When Melania Trump’s documentary (Melania: Twenty Days To History) was announced, I sort of assumed that it would appear on Amazon Prime streaming, given that Jeff Bezos is so bizarrely invested in it. It only occurred to me this week that the doc is getting a theatrical run. That’s why Melania’s husband has been using his platform to beg people to see Mel’s big dumb documentary. They don’t want this to be a theatrical flop. Too late! The advance ticket sales are in the toilet, and it looks like the global audience for this documentary is nowhere to be found. They’re literally selling ones of tickets in the UK. And it’s not much better stateside. The Fauxlania Flop Tour, coming to theaters near you! Anyway, in addition to all of this flop energy, it turns out that the people who worked on the documentary had a terrible time. From Rolling Stone:
A little over a year ago, Melania sparked a bidding war among Hollywood studios eager to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. Amazon MGM Studios ended up beating out both Disney (which had just donated $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a dubious defamation claim the soon-to-be president had levied against its subsidiary ABC) and Paramount, which was seeking good relations with the White House ahead of a blockbuster merger that would be subject to FCC approval.
A few weeks before Amazon MGM Studios offered an eye-watering $40 million for the film rights — the most the streamer had ever paid for any piece of content — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos dined with President Donald Trump and his wife at Mar-a-Lago. According to The Wall Street Journal, the first lady kept roughly 70 percent of the licensing fee, $28 million, herself. And, technically, there is nothing illegal about that.
Amazon’s purchase of Melania set off a frantic scramble to get as much footage as possible of the first lady in the weeks leading up to the inauguration. It was a chaotic process that involved hiring and coordinating three separate production crews working in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Each had its own heavyweight cinematographer: Jeff Cronenweth, best known for his collaborations with David Fincher; Michael Mann’s go-to cameraman Dante Spinotti; and Barry Peterson, cinematographer most recently of the infamous Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends With Us. Each shot portions of the film.
“People were worked really hard. Really long hours, highly disorganized, very chaotic,” one person who worked on the set said. “It wasn’t easy money,” another added. “It was very difficult because of the chaos that was around everything.… Usually [for a documentary] it’s like, ‘Oh, follow the subject.’ Well, it’s Melania Trump. With the first lady and Secret Service, you can’t just do things you usually do.”
One person familiar with the production estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary. A separate person who will be credited on the film said that, after experiencing the first year of Trump’s second term, they now wish they had not put their name on it. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” that person said.
People who worked on the film said they had fewer problems working with Melania Trump herself, who was described as friendly and very engaged in the process, than they did with the director, Brett Ratner. (“She was totally nice,” one person said. “She was the opposite of Brett Ratner.”)
Melania is the first movie Ratner — who is known for directing the Rush Hour movies and X-Men: The Last Stand — has made since he was publicly accused of sexual harassment and assault by six women in 2017.
“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one member of the production team said. “But Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.” That person said they weren’t aware of Ratner’s involvement until just days before filming began, and they would not have accepted the job if they’d known. Another confirmed: “There was more talk about Brett being slimy than there was about Melania.”
So… Melania pocketed $28 million, hired Jeffrey Epstein-associate and credibly accused sexual predator Brett Ratner to “direct” and everyone on the project absolutely hated the experience. So much so that many asked for their names to be removed from the credits. I mean… I don’t blame the below-the-line people as much as I’m just horrified and revolted by everything about this. Hopefully, this will be an audacious flop to the point where there’s even more backlash on how and why this arrangement even came about (because Jeff Bezos wanted government contracts).
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
