The Movie Trump Doesn't Want You To See
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Welcome back to American Fever Dream. I am thrilled to be joined by Gabriel Sherman, Vanity Fair special correspondent and screenwriter of the new movie The Apprentice. Welcome, Gabriel. Thanks, Sammy. Nice to be here. Thank you so much for joining us and congratulations on the film. I really loved it.

and I'm excited to talk to you about it. Thank you. Yeah, it's been seven years in the making, so we're finally ready to share it with the world. I vividly remember reading your reporting in the early years of the Trump administration, some of the best, of course, but it was also quite a

a fight to get this movie released. Can you tell us a bit about that journey? What kind of stood in the way and how ultimately you got it to be released before the election? Yeah. So just backing up, the origin of the movie began in the

the spring of 2017. At the time, I was a correspondent for New York Magazine covering, I covered the Trump campaign in 2016 and the early months of his White House. And, you know, I was struck by something people like Roger Stone had told me during the campaign, which is that, you know, Donald was using a lot of the strategies that Roy Cohn had taught him, or people would say, you know, he really sounds a lot like Roy used to.

And it came to me in a flash. I was like, that's the movie. I was like, Donald Trump is Roy Cohn's apprentice. Like we can reclaim the title of the apprentice for the force of good. And so I came up with this idea and more I dug into the research and sort of understood their relationship. It really took on this larger than life Shakespearean aspect. And

So I sold the movie to my producer, Amy Bear in Hollywood, and I set out to write the script. And very quickly, once, you know, about a year later, when we had a copy of the script that we both felt was in good shape, you know, we started to explore, you know, the financing and how to get this movie made. And very quickly, word came back from the major Hollywood studios and streamers that

This was not a movie that they were gonna finance. They did not want to in any way touch this political topic. They didn't want Trump to use the power of the government to go after their businesses. Trump famously tried to block the AT&T takeover of Time Warner

because he hated how CNN, which is owned by Time Warner, was covering him. So he basically sued to block that huge business deal. So all the other major companies in Hollywood saw that and didn't want to suffer the same fate. So we really had to pursue this as a totally independent movie. We raised money from overseas and an equity investor. And getting any movie made is a miracle, but especially this one, it took...

you know, years with many false starts. You know, I thought the movie was going to be made several times and we are actually weeks away from shooting in 2023. A year ago, we were about to roll the cameras and the money fell apart. So everyone had to go home. So it's been definitely a roller coaster ride.

And we can get into like the more recent mishigas around, you know, our financier trying to block the movie for release this fall. But more broadly, I think the struggle of this movie was that there was just no way that Hollywood money was going to pay to make it. Well, tell us about that. How did your financier ultimately try to block it this past year? And how did it get out there? Yeah.

Yeah, so our financiers, so we raise money from overseas, but we had our largest single investor was the son-in-law of a Republican billionaire. Mark Rappaport is the son-in-law of the Republican billionaire Dan Snyder. And Dan Snyder had loaned his son-in-law money to finance movies. Mark has a film production company. And it really came down to this major disagreement between

our financier and the filmmaker Ali Abassi and myself, the writer, about this scene, spoiler alert, where Donald Trump sexually assaults his wife, Ivana. But basically, they wanted us to take out this very incendiary scene. We felt it was essential, not only because I believe Ivana Trump's allegations, which was the foundation for dramatizing the scene, but I also believe that Trump has been credibly accused of

by, you know, more than a dozen women of sexual assault. He was found liable by a New York jury for sexual assaulting the writer, Eugene Carroll. So this is a very, this is an aspect of Trump's character that I felt the movie really had to address. And so we dug our heels in and didn't take the scene out. And our financier, Mark Rappaport, basically then said, well, we're not going to distribute the movie in the United States. And there was

There was a lot of back and forth negotiations. And ultimately, the filmmaking team raised money from other investors to buy him out. And that deal came together like hours before the movie premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, made its North American premiere in August. And I flew out to Telluride. It was over Labor Day weekend, not even knowing if the movie was going to play because it

The lawyers were still haggling over closing this deal. And it came together. We bought the movie back from our financier, and now the coast is clear to distribute it. Wow. And it's interesting that it was particularly over that scene because I remember the source of that scene and that anecdote came from Ivana's biography. It came from the book. Originally came from the book, The Lost Tycoon by the journalist Harry Hurt.

And he, it's an amazing book. It's published in 1993. It's essential reading to understand the Trump's early years. And Harry Hurt, the journalist, got a copy of Ivana Trump's divorce deposition, which she makes this allegation under oath.

under the penalty of perjury. And in fact, the scene that she describes in the divorce deposition is even worse than what we portrayed in the movie. And I just felt like even though subsequently, Ivana Trump, you know, said, I didn't mean this was a, you know, rape in the criminal sense. And then she completely disavowed it when Trump was running for president 25 years later. I felt

Her version of the story that she made under oath with the highest penalty of lying. I mean, if she made this thing up, then she's admitting to committing perjury, which is a crime. You know, I looked at the totality of her statements and I really felt what she said in 1990 under oath was the most emotionally true. I believe that version over all the others. And that's why it ended up in the movie.

Right. I mean, it also shows that he really did and does care about having this anecdote removed from the record because totally didn't he insist that Harry Hurt's book would be distributed with like an insert that corrects this story? Exactly. So Trump's lawyers pressured the publisher, I believe it was W.W. Norton, to clarify, you know, that this that Ivana wasn't alleging, you know, that Trump committed a crime, that Donald committed a crime.

So, yes, he he has been very much trying to sanitize the story from the very beginning. And, you know, I just felt that a movie that chronicles his rise to power in the 1980s has to.

tackle this subject because his misogyny and, you know, he's talked about this on the Access Hollywood tape about groping women. You know, this is clearly, you know, his philosophy. And I felt the character that I wrote, which is my, you know, fictional interpretation of Donald Trump, this character would do something like this.

Yeah. Knowing how and why it took so long for this movie about his origins to get made, I was thinking as I was watching it, you know, this would have been really helpful during his first term.

But I almost came away thinking, well, maybe it's better to rewrite his history after rather than have it kind of fade into, you know, all the pieces about him. But do you feel afraid that even during his second run and even now that there is so much fear amongst people?

the moneyed class really standing up to him? Well, I'm disappointed in, in official Hollywood, you know, the big studios and streamers. I, you know, I feel like they capitulated to Trump's threats. You know, when the movie premiered at the Cannes film festival in May, Trump's campaign sent me and the director, Ali Abassi, a cease and desist letter, all this bluster, we're going to sue you. And,

It sounded like an unhinged Trump rally speech. You know, they accused the movie of being foreign election interference because we raise money from overseas. And so, you know, I've been covering Trump as a journalist for 20 years. My first job in journalism was as a real estate reporter for the New York Observer. You know, I started interviewing him when I was like in my early 20s. So, you know, this is just what he does. He blusters and he threatens. And I thought,

you know, whatever. But it was successful because his threats, you know, scared Hollywood from acquiring this movie. As I said earlier, they didn't want to pay to finance the movie. But once we finished it, we had a finished product to show the world at the Cannes Film Festival.

They still didn't want to buy it. On a silver platter, we were like, here's the finished movie. Amelia Perez, which is a film about a transgender drug cartel boss, was bought by Netflix for about $12 million, right around the time we were selling our movie. All these big sales were happening, and ours didn't sell. We eventually found a very small distributor named Briarcliff Entertainment,

who had the guts to, to buy it and put it out in America. I guess to your question, am I scared that the, you know, the establishment won't stand up to Trump? I mean, it's less fear and more just, as I said, disappointment. I feel like the bill bullies respond to people that stand up. And I think his demagoguery has been allowed to, to continue and,

Because so many people who have the real power in America, you know, like their taxes to be low. Right. I mean, so many so much of the Republican Party just tolerates him because they're happy that he cuts taxes. So, yeah, I hope, you know, maybe that this is like a turning point with this movie that people will see that Trump is a lot of hot air and we can stand up to him. I mean, if you look at the history of Hollywood, like in the 1970s, they were, you know, distributing such.

you know, risky, groundbreaking films like All the President's Men. And now, you know, the industry is just, you know, all they want seemingly is, you know, superhero IP movies. So I'm hoping that the pendulum swings back the other way.

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Something I found very interesting about the movie is having now watched Donald Trump so consistently for like a decade at this point, he doesn't seem to have really changed that much. No. But in the movie, he does seem to evolve. And that, what you had said earlier about, you know, he was the apprentice of Roy Cohn, that was exactly the thought I had had during the movies. Having covered him now for 20 years, like you said,

How have you seen him evolve? First, I'll just talk about the why I decided to focus on this period in the writing of the film. When I when I came up with the idea, I was like, this is the only way to make a movie about Donald Trump is to make a movie about him as a young man, because the minute you try to dramatize anything close to the present day.

It's just going to become like an SNL parody. You just can't. Trump is so ubiquitous. He's so omnipresent in our consciousness on TV. There's no way an actor can convey

the Trump that we see convincingly, no matter how talented the actor is. So I was like, but when he's a young man, he's a very different person. He's younger. He's actually semi-handsome. The transformation of that character into the one we know is actually really interesting. So that was, yes, that's why I decided to focus on those years of change. Today, I mean, what I argue in the film is

is that really by the late 80s, the Trump quote character that we all see now was sort of set. Like he became this person that was...

you know, playing a version of himself. He had this persona of, of the, you know, the businessman, the dealmaker, even though it was, you know, all full of shit and his, you know, his business was a house of cards. He hasn't changed much since then. I mean, he's declined. I mean, the change that I see is really just the change in terms of, you know, his, him aging, you know, his, him seeming to become more detached from reality. I mean, he's,

I like when I watch Trump rallies on TV. I don't know if you do this. I like to watch the faces of the people behind him, the Trump supporters, because sometimes he starts talking about stuff and they just they don't they get really embarrassed for him. Like they don't know what he's doing. And some people start looking at their shoes and like it's really uncomfortable. Like that's what I see is like he's like the grandpa who just starts rambling at the dinner table and

And no one knows quite to like speak up to be like, okay, grandpa, like, and that's enough now. Like, and, uh, and so I just, the change that I see is really, I think he's a less lucid version of the, you know, when he ran in 2016, he was, if you watch the videos, he's just a much sharper version of himself. Absolutely. I can't even believe that I thought he sounded as crazy as I think he sounds now then.

When he could string together a few sentences that were ultimately meaningless, but still people could, could ascribe meaning to them. What you're saying kind of reminds me of what Mark Cuban was saying like a week ago that he doesn't make any sense. And it's his supporters and his surrogates who have to construct meaning out of what he's saying. That is somehow an acceptable thing for him to be saying in public. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, of course, that's the what's the famous line that somebody said about Trump? We don't take him literally. We take him. We don't take him literally. We take him seriously. Exactly. Yeah. Like basically like, you know, he he'll say something insane and then we'll just try to figure out, you know, what it what it actually means. And no, I think there's a lot of that. The Republican Party has basically become.

vehicle to translate his his obsessions into into policy I mean I this is not an original idea anymore but I mean I think it still just bears repeating that you know Trump has turned the Republican Party into a cult of personality I mean that's that's the only way to understand our current politics and and I think the movie

shows how Roy Cohn, in many ways, within his world of New York power,

and politics. Roy Cohn really did also kind of have a similar cult of personality. And I think Donald saw the power that Roy wielded. And whether consciously or not, I think he has done a similar thing, but just on a much bigger scale. I mean, Roy Cohn was not, I mean, he was a nationally known figure because of his work for Joe McCarthy in the 50s and being part of the Red Scare and the anti-communist hysteria. But

Roy Cohn was really a creature of the Upper East Side of Manhattan. I mean, he was such a specific

power broker fixer that, you know, his, his influence was, was really in that world. And Trump took all of those ideas and lessons about how to, how to wield power and the three rules that Roy teaches him in the movie, which is you always attack, you always deny, and you never, you always claim victory. And Trump does that now on the national stage. And I think that's what's

That definitely comes through clear in the message of the movie.

Just one last thing. So The Apprentice was, I thought, a genius title, has three layers of meaning at least. And a lot of people will say that The Apprentice is what sold Donald Trump to the American people. To what extent do you buy into that narrative as this really key factor? I agree. I mean, he was, prior to the TV show,

basically a washed up casino owner, right? I mean, his businesses were bankrupt. You know, I worked at the New York Observer in the early 2000s, right? Before the Apprentice went on the air. Before Jared got it? Yeah, before Jared bought it, Arthur Carter, a Wall Street financier, owned the paper at the time. And we had this legendary editor, Peter Kaplan. And there was this rule at the paper, this kind of unofficial rule,

that we couldn't quote Trump in stories because he was so overexposed. He really like, I felt like he was sitting at Trump Tower with nothing to do and just talking to reporters and getting his name in the papers. And it's because like he didn't really have, you know, he wasn't building, the banks weren't lending him money. He was, he was doing those licensing things where he would stick his name on buildings. But it wasn't until The Apprentice came along that

you know, reinvented his career as a reality TV star. So, you know, the TV show made him incredibly rich. You know, there's this new book out by Sue Craig and Russ Buechner. Is it Lucky Loser? Lucky Loser, yeah. Sue Craig and Russ Buechner at the New York Times. And, you know, basically the thesis of this book is they look at all of his business deals and they show that, you know, all of his early deals were financed by his rich father, Fred Trump. And then the only other real enduring source of his wealth

was the TV show, The Apprentice. And so, you know, The Apprentice both made him rich and even richer and also gave him a national platform. You know, the joke in New York amongst people who've known Trump for over the decades is that

the people who know Trump the most like him the least. So it's like his followers who they only know the version of Trump from the TV show think of him as this successful, you know, businessman tycoon. And the people from New York City who have been living with him, you know, obviously had a much different idea of him before the TV show. So I think that that theory holds water that

the TV show The Apprentice was definitely essential to paving the way for him to become president. Definitely. And, you know, the first reality TV show presidency, and it really, really did quite a number. And he has definitely changed the way we look at our political landscape. And if you watch the VP debate, it felt so...

almost that these two people were kind of civil, even if JD Vance was lying. The substance was so much more than we're used to. We weren't talking about eating pets and stuff. Yeah. And I mean, the way he has dominated our conscience, our collective conscious is just really been too much.

But thank you so much, Gabriel. I am thrilled for people to see this movie. Where can people watch it?

So it will be released nationwide on Friday, October 11th. So any movie theater in a town near you, it will be playing. And it's just the performances are incredible. Sebastian Stan, who was a star in the Marvel movies, disappears into this role as young Trump. And Jeremy Strong from Succession plays Roy Cohn, like, again, like a completely transformational performance. And Maria Bakalova plays Donald's wife, Ivana. And

I'm just, you know, every screenwriter kind of rolls the dice when their movie actually gets made that, you know, now it's in the hands of the actors. And like, I'm just like, so lucky that I got these, these people to do these roles, because it's like,

It's better than I actually imagined when I was writing it. And the last thing I want to say about the film is, you know, we've talked a lot about kind of the politics around Trump. But, you know, the movie itself is kind of anti-political in that it's a human. It's my lens for trying to look at.

Donald's relationship with Roy is through a human lens. It's a humanist movie. It's not like a polemic, a satire where from the first scene in the movie, you're meant to be beaten over the head that Trump is bad. And it's really this emotional journey you go on with these two characters. And I think it will surprise a lot of people and it might make them feel things about Trump that they didn't expect to feel. But I think that's what's so...

interesting about it because we've never had a media, a cultural moment where we've really tried to understand Trump as a person. He's always either the subject of comedy or he's like deified by his MAGA followers. And this is,

trying to do something much messier and more interesting in the middle, which is what was he like as an actual three-dimensional character with his flaws, but also his, you know, his dreams and his desires. And, um, it's about the corruption of a soul and what, what that does in the pursuit of power. So it was my way of trying to understand this character who's been such a big role in our, in our, all of our lives.

I can't speak to what other people will think, but I will say I thought it was a great movie. I think you're right. The actors completely disappear into the characters. It is a very, very actor-driven film. And, you know, I think it humanizes him, but not in a way that makes you –

Not in a way that's like, oh, I now agree or I want to align with that. I didn't want to let him off the hook for anything, but I wanted to humanize him so that it kind of brings him down to earth as well because I feel like so much of the conversation around Trump is that he's this kind of sweet, generous, like,

almost alien creature who comes from somewhere and is so different than all of us. And, and in fact, he's very pedestrian and there's a, just a, a normalcy about him, at least at the beginning of the film when he was in his early life. And that's,

I think that brings him down to earth in a way and is very powerful because we haven't seen that before. That has been the energy of this year, I think, bringing him down to earth and where he starts. Yeah, like the whole Tim Walls thing about calling him weird and seeing him fall asleep in the trials in the courtroom. Like he was, he's been kind of,

diminished a little bit. Yeah. I mean, obviously his followers are devoted to him as ever. But yes, I feel like in some quarters he's been kind of deflated a bit.

Yeah. And I think, you know, just one last thing about the writing is that, you know, I've read countless articles, biographies, anecdotes, seen it all about Donald Trump. But what I thought that you did really well was, I guess I would call it, you had like a great economy of anecdotes within the script and the way that you were able to sort of address all these key things that

are meaningful anecdotes that people need to know about him, but in a way that didn't feel...

Like they were shoehorned because most people aren't aware of all those characters, those pieces of his character, like the way he betrayed his brother and all of that. Like, yeah, like I, I really, I mean, the story of the film is really the story about how Donald loses his humanity. And as he gains power, he becomes less of a person. His soul is being eaten away. And so there's these moments through the movie in his relationships where

with his brother, with his wife, with his father, where we see how he's becoming more and more ruthless. And that's something that I think a movie can do in a way that journalism really can't, which is to make you feel

something. I mean, journalism is so good about conveying information, but it's sometimes, you know, if you read, when you read articles about Trump, sometimes we become desensitized to it because it's words, but there's something so powerful. At least for me, when I saw Sebastian Stan's performance, the scene, the sexual assault scene with Ivana, like it hit me in a way that I did not expect because, you know, we talk about

Donald Trump being a sexual predator and he's been accused credibly by, you know, so many women about this behavior. And yet to see Sebastian, you know, do this scene, play the character in action, it's shocking. And, and maybe that will cut through, maybe that will be a wake up of, you know, do, do people want to elect a president who, you know, would violently assault his wife? I mean, that's,

I don't know. Maybe, maybe America does, but that's, I think that's what hopefully this movie can do is, is to kind of shake people out of our, what's the word I'm thinking of? Numbness towards numbness. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. I think, I think it's, it's just seeing it and seeing it's played. So convincingly real might, might break the mold a little bit. Thank you so much again, Gabriel. And we will see you next time on the American fever dream podcast.

American Fever Dream is produced and edited by Samantha Gatzik. Social media by Candice Monega and Bridget Schwartz. Be sure to follow us on Instagram and TikTok at Betches News and follow me, Sammy Sage at Sammy and V at Under the Desk News. And of course, send us your emails to AmericanFeverDream at Betches.com.