[[link removed]]

PORTSIDE CULTURE

GO SEE ‘THE APPRENTICE’ BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE  
[[link removed]]


 

Eileen Jones
October 15, 2024
Jacobin [[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ Trump supporters will never go see 'The Apprentice' and
anti-Trumpers won’t be able to bear two hours watching the bane of
their existence rise to wealth and power. This lack of a clear
audience spells an unfortunate box-office bomb. _

Roy Cohn and Donald Trump at the opening of Trump Tower 1983., Warner
Brothers, Photograph by Courtesy of Sonia Moskowitz/HBO

 

_The Apprentice_ is a better movie than I expected, with memorable
performances by Sebastian Stan as a much younger Donald Trump and
Jeremy Strong as notoriously corrupt lawyer Roy Cohn, the mentor who
did so much make Trump the shameless, smirking, bloviating, bizarrely
successful presidential candidate we know today.

But I had to wonder who the audience was supposed to be for this film.
Trump supporters will never see it, having been long since tipped off
[[link removed]] to
stay away: “Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung blasted _The
Apprentice_ as ‘pure fiction’ and ‘election interference by
Hollywood elites right before November.’”

The various campaign statements that the film constitutes “pure
malicious defamation” were accompanied by a cease-and-desist letter
to its producers before it ever premiered at the Cannes Film Festival.
That meant most top Hollywood distribution companies passed on it, and
its release was uncertain until Tom Ortenberg of Briarcliff
Entertainment acquired it for theatrical release with a grandiose
flourish
[[link removed]]:

The fact that nobody else was willing to distribute _The
Apprentice_ created a moral imperative for me to step up and do it. .
. . If not me, then who? Unfortunately, the major studios collectively
ran away from _The Apprentice_ like their hair was on fire for fear
of reprisal.

And even the most likely audience for the film, the anti-Trump segment
of the population, perhaps drawn to this highly unflattering
portrayal, might not be able to bear a solid block of time spent
watching the bane of their existences rise to personal wealth, power,
and influence in 1980s New York City. Trump is almost too effectively
evoked by Stan in every petulant pout and smarmy lying boast and
round-shouldered shamble.

On top of that, most of this biographical material about Trump’s
rise to fame, or infamy, which was comprehensively fact-checked
[[link removed]] by
journalist screenwriter Gabriel Sherman and director Ali Abbasi (_Holy
Spider_), is already well known by people who despise Trump. And as
the final capper, films dealing with politics are generally unpopular
in the United States. Add up all those points and you can predict a
box-office bomb, which is indeed what’s being reported
[[link removed]] about
the film’s opening weekend.

Roy Cohn was of great help to Senator Joseph McCarthy during the
anti-communist witch hunt of the 1950s.

So you’ll have to hurry if you really want to see this film in
theaters before it gets unceremoniously pulled out of circulation. And
it has its fascinations. Strong’s performance as the reptilian Cohn,
who seemed to have left any salvageable humanity behind him long
before he’s shown fixing his alligator-like stare on young Trump
across a crowded room, is the most compelling element, by design. As a
brief reminder, Cohn is the vicious infighting prosecutor who was an
adviser and close personal friend of Richard Nixon’s, with a client
list that included prominent Mafia bosses. He was of great help to
Senator Joseph McCarthy during the anti-communist witch hunt of the
1950s. In 1951, Cohn dedicated himself to making sure Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg both got the death penalty after they were convicted of
traitorous espionage in supplying state secrets to the USSR.

Remaining an anti-communist fanatic to the end of his days, Cohn
professed a disturbing personal philosophy that represented his
extraordinarily brutal and often illegal methods of practicing law as
a patriotic duty to the America he claimed to love. Indicted multiple
times but never convicted, Cohn bribed, blackmailed, and
witness-tampered his way to the top of his profession and New York
high society. He sustained his power by bugging all the rooms
[[link removed]] in
his house, including his home office, so that he had the tape-recorded
goods on the legions of high-powered people who consulted him
professionally and attended his parties. The more orgiastic,
drug-fueled revelry generally took place at after-parties at Studio
54, which was run by clients of Cohn’s, but Abbasi’s budget
couldn’t accommodate the re-creation of the famous disco, so he
represented a hot-stuff house party instead.

Amazingly, it seems that Cohn was so feared that nobody he was
blackmailing ever turned the tables on him, though he was doing very
little to hide his sexual relationships with men at a time when that
was a career-ending scandal for many. He always denied being gay, and
he was stridently homophobic, claiming to be far too strong and
authoritative a person to be a gay man

In the movie, when Cohn first levels that flat stare at young Trump in
an expensive restaurant where Trump has just been ditched by his date,
it’s presumably an expression of predatory sexual interest in a tall
blond naif. Trump is portrayed as what he scorns most — a
“loser,” awkward, badly dressed, unknown in high-flying Manhattan
circles and desperately worshipful of those who are at home in its
gleaming environs. He’s a gauche outsider from Queens employed by
his rich, nasty slumlord father, Fred Trump (Martin Donovan), having
to make the rounds collecting the rent himself and manifestly
uncertain how to succeed on his own.

He’s already watched his older brother, Fred Jr (Charlie Carrick),
shot down by their father as a “bus driver with wings” for having
bailed out on the family business to become a commercial pilot. And
Fred Jr is soon succumbing to the alcoholic despair that will kill him
at age forty-two. Now it’s Donald’s turn to prove himself, and his
first opportunity involves somehow getting his father off the hook for
charges leveled by the US Justice Department accusing him of
discrimination against prospective black tenants. Why not request the
services of his powerful new friend Roy Cohn?

Cohn, always savvy, notes that the case against Trump’s father has
overwhelming evidence, including rental applications marked with a
“c” for “colored,” indicating the reason for turning the
applicants down. Nevertheless, Cohn manages to get the case settled
out of court for a very moderate amount of money. It’s all part of
the process of showing young Donald the ropes in terms of how to
acquire wealth and power. The rules are:

* Attack, attack, attack.
* Deny every accusation.
* Always claim victory.

And Trump learns these rules by heart so that, in the end, he recites
them as his own invention, only he adds garrulous embellishments that
make them sound much less impressively lethal. But that tendency will
be familiar to anyone who’s ever heard one of Trump’s speeches
full of rambling braggadocio.

The film breaks down into two sections: the 1970s, when Trump is
Cohn’s eager but comparatively hapless acolyte, and the 1980s, when
Trump’s head swells over his Cohn-abetted real estate successes and,
as a crass king of New York society, he increasingly distances himself
from his mentor. Unable to bear giving anyone else credit, he rewrites
history so that, by the end of the film, he can declare to his
biographer Tony Schwartz (Eoin Duffy), who pens _The Art of the
Deal_, that he was born with a killer instinct, an indication of
genetic superiority that just naturally brought him to the top.

Trump’s relationship with Ivana Zelnickova (Maria Bakalova
of _Borat Subsequent Moviefilm_) reflects the same grotesquely
insecure and self-obsessed arc. When he meets her, she’s a Czech
model making her own way in NYC and engaged to someone else, and
he’s boyishly infatuated and courts her assiduously. But once
they’re married, her career ambitions as the interior designer of
his Commodore Hotel and Trump Tower begin to grate on him. Soon he’s
downplaying her contributions, resenting the public attention she’s
getting, and declaring to Cohn that he looks at her and “feels
nothing” because she’s “more like a business partner” than a
wife. Make that “business rival.”

The most controversial scene in the film, as far as whether it
actually happened, is probably the depiction of Trump’s violent rape
of Ivana. But even that is based on Ivana’s own statement
[[link removed]] in
her divorce deposition, a charge she subsequently walked back by
adding, “As a woman I felt violated. . . . I referred to this as a
rape, but I do not want my words to be interpreted in a literal or
criminal sense.”

Trump is almost too effectively evoked by Stan in every petulant pout
and smarmy lying boast and round-shouldered shamble.

The even bigger betrayal, in terms of the film’s structure of
emotional impact, is Trump’s rejection of Cohn when he’s dying of
AIDS. Increasingly inclined to ignore Cohn’s advice, especially the
smarter pieces about not expanding too fast and not incurring massive
debt — the developments that nearly brought Trump down before he
became a TV star with the show _The Apprentice _— Trump is hardly
seeing Cohn by the end of the lawyer’s life, and he’s routinely
rejecting Cohn’s calls.

As screenwriter Sherman puts it, the strangest events in the movie are
the most solidly factual
[[link removed]] ones.
That includes the supposedly diamond-encrusted, Tiffany-made but
“Trump”-engraved cuff links that Trump gives Cohn at a birthday
party he hosts for the dying man that are revealed to be cheap
knockoffs.

In the film, Strong’s Cohn leaves the party weeping, his wheelchair
rolling out with painful slowness while the guests seated around the
long table watch uneasily. Whether that actually happened isn’t
clear in all those “true or false
[[link removed]]” pieces
that follow
[[link removed]] such
films as _The Apprentice._ But it’s the closest the film comes to
evoking sympathy for the devil that was Cohn.

However, it seems that Trump really did have the rooms Cohn stayed in
steam-cleaned after his death in his persistent germophobic ignorance
and paranoia about how AIDS is transmitted.

It’s interesting that, in the view of the director, which is echoed
frequently
[[link removed]] in
reviews, the film is embracing a “radically humanist angle” on
Donald Trump by showing his youthful insecurities and sometimes
slightly reluctant way of adopting Cohn’s more malevolent positions
and practices. But the “humanizing” so often referred to in
discussions of this film seems to suggest Trump is being made to look
like a better person than he was or is. Who seriously doubts Trump’s
humanity, when we have examples of ghastly human behavior on all sides
of us?

In short, _The Apprentice_ makes it plain, with lurid details, that
Donald Trump was and is a vile person. So much so that it’s a
toss-up whether he was ultimately as bad as or worse than Roy Cohn,
the man who did his all to make the United States a rottener place to
be and capped it by helping to foist Trump upon the American public in
a lasting way that seems as incurable as herpes.

* Film
[[link removed]]
* Film Review
[[link removed]]
* The Apprentice
[[link removed]]
* Donald Trump
[[link removed]]
* Roy Cohn
[[link removed]]
* Jeremy Strong
[[link removed]]
* Sebastian Stan
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]
Manage subscription
[[link removed]]
Visit portside.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 



########################################################################

[link removed]

To unsubscribe from the xxxxxx list, click the following link:
[link removed]