Donald Trump didn’t want you to see “The Apprentice” last year. And he got his way: The unflattering Trump biopic, which struggled to get to theaters, was a flop when it eventually got there last October.
But now “The Apprentice” is going to get a lot more attention, courtesy of the Oscars: Sebastian Stan just received a best actor nomination for his portrayal of Trump. And Jeremy Strong’s take on Roy Cohn, Trump’s former attorney and mentor, earned him a best supporting actor nomination.
Like most things on TV, the Academy Awards don’t get anything like the attention they used to get in a pre-internet age. But they are still the Academy Awards, and they still draw a bigger audience than just about anything that’s not an NFL game. Last year’s show drew nearly 20 million TV viewers in the US.
Which means that when this year’s show airs on March 2, there’s a decent chance that a film the president of the United States tried to stop from being shown — via a cease-and-desist letter — could get a burst of new publicity and exposure. I wonder what Trump and his supporters will think of that.
I also wonder what the people who run Hollywood’s biggest studios and streamers — the same people who didn’t want to touch “The Apprentice” — will think of that.
“Sebastian and Jeremy took career-defining risks to do this movie. And they f***ing nailed their roles,” Gabriel Sherman, the journalist who wrote the movie’s screenplay, tells me via email. “It’s also satisfying that the Academy is standing up for great art at a time when the culture seems to be chilled by the new political climate.”
The backstory behind Apprentice could be its own movie, and it’s a hard one to summarize. I’ll try here: Mark Rapaport, the producer who financed the movie, ended up clashing with Sherman and director Ali Abbasi, and told them he didn’t want it released. (I’ve asked Rapaport for comment about Thursday’s news.) Rapaport is also the son-in-law of billionaire Dan Snyder, who bankrolled Rapaport’s production company, and who also donated $1 million to Trump’s 2017 inauguration.
The controversy generated attention when the movie debuted at the Cannes Film Festival, but the movie struggled to find a Hollywood distributor — a fact Sherman chalked up to the industry’s fear of angering Trump prior to last November’s election.
“Trump talks a lot about “weaponization of government,” Sherman told me last fall. “This is a very specific case where he has now influenced the corporate and creative decisions of these Hollywood companies to basically chill content that he would object to.”
For a longer version of the story, you can listen to me talking to Sherman about the movie on my Channels podcast. And for a medium-sized version, check out excerpts of that chat here.
