Gabriel Sherman of “The Apprentice” in the movie Trump Hates

• “The Apprentice” is a compelling film about the early years of Donald Trump, written by Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman.
• It’s also not flattering to Trump.
• Earlier this year, the film’s financial backers decided they didn’t want to release it. It just hit theaters.

Who wants to see a movie about Donald Trump?

Gabriel Sherman believes: Sherman is a longtime Vanity Fair journalist who wrote and produced “The Apprentice.” It is a Trump biopic that focuses on Trump’s early rise in New York City in the 1970s and 80s and his relationship with Roy Cohn, the disbarred attorney who mentored Trump.

In Sherman’s dramatization, Trump is played by Sebastian Stan, best known to most moviegoers as Bucky Barnes in the Marvel movies. Cohn is played by Jeremy Strong from “Succession.” Both are pretty great, and if I were a professional film critic, I’d tell you to go see the film in theaters when it opens on Friday.

But just a few weeks ago, it wasn’t clear if you’d be able to see “The Apprentice” at all. That’s because of a convoluted backstory involving shy Hollywood studios, a fledgling producer and his father-in-law: Dan Snyder, a billionaire Trump supporter who originally financed the film.

Trump eventually sent Sherman a cease-and-desist letter telling him not to show the film; a Trump spokesman is now calling the film “garbage” and “pure fiction sensationalizing lies that have long been debunked.”

Sherman told me the story on the newest episode of the My Channels podcast, but you can read an edited excerpt of our conversation here:

This is not a pro-Trump movie. But it also humanizes Trump and creates a three-dimensional character who has flaws and maybe even some strengths. How did you go about portraying him as someone who might have positive attributes – and how might an audience think about that in 2024?

I was really surprised and struggled to understand this discussion about why it would be controversial to humanize Donald Trump.

This is the same reason some people say you shouldn’t pay Donald Trump.

I disagree with that line of thinking.

He is someone who is in our lives. He is real. He is not an alien from outer space. He is a person in the flesh. And to try to understand him as a person without shying away and whitewashing any of his flaws, I think that’s one of the necessary things of journalism as well as art and drama.

I am endlessly curious about people with whom I may vehemently disagree. I’ve written a lot about (former Fox News chief) Roger Ailes and Fox News. And obviously, I didn’t share any of Ailes’ politics. But I was obsessed with trying to understand how someone like this could exist.

When I was doing the research for this film (I found) this wonderful and incredible interview on YouTube that we’re recreating in the film. It’s Donald Trump’s first national TV interview since 1980. The Trump you see then is mild. He’s articulate, he’s charming. He bears almost no resemblance to the character we see on our TV screens all the time today.

So it got me thinking – how did that person become this egotistical orange maniac that we see every day? I wanted to connect those dots.

You have a Trump supporter financing this movie, which is in no way a movie a Trump supporter would want to see, much less finance. How did this happen?

Before we got the funding to make this movie last year, no one would make this movie. None of the major studios would finance the film’s production. So we had to raise money as a completely independent feature.

Last year we worked with a production company called Kinematics, which is run by a young producer named Mark Rapaport. He is married to the daughter of Republican billionaire Dan Snyder. (Cinematics declined to comment.)

Former owner of the Washington NFL team.

Yes. Kind of a notorious figure in the NFL world. And Dan Snyder loaned money to Mark Rapaport to support his production company. And so, indirectly, money from a Republican Trump donor was paying for the production of this film.

That you were aware of. And he must have been happy?

Obviously, we had many conversations with our funders to make sure there wouldn’t be a conflict. The nightmare scenario would be that we shoot this movie and then Dan Snyder hates the movie and is somehow able to block it. Which is basically what happened.

So Snyder gives his son-in-law money to fund this production company, and his son-in-law says, “I’m going to use some of this money to fund this Trump movie, which is not explicitly an anti-Trump movie. , but it’s definitely not a pro-Trump movie.” Do you think Dan Snyder understood what he was funding?

Unclear. I know he didn’t read the script. So, I didn’t understand the degree to which he understood the substance of the film.

We wrapped production at the end of January 2024. And Mark Rapaport, the owner of Kinematics, basically tried to block the movie. He didn’t like the cut. He particularly disliked the sexual assault scene with Ivana. Show it to Dan Snyder. Dan walked out of the screening room. He hated the movie. So basically a kind of cold war between us and our financier had started in the spring of 2024 before we took it to Cannes.

Did you bring a film to Cannes knowing that the people who financed it didn’t want it to be shown?

Yes. And they tried to stop us from going to Cannes. They had no right to do that because we had sold the film to a French distributor who had the legal right to show it in France. But yes, this was already being played before Cannes. And it kind of snowballed after the festival.

This seems like a true half-empty, half-full situation. On the one hand, the people who put up the money to make the movie are doing everything they can to make sure it doesn’t happen. But this is also a controversy that sells the film. How close were you to half-empty versus half-full over the summer?

Totally empty. At the end of August, we went to the Telluride Film Festival not knowing if our film was going to be shown because if we didn’t get Kinematics to back down and let us buy them and move on, they would the release of the film was stopped. in America before the election. And then it’s unclear what his business prospects would be after the election. It would be so uncertain who would ever want to buy the film at that point.

This is going to sound pretty cavalier of me, but: apparently there’s an “unseen Trump movie” that will immediately have people clamoring to see it.

Of course. But in the midst of it, we had to take it day by day. For my wife and I, it was like an emotional roller coaster. Every day for the month of August, I checked in with my producers: “What’s going on with the talks? What are the lawyers saying?” Everything was done through lawyers. It was such a nerve-wracking process because it was so far out of my hands.

And yes, it all worked. And people will be able to see this movie. But if someone wants to get into show business and make a movie, I don’t recommend doing it this way.

You said you were surprised none of the major studios and distributors wanted to pick it up. Was it really a surprise to you?

I thought someone would Maybe not a giant publicly traded media conglomerate. But there are studios that take risks, independent studios: A24, Neon. I really thought Amazon/MGM – Jeff Bezos owned The Washington Post. He doesn’t really have any tolerance for Trump mishegoss. I thought there would be a deep-pocketed buyer in Hollywood who would see this as a real moment to fight for artistic freedom.

And you think it hasn’t existed because people are afraid of the repercussions of a future Trump administration? Or that they are worried about having a The Bud Light moment?

I wasn’t in the room so I don’t know what specific feedback specific buyers had. But the general consensus I heard was some version of no. 1.

These companies worried that if Trump became president, he could use the government’s regulatory power — whether it’s the FCC or the Justice Department or the FTC — to go after their businesses in some way .

And we’ve seen precedent for this: Trump tried to block the AT&T-Time Warner merger during his first term because he was apparently unhappy with how Time Warner-owned CNN covered it.

His DOJ antitrust guy insists up and down it was not the case.

Whether that was true or not, the end result was that other companies in Hollywood saw that precedent and basically said, “It’s not worth it to us.”

And even if I’m disappointed in her, I can understand her. I mean, if you’re running a company and you think, “Well, I could acquire this movie and maybe make some money, but I’m going to have to deal with lawyers and regulatory crap for the next three years.” I mean, I can understand.

And I think that’s so scary. Trump talks a lot about “weaponizing the government.” This is a very specific case where he has now influenced the corporate and creative decisions of these Hollywood companies to basically reduce the content they would object to.