You may or may not have been paying attention to the drama surrounding the film, “The Apprentice.” Debuting earlier this year at the Cannes Film Festival, the film is the touted “Donald Trump origin story” drama. Directed by Dutch/Iranian filmmaker Ali Abbas (“Holy Spider,” “Border”), the drama stars Sebastian Stan as the future president and Jeremy Strong as his consigliere and mentor Roy Cohn. Cohn is known as one of the worst bad-faith operators in the conservative moment. It met with solid to respectable reviews, and it seemed like “The Apprentice” would be an excellent acquisition title for Netflix et al.. Still, the Trump element made the film a dangerous hot-button topic that most major distributors were afraid to touch.
While Puck reported this morning that the film would be screwed if it didn’t find a distributor before the election, in perfect time, today Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment would be releasing the movie for a pre-election U.S. release on October 11, as well as an awards campaign push, according to various trades. “The Apprentice” will also make its North American premiere at the Telluride Film Festival.
The film was met with solid reviews (read ours here) but made negative headlines because of the rape scene in it (Trump violently throws his then-wife Ivana, played by Maria Bakalova, to the ground and proceeds to have nonconsensual sex with her). Ivana Trump alleged this attack during their ’90s divorce trial, though she later disavowed the allegation.
Either way, with all the apparent legal hassles from releasing the film and in-fighting from its producers and investors—the pro-Trump billionaire Dan Snyder’s Kinematics company who helped the film find a domestic was reportedly displeased with the film’s depiction of Trump and even had potentially sought to block its release—most studios stayed away.
Roy Cohn was a legal attorney in New York for 30 years. Donald Trump was one of his clients, and he taught him everything he knew about his shady and duplicitous maneuvering. Cohn was such a notorious meddler in politics, mentoring the despicable Roger Stone, that a scathing documentary was made about him, “Where’s My Roy Cohn?” featuring some telling quotes about people who knew him and his utter “contempt for the law.”
Either way, “The Apprentice” tells, in part, how Donald Trump became who he became thanks to the advice and tutelage of his infamously wicked and bulldog-ish attorney.
Briarcliff Entertainment has not made an official announcement, and its Telluride appearance was not revealed in the initial lineup announcement, so it appears the indie distributor will take a low-key, word-of-mouth approach for now. No trailer has been released, but you can watch the Roy Cohn doc trailer below in the interim.
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