Skip to main content

‘The Apprentice’ filmmakers blame ‘cowardice’ for their inability to find a buyer

The film's explicit political subject matter has made it a target for Donald Trump's campaign.

Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice
Briar Cliff Entertainment

With just a month left until the presidential election, it’s easy to see why a movie like The Apprentice might be even more controversial than it would be otherwise. The film, which tells the story of a young Donald Trump in the 1970s and early 1980s as he studies under lawyer Roy Cohn, was first screened at the Cannes Film Festival, but didn’t have a buyer or a release date until quite recently. Given the movie’s fraught subject matter, and the fact that it’s now being released before the election, it’s easy to see why some major studios might have balked at the idea of acquiring it.

Director Ali Abbasi, though, has a slightly different explanation for why they couldn’t find a buyer.

Recommended Videos

“It was pretty shocking for me after the reception we got in Cannes,” he said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I understand it from the business perspective of not wanting to have trouble, but we’re not in the business of ice creams. We’re not selling shoes. So yeah, it was shocking.”

Veteran studio executive Tom Ortenberg ultimately purchased the film under his label, Briarcliff Entertainment, and said that he was also surprised that no one else had grabbed the movie. “I’m so disappointed that literally nobody else in Hollywood would distribute The Apprentice,” he said. “It’s shockingly disappointing to me to be living and working in an industry where that’s the case.”

Ortenberg added that “I can’t really speak for others, but my sense is it is in large if not complete part cowardice in the face of Donald Trump. Anybody who claims otherwise, I would probably accuse of fibbing.”

Trump has already threatened a lawsuit over the film, which he claims is defamatory. As The Apprentice details, lawsuits are a core part of Roy Cohn’s legal strategy, so a lawsuit probably shouldn’t come as a surprise.

Joe Allen
Contributor
Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…
American Psycho director doesn’t understand why ‘Wall Street bros’ love her movie
She's weighed in ahead of a new adaptation of the novel from Luca Guadagnino.
Christian Bale in American Psycho

There are few things in life that are guaranteed, but one of them is that large groups of people will never fully understand satire. During a recent interview with Letterboxd Journal, American Psycho director Mary Harron made it clear that she doesn't understand why "Wall Street bros" love her movie so much.

“I’m always so mystified by it,” Harron said. “I don’t think that [co-writer Guinevere Turner] and I ever expected it to be embraced by Wall Street bros, at all. That was not our intention. So, did we fail? I’m not sure why [it happened], because Christian’s very clearly making fun of them… But, people read the Bible and decide that they should go and kill a lot of people. People read The Catcher in the Rye and decide to shoot the president.”

Read more
Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey: Everything we know so far
We don't have any footage from the movie just yet.
Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas.

These days, you can rely on Christopher Nolan to make a new movie roughly every three years. The director, who has become a brand unto himself, is coming off of the tremendous success of Oppenheimer, which was both a colossal box office success and an Oscars juggernaut.

For his follow-up, Nolan is adapting Homer's The Odyssey, one of the foundational myths in the history of stories. While there's plenty we still don't know about this project, it's clearly something that Nolan fans are going to be eagerly anticipating. With that in mind, here's everything we know about Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey:

Read more
Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman go to war in the first trailer for ‘The Roses’
This story has already been adapted into a feature film once.
Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman in The Roses

Anytime you get two heavyweight actors together and ask them to do battle on screen, the results are almost guaranteed to be electrifying. That's certainly what the first trailer for The Roses promises. The movie, which is adapted from Warren Adler's 1981 novel The War of the Roses, stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Olivia Colman as a married couple whose relationship disintegrates over the course of the film.

The two play Theo and Ivy, a married couple living an idyllic California life. When Theo's career crumbles just as Ivy's is taking off, though, buried resentments in their relationship come to the surface. Andy Samberg, Allison Janney, Ncuti Gatwa, Kate McKinnon, Sunita Mani, Jamie Demetriou, Zoë Chao and Belinda Bromilow are also in the cast. It was directed by Jay Roach.

Read more