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From LeverNews.com — Lever Time is the flagship podcast from the investigative news outlet The Lever. Hosted by award-winning journalist, Oscar-nominated writer, and Bernie Sanders' 2020 speechwriter David Sirota, Lever Time features exclusive reporting from The Lever’s newsroom, high-profile guest interviews, and expert analysis from the sharpest minds in media and politics.
Arjun Singh 0:03
Arjun from the levers, reader supported newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, what frightens Donald Trump, apparently, it's a new movie about himself called The Apprentice. When the apprentice premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, it got rave reviews, starring two well known actors and written by a prominent screenwriter, the movie had box office success written all over it, but no studio wanted it, at least here in the United States, that's because Donald Trump immediately threatened legal action, but even more, the specter of a second Trump presidency as Hollywood terrified, terrified of what that could mean for their bottom line. And it's not just Hollywood. In the past two weeks, the billionaire owners of the Washington Post and LA Times blocked their papers from endorsing Kamala Harris, moves that were widely seen to be a signal to Donald Trump, or perhaps a plea, don't hurt our businesses. And to screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, it could represent a paradigm shift in the media business as a whole, and to screenwriter Gabriel Sherman, the writer of The Apprentice, it could represent a paradigm shift in the media business as a whole, especially if Trump returns to office today on lever time. I'm gonna dive into that question. Is political art dead? What are the consequences of the financialization of the media business, and how exactly did we end up here? When I was in high school, one of my favorite movies was All the President's Men. You know,
All the President's Men 1:31
once when I was reporting Lyndon Johnson's top guy gave me the award. They were looking for a successor for J Edgar Hoover, I wrote it, and the day it appeared Johnson held a press conference and appointed Hoover head of the FBI for life. When he was done, turned to his top guy, and the President said, Call Ben Bradlee and tell him, fuck you. Hell. Everybody said you did it. Ben, you screwed up. You stuck us with Hoover forever. I screwed up, and I wasn't wrong, the
Arjun Singh 2:02
movie is a behind the scenes account of how the Washington Post came to publish the revelations that Richard Nixon wiretapped the offices of the Democratic Party, a scandal that would become known as Watergate, and it would lead to the downfall of Nixon himself. Released in 1976 the movie documents the personal and professional risk the reporters and editors at the post took when they challenged the Nixon administration head on. Surveillance is doing
All the President's Men 2:26
it's being done. People's lives are in danger, maybe even ours. What happened to that Justice
All the President's Men 2:31
source of yours?
Speaker 1 2:32
Well, I guess I made the instructions too complicated, because he thought I said, Hang up when I just said, Hang on, Arjun, his story is right. Alderman was the fifth name to control that fund, and Sloan would have told the grand jury. Sloan wanted to tell the wanted to tell the grand jury, why didn't he? Because nobody asked, nobody asked him. The
All the President's Men 2:46
cover up had little to do with the break in. It was to protect covert operations, the covert activities involving the entire US intelligence community.
Arjun Singh 2:53
Since its release, the movies inspired generations of journalists, including myself, as the editor of my high school newspaper in suburban California, I used to daydream about one day becoming a muckraking journalist, and the movie made a long lasting impression on me, including what it means to be a journalist. It taught me that journalism is gritty and not sexy. It's about rifling through documents, finding a paper trail scattered in obscure places, and earning the trust of sources embedded deep in the halls of power, but ones who are willing to divulge important secrets. That same mentality was seen in another film about journalism spotlight. This
Spotlight 3:29
strikes me as an essential story to a local paper. I think at the very least we have to go through those documents.
Unknown Speaker 3:36
How would you like to do that?
Speaker 2 3:40
I don't know what the laws are here, but in Florida, we would go to
Speaker 1 3:43
court. You want to sue the church. Technically, we
Speaker 2 3:47
wouldn't sue the church. We'd file a motion to lift the seal on those documents.
Speaker 1 3:51
The church will read that as US suing them. So Will everybody else
Arjun Singh 3:57
good to know like All the President's Men. Spotlight is about a tough group of journalists who passionately believe in the power of journalism as a public service. In this case, the movie follows a group of reporters and editors at the Boston Globe investigating the Catholic Church in Boston, and eventually they exposed a decades long pattern of sexual abuse.
Spotlight 4:16
We need the full scope. That's the only thing that will put an end to this. So let's take you out to bed. Let Him decide we'll take it to bed. When I say it's time, it's time Robbie, it's time they knew and they let it happen to kids. Okay? It could have been you, it could have been me, it could have been any of us. We gotta nail these scumbags. We gotta show people that nobody could get away with this, not a priest or a cardinal or a freaking Pope.
Arjun Singh 4:46
Spotlight came out right around the time I myself was getting into journalism, and like All the President's Men, it was an inspiration of the kind of journalist I wanted to be. These two films would eventually hold even more resonance with me, because in 2020 20 I went to work at the Washington Post, and one of the people who hired me was Marty Baron. He was the editor of The Boston Globe when they broke the news about the Catholic Church, and he would later go on to become the editor of the Washington Post. That's why last week, it was incredibly disheartening to hear the news that Jeff Bezos, the post owner, since 2013 decided to break a long held tradition among large and influential newspapers. Fallout
Newsreel 5:24
continues after the Washington Post announced it would not endorse a candidate for president, at least two members are resigning from its editorial board, and the post publisher defended the decision, saying the paper was returning to his roots of not making presidential endorsements, but according to reports, it was owner Jeff Bezos who made the call.
Arjun Singh 5:43
Bezos justified his decision to stop the Post editorial board from publishing an endorsement about Harris by saying papers shouldn't be endorsing candidates anyway. And while that argument might have merits on its own, it's pretty hard to take seriously from the guy who owns Amazon, especially considering that Bezos and Trump have recently spoken, and the head of his spaceship company Blue Origin, met with Trump the same day he ordered the post to stand down, and as the Washington Post journalists reported, Bezos, entanglements with the government have become even tighter in the last few years, raising serious questions about whether he was just doing this to curry favor with Donald Trump. It also highlights another thing that's been happening the media industry, whether it's Hollywood or the news industry, it's losing its swagger. It feels like it doesn't want to fight back anymore or even challenge power, and part of that is because it's becoming increasingly controlled by billionaires or the financial sector. There was once a time when people who owned newspapers just owned newspapers, and movies were made by rich people who mostly focused on just making movies. And while none of that was perfect, it did create an era where newsrooms and movie studios would sometimes endorse publishing works that actually did challenge entrenched power. Take the movie network release the same year as All the President's Men. It was a searing indictment of how the traditional news was starting to be cannibalized by large corporations pushing business interests over good journalism. The pinnacle of the movie is a rant from a despondent news anchor encouraging people not to hide in the safe confines of consumer capitalism. I don't want
Network 7:21
you to protest. I don't want you to ride I don't want you to write to your congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you've got to get mad.
Arjun Singh 7:34
Today, though, it's getting harder to make movies like that, movies that really challenge not only the power centers of our society, but challenge us later in the show, David Sirota and I are going to sit down with the screenwriter, Gabriel Sherman. Sherman's the mind behind a brand new film about Donald Trump called The Apprentice, which stars Sebastian Stan as a young Donald Trump. Well,
The Apprentice 7:53
I intend to acquire the Commodore, and I'm planning on making it the best in the finest building in the city, maybe, maybe the country in the world.
Arjun Singh 8:04
You think a movie about Donald Trump, starring two celebrities, Jeremy strong and Sebastian Stan, would be box office gold, but when Trump threatened the film with legal action, Hollywood got spooked, and Sherman struggled to find a distributor. But before we hear about that saga, it's important to understand the reason we got here deregulation and corporate consolidation,
Daniel Bessner 8:25
this sort of deregulatory ideal, and what we now term neoliberalism, began to get going during the second half of the Carter administration. But it really takes off under Ronald Reagan. And there's this idea that you would deregulate the economy and you would unleash the forces of capitalism. You know, greed is good type 1980s stuff.
Arjun Singh 8:44
Daniel bestner is a historian and an associate professor of Foreign Policy at the University of Washington, but he's also a screenwriter. In May, Daniel wrote a major article in Harper's detailing the decline of the movie industry, and in particular the role that financialization has played in changing the power structure in Hollywood from the 1940s up until the early 2000s Hollywood was primarily controlled by movie studios, and this was called the studio system. If you've watched a movie, you definitely know the names of them, universal, Paramount, Warner Brothers. But in the 1980s and the 1990s deregulatory moves from the Reagan and Clinton administrations paved the way for big finance to enter Hollywood, changing the entire business structure and goals of film companies. So
Daniel Bessner 9:27
you get tri star, which combines film and cable interest in a way that had never really been done before, and you get the rise of conglomeration that really begins to take off in the later 1980s and into the 1990s as the Clinton administration continues the deregulation of Hollywood, repealing various rules, eventually leading to the passage of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 which allows for more corporate consolidation. And so you get the rise of monopolization in Hollywood then over the course of. 2000s really, beginning in the later 2000s as a result of the Great Recession, you get the financialization of Hollywood, where the government pops capital into the system. And this eventually leads new, novel financial institutions, which were themselves allowed, because of the various deregulations of the financial industry, to enter in to the media. You know, hedge funds, private equity firms, index funds, things like
Arjun Singh 10:24
that. When Daniel says the government bumped money into the system, he's referring to a policy by the Federal Reserve to lower interest rates in the early 2000s as the institution that controls the money supply, one thing the Fed can do is change the interest rate that banks have to charge each other to borrow excess cash and between 2001 to 2003 the Fed lowered that rate from 6% to 1% that had huge economic consequences in the case of Hollywood. It made it cheaper for banks and financial firms to borrow money, making it more enticing to load up on debt and dive into new industries or make big bets on things. So
Daniel Bessner 11:01
you get the entrance of all these novel financial firms into Hollywood. And I just want to take a step back here, and I think because it illuminates a larger structural issue that the media business is, of course, not a great business. Famously, as William Goldman said, nobody knows anything. No one knows what to succeed. It's a relatively moderate return business. It's a business of hits. There's a lot of lost money. It's not an expense. Especially great place for capital to go in a sort of stable financial system. But I think it points to the fact that as the 21st century wears on, there's fewer and fewer places for capital to productively invest, related to the falling rate of profit, which happens over time. So you get the entrance of all these financial institutions into Hollywood. At the same time, you get a technological revolution, sort of the use of the Internet for television purposes, which was, of course, happening since the beginning of the internet, but really begins to take off with Netflix and its turn to streaming, where Netflix plans to totally disrupt the cable business and, to some degree, the movie business and offer consumers streaming television and streaming films at their homes. And so this attracts a lot of investment and a lot of excitement, because your promised great returns, because the Netflix bet is essentially the Amazon bet or the Uber bet, which is that it's going to become the place to watch television. And by the middle of the 2010s a lot of the traditional studios begin to basically chase the streaming model, viewing it as the next frontier of their business, in the process, slowly destroying the cable model. Of course, while this is all happening, while streaming and financialization is happening, you get increasing corporate consolidation, like most famously, you could see all the companies that Disney bought, Marvel, Lucasfilm, Pixar, these are themselves, big companies which were previously independent, but now become part of the Disney World.
Arjun Singh 12:52
That's right, I regret to inform you that baby Yoda isn't actually an adorable alien child. He's just a mascot for excessive corporate consolidation. The same is true of all those Marvel superheroes. These franchises exploded for a few reasons. They're safe bets, but they're also vehicles to bolster Disney's other businesses, such as theme parks and toys. This type of financial consolidation also led to the top dogs being risk averse in the interest of hitting the widest and most profitable audiences out there. The trick
Adam McKay 13:22
to anything in the world we now live in is kind of understanding what you're dealing with. And the one borderline mericratic element of these studios and streamers, they want to make money. And so, like, we made The Big Short and like, I had a great experience. We got to say what we wanted to say. And Paramount, Vietcong made a lot of money off of that.
Arjun Singh 14:00
This is Adam McKay. McKay is an Academy Award winning screenwriter and director, and he's made movies like The Big Short and vice he was also the executive producer of succession and earlier in his career, he worked on Saturday Night Live and wrote and directed movies like Anchorman and step brothers. A few years ago, McKay and the levers founder David sorota worked together on the Netflix movie don't look up, which was nominated for four Oscars. So you could say McCain knows a thing or two about how Hollywood works.
Adam McKay 14:28
In the case of the movie I worked with David on, don't look up. You know, that was clearly a heartfelt, terrified message that we were sending Netflix made so much money. I mean, half a billion people watched that movie. So the last kind of honest, pure thing, to some degree, there are still certain media. Companies. You know, you're never going to do a movie at Apple that, like, calls out, you know, corporate control of our government. But a lot of these companies still, ultimately are driven by profit. So I don't think it's a mistake that the guy who made Anchorman and Step Brothers is able to still get things made because I like stuff that's entertaining.
Arjun Singh 15:33
In recent years, Mackay used his films to tell political stories. Vice for example, was an intimate portrait of Dick Cheney and an incrimination of the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq.
Vice 15:45
You have authorization to shoot down any aircraft deemed a threat presidential authority that is correct. Follow orders are uniteer unidir Sir, unless otherwise directed. In
Arjun Singh 15:59
The Big Short McKay took aim at the financial sector and pulled few punches in calling out the bankers behind the 2007 financial crisis, a lot of the same money, men who are behind Hollywood's consolidation. The
The Big Short 16:11
banks have given us 25% interest rates on credit cards. They have screwed us on student loans that we can never get out from under. Then this guy walks into my office and says, those same banks got greedy, they lost track of the market, and I can profit off of their stupidity. Fuck yeah, I want them to be right.
Arjun Singh 16:29
Last week, David and I sat down with McKay for a long raging conversation about vice and Dick Cheney's endorsement of Kamala Harris. But I was especially intrigued by how a filmmaker who's so vocal about tackling things like corporate excess is still able to get films made. But McKay says he knows what people like, and at the end of the day, his movies, regardless of topic, have always managed to find widespread audiences. We've done
Adam McKay 16:52
documentaries about the, you know, the election being seized for Bush Cheney. We've done all kinds of stuff, but I think people know that if I'm doing it or producing, I want it to be entertaining. I'm not looking to impress a small group of, quote, smart people or critics, you know, we our company, a hyper object, makes populous. You know, movies, documentaries, shows, succession. I mean, the reason I was able to tell HBO this is going to work is because I knew that ultimately it was a family drama involving rotten wealth, and like I dare anyone to resist that.
Arjun Singh 17:50
But now we're staring down the barrel of another presidential election. Donald Trump's return to the White House seems to have had a chilling effect on Hollywood's money machine.
Newsreel 17:58
Speaking of Trump, his real life rise to real estate mogul has been written about many times. Now, there's a new movie about Trump back in the 1980s it's called The Apprentice recently premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in France, and as our Washington bureau chief Joe Melvin reports, the Trump campaign isn't happy at all.
Arjun Singh 18:15
This is the movie I mentioned a little bit earlier, written by Gabriel Sherman in starring Sebastian Stan. Although this movie sounded like a slam dunk, Trump's efforts to block its release clearly did frighten Hollywood's moguls, I find
Gabriel Sherman 18:27
it very distressing, disturbing, depressing. You know, pick your word, the consolidation of media in this country, both in newspapers, but you know, also in entertainment. You know, we have the biggest platforms that distribute movies and TV now, two of the biggest are, you know, Apple and Amazon, and half of their customers are probably, you know, members of Maga. So, you know, they don't want to distribute anything controversial that would, you know, make people cancel their Prime subscription or stop buying iPhones. That
Arjun Singh 18:58
was the voice of Sherman himself. And in the apprentice Sherman depicts Trump's earlier years just as he's about to become a celebrity. It's a unique portrayal of him in fiction. Trump's usually portrayed as comical, almost something like a clown. Take this last week's impression of him on Saturday Night Live.
Saturday Night Live 19:15
You know, I heard about that. They said I was threatening, not true. I would never threaten anything except perhaps violence. But they do phony investigations. Okay, I've been investigated. Martha now finds Capone, who famously did nothing wrong, Scarface. But in
Arjun Singh 19:30
his movie, Sherman cuts the comedy in a lot of ways. This movie feels more like a horror movie. Trump is shown as brooding and insecure, cruel, and when Trump demanded the movie not release, Hollywood appeared to listen
Gabriel Sherman 19:42
the legal threat, which he's not followed up on, it had the effect of scaring every Hollywood studio and streamer. So, you know, we left the Cannes Film Festival with not with no offers to distribute the movie in the United States. You know, we sold the movie to territories all around the world, no problem. But you. No major Hollywood company would take this on to release it in America
Arjun Singh 20:06
after the break, David Sirota and I sit down with Gabriel Sherman to discuss the apprentice and hear how in both of their experiences as screenwriters, Hollywood is clamped down on political art. We'll be right back. You.
Arjun Singh 20:33
So Gabe Sherman, it's awesome to have you here on lever time. Excited to talk to you. I had the chance to watch the apprentice in theaters. It's an interesting portrayal of Donald Trump. So you chose to focus a lot on his relationship with the lawyer Roy Cohn, and this earlier part of his career. You know, there's a really big spectrum of where you can go with Trump. So why did you want to talk about this specific part of his career, the early part? Yeah,
Gabriel Sherman 20:58
well, first off, thanks guys for having me. It's great to talk to you. You know, when I came up with this idea, I always thought it would be impossible to make a Trump movie about anything close to the present day, because, you know, he's so he's everywhere. He's so ubiquitous. He's on our TV screens. It would be impossible for an actor to dramatize Trump in a way that you know wouldn't become it would quickly become like SNL, like a parody. So I thought, you know that would that's impossible. But I thought you know Trump as a young man in his 20s and early 30s. You know there's enough there's enough distance from that that, you know, the character looks different enough from present day Trump that the audience could, you know, kind of suspend disbelief and get invested in the character. So that's sort of one, one thing, and then the other, the other reason I focused on this time period was that people like Roger Stone, who had worked with Trump since the 80s, you know, I covered Trump's 2016 campaign for New York Magazine, and when I covered the campaign, people around Trump told me that, you know, he's winning because he's, you know, using the lessons that Roy Cohn taught him, or he sounds a lot like Roy. And it just came to me in a flash as like, you know, there's, there could be a movie that explores that, that one relationship that you know, to sort of boil it down, like the Hollywood pitch version is like, this is the origin story. Trump
david sirota 22:27
tried to stop this movie from being released. Tell us a little bit about that whole process. Did you think the movie was going to be able to at a certain point when there was opposition or obstacles? Was there concern that it wouldn't be able to even come out here in the United States? I mean, what was that? What was that like?
Gabriel Sherman 22:46
Yeah, God. I mean that that's that's basically been the last six months of my life, and it's really a distressing picture of kind of the state of Hollywood and and how feckless these companies are but to recap, the movie premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, got an eight minute standing ovation. You know, was, you know, very well received, both by audience, the audience and critics. But the night of the premiere, the Trump campaign released a statement saying that they were going to sue us for foreign election interference, because the filmmaker is lives in Denmark, and was born in Iran and and they accused me of, you know, being a communist. And you know, all the, all the Roy Cohn playbook that the movie explores, and anyways, the the legal threat, which he's not followed up on, it had the the effect of scaring every Hollywood studio and streamer. So, you know, we left the Cannes Film Festival with not with no offers to distribute the movie in the United States. You know, we sold the movie to territories all around the world, no problem, but no major Hollywood company would take this on to release it in America.
david sirota 24:03
And I want to just as a follow up to that. I mean, what? What do you make of that? Or what do you tell people who don't know anything about Hollywood? Why would it be difficult to make or to get produced and distributed a movie, a well reviewed movie at that point, yeah, in the United States, right? Trump is a big news story. Trump is a big topic of discussion. What do you tell people who don't know anything about Hollywood why it would be difficult to get a well reviewed movie about Trump actually out there in the United States, like I can imagine, the average person listening to this might say, well, I don't understand. What's the problem?
Gabriel Sherman 24:41
Yeah, you know, I laugh when my right wing friends always talk about how liberal Hollywood. And the truth is that, you know, yeah, maybe you know personally, on their personal politics, or there's a lot of liberals in Hollywood, but on a business level, it's a very conservative industry. And basically what. Boiled down to was that these companies did not want to get on the wrong side of Trump. Should he become president? You know, he had already demonstrated that he, you know, would go after companies and attack them if he felt that they were critical of him, like there is a very famous case believing back in 2018 he tried to block the at&t merger with Time Warner, because Time Warner was the parent company of CNN and Trump called CNN fake news. So, you know, these big Hollywood media conglomerates look at this and they say, you know what's there's no upside for us to release one movie about Trump that could cost us, you know, billions of dollars of mergers in the future. And you know, it's really I've been seeing online, you know, as we get close to the election, there's, you know, the historian Timothy Snyder, who has been talking about, like, anticipatory obedience and how authoritarian leaders make the threat of retribution high enough that people just start doing what they want without even being told. And there was this line that I saw that said, like, don't obey in advance. And, you know, the casual this movie being a casualty of that, I think, shows that, you know, all it took was one legal letter for for Trump to get all of Hollywood to back down.
Arjun Singh 26:21
It's really interesting that you brought up the business side of it, and the fear of what would happen if Trump became president. You know, this week, we've seen the fallout of the Los Angeles Times. Now the Washington Post, their owners interfering on the editorial side. You know, for listeners who aren't familiar, newsrooms are split. There's the opinion, Op Ed editorial side. There's the reporting side. The endorsements of candidates come from this editorial side. Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post has reportedly said that that shouldn't happen. You know, I think that there's a fear that it is a problematic situation, that people who have other business interests that can clash with, you know, the role of journalism, and at some point the business interests are going to come out front, I guess. You know, first, Gabe, just after you've gone through this process, do you have any thoughts, and you know, what do you make of seeing this? LA Times, Washington Post decision, and does it? Does it make you concerned about kind of the role of journalism in a Trump presidency, with the way that a lot of outlets are being consolidated by wealthy people who have, you know, entanglements with the government industries that are regulated?
Gabriel Sherman 27:35
It's such an unforced error. Both of these cases, you know, nobody, by and large, really pays attention to newspaper editorials. But by, you know, trying to appease Trump and not endorse anybody, it had the opposite effect. Now everyone was paying attention. Yeah, I find it very distressing, disturbing, depressing. You know, pick your word. You know, the the consolidation of media in this country, both in newspapers, but you know, also in in in entertainment. You know, we have the biggest platforms that distribute, you know, movies and TV. Now you know two of the biggest are, you know, Apple and Amazon. And you know, half of their, half of their customers are probably, you know, members of Maga, so, you know, they don't want to distribute anything controversial that would, you know, make people cancel their Prime subscription or stop buying iPhones. So I think, yeah, it's, it's, it's a real issue. And I just saw, I believe it was a New York Times story today. Might have been in the Wall Street Journal, but journal, but, you know, CEOs around America have been like calling Trump to kiss the ring. I mean, everyone is, you know, everyone in a position of power who would be able to oppose him, you know, seems to be getting in line. And it's, you know, it's a sad, it's just a sad commentary on on the state of politics in America.
david sirota 29:04
I want to, I want to also echo that because, because I think the the point about there's one thing to own a media empire and your business is media. It's a whole other thing to be a media empire attached to a different set of industries, like the largest retailer in the world also has a media empire in the Washington Post, the you know, the guy who, who runs Tesla, runs Space X, also owns a social media platform. It seems to me, what's there's always been citizen canes out there, right? But it seems to me, the problem that the maybe somewhat unique problem, or new problem in this era, is you own one set of businesses. Apple owns a studio. Amazon owns the Washington Post effectively, or there's a linkage there, right? That the problem is, is that the media entity has other considerations, other. Better than just media. And I want to bring it back to Hollywood for a second, because when I wrote about this this weekend, about the whole LA Times Washington Post situation, I referenced how when we made don't look up a couple years ago, my hope was that the movie would do really well. I mean, this is sort of naive hope the movie would do really well, and it would open up this space for more political movies, right? Hey, yeah, it succeeded. So let's do more of this. And it felt like, in some ways, that was like, actually, it was like, the the end of like,
Gabriel Sherman 30:36
how did you know, what did, what was Netflix respond? I mean, how did you even get that movie made. They wouldn't make that movie today. Well, honestly,
david sirota 30:43
it was about Adam McKay got two big stars to participate, and it was, like, really hard for them to say, to say no. And I had hoped naively, like, oh, the movie does. Well, let's do more of this. And actually, that's not the way it's gone at all. It's actually much harder to make anything that's even vague, really political well, and like
Gabriel Sherman 31:02
twisters, this summer, I was reading an article that, you know, universal released the sequel to Twister. And, you know, they don't mention that tornadoes are getting worse because of climate change. They just, just erased it because they wanted their heartland, red state audience to go and it worked. I mean, the movie made, you know, north of $100 million so from a business standpoint, I understand why you would do that, but you're that at some point you're not even reflecting reality.
david sirota 31:30
No. And by the way, by the way, to get up on my high horse for a second here, the movie that drove me crazy on this was the movie Civil War. Oh
Gabriel Sherman 31:38
yeah, I turned it off. I was watching it on a flight, and it made me so mad. Halfway through, I shut it off, a
david sirota 31:44
movie about nothing, okay, I'm wondering if it made you mad in the way it made me, man, I'll tell you why it made me mad. It's like, here's a movie about a civil war that somehow extracted all, all politics, anything out of it. Now maybe you could argue that was the only way they would let them make that movie. But then what's the takeaway? The takeaway is just what, like, war is bad, but there's no, there's no cultural commentary or space to kind of, to kind of deal with political conflict in our world. And so that's actually the long way to get to my question. I
Gabriel Sherman 32:14
found that movie just so morally problematic, because it was, to me, it was like, it was like a first person shooter. It was like a video. Like, to me, it was just like, it was like war porn, yes, and because you have no reason, you have no idea why these people are fighting. They're just shooting and killing each other and and it, it was sort of, and they this, like, sort of fun Hip Hop soundtrack that, like, made it fun, and I'm like, This is not fun. And I just felt like I the lack of any kind of political discussion in that movie just made me be like, I can't
david sirota 32:50
Yes. And so my my so my question then is, where does the political angst go like cinema, television used to be the place where, where? And I'm, you know, golden age. I'm not saying it was so much better in the in the past, but like, it used to be the place where the society sort of litigated these issues and, like, debated them sort of in proxy terms. And I feel like that's now been, in some ways, shut off. And I feel like the cultural foment, therefore, is almost captured by things like the alt right, like Donald Trump rallies, like right, like the culture, the cultural angst is gonna go somewhere if it's not being expressed in arts and cinema. So like how, I guess, just talk a little bit about how bad it is for the society that we're not really litigating these things anymore in the art as much in the artistic space, yeah.
Gabriel Sherman 33:43
I mean, I've had producers tell me that, you know, the best approach in this climate is to do something like allegorical, like the way mash was about Vietnam, but it was set in Korea, right? So early idea like, do it this Twilight Zone, yeah, yeah. So you, I mean that you try to get at current ideas in the culture, but you do it through the side door, um, but, you know, I think it is, yeah. I mean, it's clearly problematic. I also feel like the, the only cultural space, what we're allowed to talk about these things is in comedy, whether it's SNL or in late night, which, you know, there's a place for comedy. I enjoy it. But with Trump, specifically, before my movie, the only way he was really ever portrayed in popular culture was as was as comedy, and then you reduce him to a joke, and there's nothing funny about Donald Trump. I mean, his policies, you know, he tells us what he's going to do. And so I think it allows people, it allows the alt right and Trump to flourish in a culture where the only way to engage with them is just to make fun of them,
Arjun Singh 34:57
yeah. And I think one of the things that you do. Oh, well, in the apprentice, we joked before we started the interview, but I had asked, did you intend to make a horror movie? And you know, you said it kind of ended up that way in the process of making this movie, was everyone on board with your vision, Gabe, or was there a struggle to really say, No, we have to show him the way that he is. And I think we're actually one of the most powerful scenes in the movie is, uh, is when Donald Trump rapes his first wife, Ivana Trump, and that is something that you rarely do hear about that. And it completely shatters that idea that this is a comedic figure, this is a very cruel, monstrous man, but that I will give you praise, that was a gutsy thing to include in the movie. And did you get pushback? You know, I back to sort of David's question, how did you get this movie really put together with producers and backing financially?
Gabriel Sherman 35:49
I'll just speak to the that one scene in particular. You know, that scene probably cost me, personally, you know, lots of money because, you know, everyone on the creative side was supportive of that scene. You know, my filmmaker, my producers, but our financier, our main financier, who you know, gave us the final piece of the money to shoot the movie last year. They were adamant after we shot it that you cannot show that it has to come out. And you know, myself and the director dug in. We're like, we have to include this. You know, Trump has been accused of sexual assault by, you know, more than a dozen women like this is clearly an aspect of his character. But the result was that, you know, our financier dug in, and we were in this like stalemate with them. All summer, we had finally found a very small distributor to release the movie before the election, but they wouldn't let us sign the deal because they said, cut the scene. We're like, we're not cutting the scene. And, you know, long story short, they eventually backed down, and we signed this, distributed this, this deal in but it was over Labor Day, so we had six weeks to we got control the movie, six weeks before the release. And that's, you know, in Hollywood terms, that's like no time at all. So we didn't have enough time or money for advertising, for marketing. But I felt that it was an important artist for for artistic freedom and for the integrity of the film. That scene was essential in terms of how we put together the movie. I mean, I had a, I had a very brave producer who, way back in 2017 saw the the the potential of this, the movie. She commissioned me to write the script. And I went off and wrote the script. And then we, we found Ali Abbasi, the the Iranian Danish filmmaker who this was going to, this is his first English language film, you know, we it was like Jenga. We had to find all these like little pieces and slot them in. And the movie, you know, and maybe David knows this as well. Like this movie lived and died so many times, like we were going to make it in 2021 and that like, so every movie is any, any movie that gets made is a miracle. But this one in particular was, was very hard on
Arjun Singh 38:05
that note, you know, to kind of get back to the movie itself. One aspect I really enjoy is you show the evolution of how Trump does in media interviews. And it really hits home that the media and Trump go in tandem like you can't really tell the story of Trump without talking about media and how it's changed. How do you think the media shaped Trump? And conversely, how has Trump now changed the media? Whether that's Hollywood journalism, uh, whatever, the relationship between the two. Is it symbiotic, or is one kind of the more powerful force on the other? Well,
Gabriel Sherman 38:40
in terms of Trump's presence in the media, you know, one of the things that I thought this film could really accomplish is to puncture the myth that Trump kind of came out of the womb like this orange maniac. Because if you go back and there's a very famous interview that recommend your listeners to check out. It's on YouTube. It's Trump's first national TV interview with the with the TV host Rona Barrett, and we actually recreate a scene of the interview in the movie. But when you watch this interview, he's like, so insecure and stiff, and he speaks in complete sentences, and he's somewhat charming and like, to me, there was such a distance from that character to the one we saw today, so I thought that the movie could really show that at the beginning, Trump, played by Sebastian Stan, is kind of figuring out he's kind of has this, like unformed personality. And as he takes Roy Cohn's lessons and learns, he kind of starts to resemble the man that we know today in terms of, I guess Trump's the second question, like, what's the Trump's relationship to media now? I mean, I, I mean, I clearly he, you know, he is a blitter. Any sense of objective, not that there was, was objective truth. But, you know, there's now half the country who just doesn't believe anything that he doesn't want them to believe. And I wonder, I guess it's a question. I don't know the answer. Will after Trump, like, Will Maga continue to be this cult, like, is JD Vance going to take it over or, I mean, we saw Ron DeSantis try, and he was just completely, he blew himself up like that wasn't possible. I just wonder how specific this, this media culture is now, to Trump versus like, this is just the world we live in now.
Arjun Singh 40:41
Well, I think it's it. It's that Trump is, in a way, means a charismatic person. But I'd be curious to me, you've had the chance my understanding, to talk to Trump, interview him a few times. Is there a you know, people who knew Ronald Reagan would always say the same thing, he had a twinkle about him, a twinkle in his eye, but they were trying to portray that he had a magnetism around him that you couldn't help but be drawn into this. I think that for a lot of people, it's sometimes hard to understand that with Trump, he can be buffoonish and boorish, but when you're with them in person, when you're doing these interviews, do you see is there a magnetism about him, like did those experiences shape the way that you portray him? And do you understand why people kind of gravitate to him? I guess, yeah.
Gabriel Sherman 41:26
I mean, listen, I, I, I've interviewed Trump many times over the years. You know, in fact, my first job in journalism, more than 20 years ago, was as a a real estate reporter for the New York Observer, a weekly paper in the city. And, you know, I was like, you know, a nobody, a cub reporter, and Trump would get on the phone to gossip with me. And I was like, you know, this, you know, this was pre apprentice, you know, before his TV show. And so I understand that, you know, it's funny, you know, he, he tells his followers that the media is the enemy, the media is the devil. But then you get, you know, he actually loves spending time with reporters, and I feel like that is part of his, you know, the secret of how he's been able to manipulate the media into doing what he want. I mean, he the last time I interviewed him was in 2022 and you know, one on one, he can be, he can be charming, but that's, you know, that's the face, that's the mask that he wants to show in that moment. So, yeah, I think he is. There is something so unique to his ability to play the media. You know, DeSantis tried, and he just was so awkward, and you know, there was nothing there.
david sirota 42:43
Can you, for those who are on edge about the election, can you project forward for us what you see unfolding if Trump wins, how the media, and I'm putting the media in quotes, because there is no one giant, monolithic media, but how the media will operate in another, in a in a next Trump presidency, a dark vision of that, and then maybe a more, more positive vision, a hope so that we don't like. If Trump wins, I feel like it's gonna explode people's minds in lots of ways. And I'm just trying to think forward, you know, six months from now, what does the Washington Post, the New York Times, MSNBC, Fox News, like, what? What is the media posture? Is it just a complete surrender? Like, what do you see, knowing what you know about the media and knowing what you know about Trump, we went through it once before? Is it going to be the same? Is going to
Gabriel Sherman 43:40
be different? Well, I guess I'll take the positive first and maybe see if that, if that leaves room for a dark view. But I think the positive view is that at least now the media has dropped the big newspapers and news outlets have dropped the euphemisms right, the like the bullshit, like Trump uses racially charged language, or Trump says, you know, falsehoods like they now are willing to say Trump, Trump is a racist, Trump lies. And I've been lucky in my journalism career. Like to write for New York Magazine, and I now write for Vanity Fair, where they let us just call it as we see it. But I think the national, you know, quote, unquote, you know, mainstream media has gotten somewhat better at, you know, not couching what is so obvious to all of us. So that is a plus. I think hopefully, if he wins, they would continue that. I think the the negative is that, I guess, how do you inch, how do you engage with an administration that will just clearly probably just lie? I mean, you know when you, when you interview Trump, or they, they cover his speeches. I mean, you can't fact check him in real time. So you're just giving a platform and a forum for him. Like, he says things like, you know, I was watching the Madison Square Garden rally the other night, and, you know, he's giving a speech, and he's like, you know, countries are releasing, you know, millions of people from insane asylums and prisons and and they're coming and they're they're murdering and they're raping. I mean, if you look at the FBI crime statistics, like we are basically at historical lows for for violent crime. I mean, yes, it's slightly up from before the pandemic. But he describes this vision of America that is completely out of touch with reality. And if you I just, I don't, I don't know how the media covers him in a way that is not just spreading that reality. That's the challenge. Yeah, I
Arjun Singh 45:49
think another thing with Trump is, like, you know, when I see him, I don't know if I would necessarily call him like a political person, you know, like he says in interviews, they talked about the deficit in one interview, he's asked, but when you were president, you endorse certain things that raise deficiency, he just says, well, now I'm not the president, and it's not someone with a coherent ideology to me, no. But in the movie The Apprentice, it kind of removed Trump. It reminds me a little bit of the Oscar Isaac movie, A Most Violent Year, which is about corruption in New York City during the Yeah, exactly, with sanitation workers. And I'm a huge, like, nerd for local city stuff. So in one way, this is, like a really great movie about, like, real estate corruption and gritty city politics, but there's politics peppered throughout it. Do you think Trump is a political person?
Gabriel Sherman 46:37
I think he is. I don't think he is a political person, that he's left or right. I don't think he has a cohesive ideology. I think he has, you know, listen, I think the only thing that he's been consistent on, and you can go back to that Rona Barrett interview I referenced, he has been sticking to this thing since the late 70s, that America's quote getting ripped off, that America gets quote no respect, and, you know, only he would be able to be the one to command respect on the world stage. So I think his his politics, to the degree that he has them are, you know, you know, roughly in that sort of authoritarian mold where you need a strong leader to push people around. I mean, his politics were shaped, yes, by Roy Cohn, but also by his father. And his father had kind of a proto fascist worldview, which was that the world, it's this Hobbesian world, where there's winners, there's winners, and there's killers, I'm sorry, there's losers and there's killers, and genetics determines who rises to the top. You know, social Darwinism and and Trump, you know, was formed by that worldview. So I think, to the degree that he's political, I think those ideas are kind of what his politics are. You know, the end of the movie ends with, spoiler alert, so if you tee this up for your audience, but you know, the end of the movie ends with, with Trump, with Sebastian, who plays Trump, saying, like, you know, I'm a big believer in natural ability. You have to be born with it. You know, it's your genes. And I think that, you know, when Trump talks about his cabinet being, quote, out of central casting, you know, he has this that, this worldview, that you know people are their, their genetics, determines whether they're capable or not. And but in terms of left, right, I mean, he blew up the deficit, you know, he wants to, you know, raise tariffs, which is, you know, historically, a a populist left wing, you know, quote, unquote liberal idea. So I don't think he has discernible politics on a, on a, on a partisan basis. And I think that's partly probably why he's been successful is that he's been able to build a coalition of people that sort of transcends the Republican Party. But, you know, I think he, and also I think his politics also boils down to whatever the politics of his own advancement are. It's about, you know, whatever, whatever furthers his financial or personal interest? Well, the
Arjun Singh 49:21
movie is The Apprentice. I gave it a personal stamp of approval. Everyone should see it. I think you see it in theaters, but it's going to be on streaming. Gabe, streaming. Just great to talk to you. Thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us.
Unknown Speaker 49:32
Thanks, man. Great. Enjoyed it, guys.
Arjun Singh 49:38
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me Arjun Singh, with help from Chris Walker and editing support from Joel Warner and Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music is composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with more episodes of lever time. You.