‘This garbage is pure fiction’: when subjects hit back at their biopics
More than any film at this year’s Cannes film festival – more than Megalopolis or that film where Demi Moore pushes Margaret Qualley’s face out of her spine – Ali Abbasi’s new film The Apprentice has dominated the news cycle.
This is because The Apprentice is a Donald Trump biopic, and one that has aggressively chosen not to pull a single punch. Played by Sebastian Stan, the Trump of The Apprentice is seen receiving liposuction and hair transplants, and more seriously, raping his wife Ivana. Although reaction has been mixed – Peter Bradshaw called the film “obtuse and irrelevant” in his two-star review this week – it may yet prove to cause damage to Trump’s election chances this year.
Especially since, as he is wont to do, Trump himself has inadvertently become the film’s biggest pitchman. Following the Cannes screening, Trump’s legal representative Steven Cheung announced that the former president was planning to sue the people behind the film, with a typically dictatorial statement. “We will be filing a lawsuit to address the blatantly false assertions from these pretend film-makers. This garbage is pure fiction which sensationalises lies that have been long debunked. As with the illegal Biden Trials, this is election interference by Hollywood elites, who know that President Trump will retake the White House and beat their candidate of choice because nothing they have done has worked.” Which sort of makes you want to see it more, doesn’t it?
Although Abbasi seems unconcerned about the threat to his work, the proposed lawsuit does mean that The Apprentice has entered the ranks of biopics that have openly annoyed their subjects. Jay Roach’s 2012 movie Game Change, for example, was a retelling of John McCain’s 2008 election campaign, starring Ed Harris as McCain and Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin. Although the film didn’t make as many serious accusations of its subject as The Apprentice – Palin is largely seen as an empty vessel tasked with parroting talking points she didn’t fully understand – it nevertheless irked Palin enough to go on television and decry it as a “false narrative” that she urged people not to waste their time on.
Meanwhile, no figure has ever been personally and professionally destroyed to the extent Ike Turner was in What’s Love Got to Do with It, which depicted him as one of the most violent monsters in cinema history. Turner took issue with this, although in retrospect his complaints did him no favours whatsoever. Yes, he slapped Tina Turner from time to time, he told the Los Angeles Times in 1993, but it was only because of her attitude. Besides, “the only time I ever punched Tina with my fist was the last fight we had.” So that’s something.
One of my favourite examples of biopic-related fury came when HBO made a movie based on The Late Shift, a book about the late-night talkshow wars of the early 1990s. This riled David Letterman enormously, to the extent that he used his nightly television show to launch attack after attack on the film. He called the film “the biggest waste of film since my wedding photos” and likened John Michael Higgins’s portrayal of him to a “circus chimp”. Most pettily of all, Letterman invited Higgins on to his show, only to bump him. “My apologies to John Michael Higgins, who plays me in Late Shift,” he said at the end of the episode. “He’ll be here at his next early convenience, or he’ll be in the lobby if you people are really that disappointed about it.”
Perhaps most vocal of all was Hunter Adams, the doctor who inspired the Robin Williams film Patch Adams. Adams, by all accounts, found the film
to be just as sanctimonious as the rest of us, and it made him angry. “I keep a list of 50 books in my wallet as my card, so that when someone comes up and asks me for an autograph I give them a little lecture on pop culture and how it’s dummified our population,” he told New Renaissance magazine years after the film was released.
Of course, in recent years celebrities have started to wise up to the risk of being embarrassed by unauthorised biopics, by acting as producers on their own. The fact that the surviving members of Queen were all significantly involved in the making of Bohemian Rhapsody is often cited as an explanation for the film’s willingness to stray from chronological truth. And next year’s Michael Jackson biopic Michael would probably have a lot more bite if it hadn’t been made with the express cooperation of the Michael Jackson estate, or starred his nephew.
So perhaps this is the future of the genre. Maybe Hunter Adams will make his own film about himself, or David Letterman will join a biopic as a producer. Obviously the logical endpoint of this trend is Donald Trump making his own hagiographic biopic, but let’s worry about that when we need to.