EXCLUSIVE: When it comes to The Apprentice film screening Saturday night at the Telluride Film Festival, Donald Trump has proved again to be all bluster, no bite.
The former president’s campaign may have sent out a vitriolic cease-and-desist letter earlier this year after its debut at the Cannes Film Festival and threatened legal action against the Ali Abbasi-directed and Gabriel Sherman-written movie, but they’ve done nothing since.
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In late May, Trump’s Dhillon Law Group attorneys gave the Apprentice filmmakers until May 27 to essentially shut down anyone ever seeing their acclaimed film in America. Calling the Canadian-, Irish- and U.S.-funded flick “a concoction of lies that repeatedly defames President Trump and constitutes direct foreign interference in America’s elections,” the Alexandra, VA-based lawyers swore that if the movie did “not immediately cease and desist all distribution and marketing of this libelous farce,” then Team Trump would “be forced to pursue all appropriate legal remedies.”
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With The Apprentice set for a U.S. release likely on or near October 11 via ex-Open Road CEO Tom Ortenberg’s Briarcliff Entertainment, it looks like the Trump team has decided to walk away from the matter and hope it just fades away, according to sources close to the situation.
While this being the impulse-control-deficient Trumpland, there is a chance that could change, and a lawsuit could still end up coming. However, right now, the First Amendment is looking pretty good for The Apprentice filmmakers.
There is also the fact that Trump’s tight race against Kamala Harris is about to move into the election’s fourth quarter right after Labor Day.
Which means, with the biopic about Trump (Sebastian Stan) as the protégé of noxious lawyer Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong) playing now to a packed house for a suddenly announced screening at the prestigious Colorado festival, those empty ultimatums of May look like silly saber rattling by the former Celebrity Apprentice host.
Which is nothing new.
Still employing Cohn’s old dirty tricks, Trump frequently vows legal retribution, and frequently fails to follow through, or else sees his efforts tossed out of court. A fact that director Abbasi noted about Trump at a May 21 Cannes press conference: “Everybody talks about him suing a lot of people, they don’t talk about his success rate.”
To that, Abbasi, Stan, Strong, Sherman and producer/Golden Media boss Amy Baer are at Telluride’s Galaxy Theater tonight for the screening that started at 10 p.m. local time. On-stage, Abbasi told the 500-strong crowd that The Apprentice “is not a political hit piece.”
As for the Trump campaign, all they offered when contact by Deadline today about The Apprentice distribution deal and the Telluride screening was a near complete rehash of their statement against the film when it first opened at Cannes three months ago.
“This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalizes lies that have been long debunked,” Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung told Deadline today of The Apprentice, which features a scene of sexual assault by Trump on his first wife Ivana (played by Borat alum Maria Bakalova).
“As with the illegal Kamala witch-hunts, this is election interference by Hollywood elites right before November, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked. This ‘film’ is pure malicious defamation, should never see the light of day, and doesn’t even deserve a place in the straight-to-DVD section of a bargain bin at a soon-to-be-closed discount movie store, it belongs in a dumpster fire.”
With “Kamala” replacing then candidate “Biden” and “right before November” added, this statement from the Trump campaign is exactly the same one they put out on May 20 when the lawsuit that has yet to materialize against The Apprentice filmmakers was first threatened.
Or to use a recent line from Harris about Trump’s campaign tactics: “Same old tired playbook.”