual assault scene. It dramatized allegations Ivana made in a deposition during her 1990 divorce. (Trump’s lawyers pressured the publishers of Hurt III’s 1993 biography to include an updated statement from Ivana that clarified that when she had used the word “rape” under oath, she didn’t mean Trump assaulted her in a “criminal sense,” only that she felt violated. She fully recanted her sworn testimony when Trump was running for president 25 years later.) Rapaport and his business partner, a former CAA agent named Emanuel Nuñez, told Abbasi the scene was too risky to portray.
Making matters worse, Rapaport screened the rough cut for his father-in-law at his Caribbean vacation home. Every film professional knows rough cuts are difficult to watch for the uninitiated because there’s no music or visual effects and filmmakers take risks to see what works. Abbasi’s first version included an improvised homoerotic dream sequence in which Strong wore a skintight frog costume and climbed into bed with Stan and caressed his face. Snyder eventually walked out of the screening room.
Soon, Rapaport and Nuñez were demanding changes. The frog scene had to go. “I thought it was funny when I was on set…but this is not in the script,” Rapaport told Abbasi and producers on a Zoom, according to notes of the conversation that were forwarded to me at the time. Abbasi agreed the scene didn’t work. But Abbassi and I refused to cut the sexual assault scene because we believed Ivana’s sworn deposition (our producers backed us up). Trump has been credibly accused of sexual assault by many women over the years. Trump has denied all such accusations.
“This is not an Ivana tragedy. It’s not integral to the core storyline…. No version of it works,” Rapaport protested. On a certain level, I felt for the guy, stuck on an island with his billionaire father-in-law. He had financed the movie when no one else would.
Kinematics upped the pressure. In the weeks leading up to Cannes, Rapaport’s lawyers sent producers cease-and-desist letters to stop the movie from playing the festival he had asked us to submit to in the first place. It seemed like Rapaport was taking a move from his father-in-law’s playbook. (Snyder is a notoriously litigious mogul who once sued a 72-year-old grandmother in a dispute over her football season tickets.) Rapaport only dropped his legal threats because the French distributor owned the movie in France. Rapaport had no power to stop the Cannes premiere. So he used what power he had. There would be no yacht party.
After Cannes, I remained optimistic that an American company would eventually buy the movie. But every studio and streamer passed. One buyer called it a “complicated movie.” I found the industry’s response deeply dispiriting. Hollywood fashions itself as a community of truth tellers, but here they were running from a movie to prepare for a Trump presidency. On a human level, I understood. If you’re a studio executive fearing for your job in a climate of layoffs, do you want to buy a movie that could ignite lawsuits or vindictive regulatory action by the next Trump administration?
In June, we finally found a buyer willing to take the risk. Briarcliff Entertainment made an offer to release The Apprentice in theaters before the election. The small company was founded by Tom Ortenberg, a veteran executive with a track record of distributing commercially successful political films. He previously released Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 11/9, Oliver Stone’s W., and Tom McCarthy’s best-picture-winner, Spotlight. Ortenberg didn’t have a lot of money to spend, but he had guts. “Fuck ’em!” he said when I brought up Hollywood’s timidity.
I thought having a distributor would be the end of the saga. But Rapaport refused to accept Briarcliff’s offer because he said it didn’t pay enough up front. He wanted to hold out for a better deal, which seemed absurd because every other buyer had already passed. There was no better deal to be had. But this is where he had real leverage: Rapaport was the movie’s largest equity investor, which gave him power to approve domestic distribution. Would he really be capable of performing a catch-and-kill of his own movie? I told Strong that it was like we were living inside an episode of Succession.
Time was running out. It would be impossible to release the movie in the United States before the election if the Briarcliff deal didn’t close by Labor Day. I consoled myself that at least the movie would be released in other countries in October—even in Putin’s Russia. That hope died when producers told me international distributors didn’t have the legal right to screen the movie before it played domestically. Effectively, it meant the movie was dead.
In the end, everyone has a price. A pair of investors, Fred Benenson and James Shani, came together to buy out Rapaport’s stake. The deal closed on August 31, hours before the movie was scheduled to make its American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. The path was clear for the movie to hit theaters nationwide on October 11. As the release neared, I braced for Trump to file his threatened lawsuit. A source close to the campaign told me people around Trump knew not to discuss the movie. “Talking about the movie puts him in a bad mood,” the source said.
In a screenplay, a character’s lowest moment is called the dark night of the soul. It’s the final test that forces the protagonist to confront his worst fears and change. My dark night of the soul lasted four months as the movie lingered in purgatory. I’m a natural pessimist who assumes the worst will happen so I can be pleasantly surprised if anything goes right. My therapist asks me to accept forces I can’t control and imagine a world in which things work out. Making this movie helped me to finally grasp these concepts.
Whether or not Trump files a lawsuit, Cohn’s lessons worked in a way. The threat alone was enough to delay a deal for months. Cohn has been dead for nearly 40 years but we’re still living in his world.
This story has been updated.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that a loan from Dan Snyder to Mark Rapaport started the production company Kinematics. Kinematics had already formed at the time of Snyder’s loan.