Imagine you are a movie producer. There you are sitting in your office, doing whatever producers do all day: make phone calls, hit on your assistant, talk about your ongoing juice cleanse. Then a screenwriter walks in and pitches a script in which the two lead roles are Donald Trump and Roy Cohn. You love it. You think, “Finally! The sympathetic and heroic story that Donald Trump and Roy Cohn deserve!”
You would be a fucking idiot if you thought that.
Which brings us to Dan Snyder: billionaire, litigious pervert, former owner of the football team then known as the Washington R******s, and apparently a fucking idiot.
Snyder is not a movie producer, but he reportedly was an investor in a new movie called The Apprentice, a movie about Donald Trump premiering on Monday at the Cannes Film Festival. The film traces the life of a young Trump in the 1970s and early 1980s as he tries to make it big in Manhattan real estate. Trump’s lawyer and consigliere at the time was Roy Cohn, one of the most all-around abusive, cruel, rotten sociopaths of a human being to ever walk the Earth.
Roy Cohn! A man so despised that 40 years after his death, people still spit on the ground at the mention of his name. A man so terrible that he makes Vladimir Putin look like Clifford the Big Red Dog.
Given this objectively correct description of Cohn coupled with, well, *waves hand in direction of Donald Trump*, what would make anyone think a movie focused on the two of them would be sympathetic? The best thing you could say about 1970s-era Donald Trump and Roy Cohn was that neither one of them was the Times Square Torso Killer. Allegedly.
Not Dan Snyder, though. From Variety:
Sources say Snyder, a friend of Trump’s who donated $1.1 million to his inaugural committee and Trump Victory in 2016 and $100,000 to his 2020 presidential campaign, put money into the film via Kinematics because he was under the impression that it was a flattering portrayal of the 45th president. Snyder finally saw a cut of the film in February and was said to be furious.
LOL, and may we add, LMAO.
Snyder reportedly then hired lawyers to try and prevent the filmmakers from releasing The Apprentice, which is funny because the movie does not yet have a distribution deal. The producers are premiering it at Cannes in the hopes of drumming up some interest.
Shoot, for all we know, some clever publicists planted this story to gin up some controversy. It says a great deal about people’s opinion of Dan Snyder that it would ring so very, very true. Those are some good publicists!
Sources familiar with the back and forth say Snyder took issue with multiple aspects of the film and weighed in on what should be changed. In earlier versions of the screenplay, “The Apprentice” featured a scene where Trump rapes Ivana.
Did Snyder not read this script before he agreed to put money into filming it? Is it possible Dan Snyder does not know how to read? It would explain a few things, and thus it would be irresponsible not to speculate.
Our advice to budding filmmakers out there: always read the script and never, ever, ever, EVER have anything to do with Dan Snyder. Pretty much the entire NFL will back us up on that one.
OPEN THREAD.
[Variety]
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