Political films that spew out some explosive truths are essentially considered part of an agenda. As the presidential elections approach, Ali Abbas’ ‘The Apprentice’ is one such film making the waves. Released on October 11, the film revolves around the Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s life. Needless to say, it brings forth some incidents that are simply too crazy to be real.
While Trump himself has trashed the film as “fake and classless”, even viewers who may not entirely be his fans are casting doubts over the things shown in the film. The reason is simply because of how outrageous they are. However, director Ali Abbas stands firmly with what the film conveys, and so does the rest of its crew. Here’s why the film is so controversial and what it is exactly that it claims to be true.
Donald Trump Rapes Ivana In A Harrowing Scene
Viewers of ‘The Apprentice’, including Donald Trump himself, are shocked to watch the film unfold some very distasteful incidents in the Republican leader’s life. However, the film’s crew says it’s just the tip of the iceberg. “The funny thing is, everything in the movie that seems the most shocking is actually completely based on real events,” screenwriter and journalist Gabriel Sherman recently said during his interview with Entertainment Weekly. “Very little has been dramatized,” he added.
The film’s script was written by Sherman himself, based on his coverage of Donald Trump’s affairs for two decades. The film’s chief focus is on young Trump’s rise to power, with his infamous attorney Roy Cohn by his side. The film is a brave take, where Trump’s character played by Sebastian Stan, takes diet pills, undergoes plastic surgery, and rapes his wife Ivana — all heinous acts that Ivana admittedly once testified about in a deposition. She later backed away from the allegations, claiming she felt “violated” by Trump, but it wasn’t rape.
In ‘The Apprentice’, the melodrama does not spring merely from Trump’s real estate deals but plunges into his personal life including some moments that can make the audience highly uncomfortable. The film does not hold back on one of its most contentious moments: a harrowing scene depicting Trump raping Ivana, based on her 1990 divorce deposition. In the movie, the assault occurs after Ivana gifts Trump the book ‘The G Spot’ as a subtle hint about their declining love life.
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Although the situation is not anything like accounts in real life, Sherman claimed Ivana’s deposition was highly graphic, and that at the time of the attack, Trump was recuperating from a scalp surgery. “As she described it, Trump was recovering from his scalp surgery and was having these debilitating headaches, and she kind of provoked him, and he flew into a rage and threw her down on the bed and pulled out her hair and assaulted her.”
The film also dramatizes a lighter moment: Trump’s infamous prenup meeting with Ivana. There, Cohn presents a contract that sends her storming out of the restaurant, furious over a clause that demands she return all gifts if they divorce. Of course, Trump’s desperate chase to win her back! That too is based on real life, Sherman claimed.
“The sidewalk scene was inspired by Harry Hurt’s book ‘Lost Tycoon’,” Sherman revealed, “where Trump famously convinced Ivana to come back inside. As for the lawyer present at the real meeting? “It was a lawyer Cohn handpicked for Ivana—so the whole thing was corrupt.”
Donald Trump’s Unethical Business Philosophy
One of the other shocking scenes features Donald Trump’s lawyer Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, blackmailing a city official to extort a $400 million tax abatement for Trump’s Grand Hyatt Hotel. Speaking about the same, Sherman shared that Cohn had recorded any of his customers to blackmail them later. “Roy’s use of blackmail, and especially tape recording phone calls, is well documented,” Sherman explained.
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“Roy had a woman in his basement who actually ran a switchboard, and she would tape and listen to all the conversations. I found it so powerful that Roy would basically tape-record his own clients for blackmail and for leverage,” he said, adding that it was an apt example of Trump’s philosophy for winning – to be “willing to almost betray your own people to win.”
The tax deal worked out by the city with Grand Hyatt was signed off on by a city official who later took a job at Cohn’s law firm — a coincidence that raised a few eyebrows. So Donald Trump may have been the king of real estate deals, but in ‘The Apprentice’, it is really his relationship with notorious Roy Cohn that steals the show.
Roy Cohn’s Townhouse Parties And Sexuality
Another scandalous issue covered extensively in the film is Cohn’s infamous townhouse parties, which threw Manhattan’s élite together with the mob bosses in a maelstrom of drugs, excess, and debauchery. Cohn’s legendary orgies used to be populated with people like Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner, and Andy Warhol. More thrilling is how the film imagines that Trump had caught Cohn in flagrante delicto.
How much of an illusion that might be — it’s unclear if he ever caught Cohn in the act, as Sherman notes. “Roy wasn’t shy about his sexuality,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “We wanted to capture that moment when Donald is forced to confront it, though neither of them would ever speak of it again,” he added.
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In another scene ripe to be exposed to the sun, Trump gifts Tiffany diamond cufflinks to Roy Cohn. But when Cohn proudly shows them to Ivana, she lets everyone know, they’re knockoffs. “We put it in because it is just the perfect expression of Donald’s shamelessness,” Sherman said.
Donald Trump’s Plastic Surgery
Among the movie’s most memorable scenes is when a shrinking forehead and rising paunch co-conspirators confront Trump in a plastic surgeon’s office. While the good doctor might suggest diet and exercise, Trump famously waves it off with his bizarre theory that human bodies only have a certain amount of energy that mustn’t be wasted on physical activity. Thus, liposuction and scalp reduction surgery follow.
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Although Trump has always denied going under the knife, Sherman argues there’s proof of it. “Ivana testified that Donald got liposuction, scalp surgery, and was on diet pills,” Sherman explained, referencing Harry Hurt’s book, ‘Lost Tycoon’. “It’s all backed by the record.”
Given the volatile material and Trump’s notorious litigious personality, Sherman and the filmmakers took extreme precautions to ensure the film factually fell into the “bulletproof” category to avoid any legal troubles. “I submitted an annotated draft of the script to our lawyers,” Sherman said. “So it was rigorously supported by the research, and everyone on the filmmaking team was comfortable with that before we went into production,” he added.
‘The Apprentice’ was released on October 11 and is in theatres now.
