How Hollywood ran shy of geopolitics

This week, various eye-catching billboards in London are promoting The Apprentice, a controversial biopic of Donald Trump’s early career.

No surprise there, perhaps: when The Apprentice opened at the Cannes Film Festival this year, it received a standing ovation. And with political betting markets now predicting that Trump will win next week’s US election, Studiocanal, the film’s European producers, clearly think it’s a good moment to offer British audiences a chance to find out more about Trump. Hence those billboards.

America, however, is different. After Cannes, Hollywood’s major distribution groups shunned the biopic. That might have been down to fears about retribution from the Trump team. Legal risk undoubtedly played a role too: his people have threatened to sue The Apprentice producers.

Either way, the film seemed unable to secure US distribution until a maverick independent group called Briarcliffe acquired the rights and staged a small-scale theatrical distribution — albeit without the type of mainstream promotion that such films might normally receive.

“With the reception we got in Cannes, it’s unheard of [how] the industry has treated this film,” Ali Abbasi, its director, has complained. Or as Tom Ortenberg, head of Briarcliffe, echoed: “Trump campaign’s cease and desist order . . . led all corporate Hollywood to run away from the movie like their hair was on fire.”  

This sort of concern is depressing, particularly given the recent drama over The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. But what is doubly notable is that the saga around The Apprentice is not unique. Far from it: many other controversial films have also failed to get mainstream distribution in recent years, ranging from documentaries about the January 6 2021 riot, including The Sixth and 64 days, to The Dissident (a piercing saga about Saudi Arabia’s killing of The Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi).

“Global media conglomerates . . . are silencing films that take on [a sensitive] subject matter,” says Bryan Fogel, the Oscar-winning director of The Dissident. Meanwhile, the future of The Bibi Files, a hard-hitting new film about Benjamin Netanyahu that uses leaked police tapes, is unclear: although it has European distribution, no mainstream Hollywood studio has bought it yet.

Indeed, only half of the top 30 documentaries on this year’s annual Oscar contender list compiled by Scott Feinberg, the influential critic, have mainstream Hollywood distribution deals — a sharp contrast to a decade earlier. For lower-ranked movies it is far worse. “There has been a startling drop in numbers of films purchased from about 60 per cent to 10 per cent, in only a few years,” says Tara Hein-Phillips, head of a new film-on-demand streaming platform called Jolt.

Why? Economics is one reason. Since 2000 the annual production of documentaries has tripled, as digitisation has made it easier and cheaper to shoot films. But while demand for this content surged during the Covid pandemic, it subsequently fell. Meanwhile a wave of industry consolidation, amid the so-called “streaming wars”, cut the number of mainstream distribution groups.

The other issue is political risk. At a time of rising voter polarisation and uncertain geopolitics, distributors are increasingly reluctant to buy films that might only appeal to narrow niches of the population, while alienating powerful cohorts and/or governments. Instead they are backing less contentious content that has broad appeal, such as sports, travel or true-crime documentaries, or reruns of television favourites.

Some entrepreneurs view this as an opportunity. Take Briarcliffe’s Ortenberg, who says Hollywood’s unease has created a “very good business” opening for his group. Independent video-on-demand platforms, such as Gathr, are touting their services to filmmakers too.

Jolt will host The Bibi Files next month. This start-up (one of whose investors I know) aspires to not only host politically controversial content, but a range of non-political material too niche for Hollywood to embrace. It is currently screening Hollywoodgate, another Oscar contender without a major Hollywood distributor, which deals with the US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The guiding theory is that film is going where the music and news industries have already gone, namely towards a fragmented universe where old-style top-down mass-marketing campaigns — of the sort beloved by Hollywood — no longer work. Instead, it must try to reach audiences in a more viral manner using innovative social media and internet analysis. “By using predictive technologies to market directly to audiences that are interested in each specific film, we hope to improve the impact and reach [of films],” says Hein-Phillips.

The good news about this focus on “audience discovery” is that politically controversial content should find audiences — even in nervous, self-censoring times. The bad news is that this might intensify the polarisation and tribalism that is now poisoning western politics (which, ironically, many documentaries that can’t find a US home decry).

Either way, the shift seems unlikely to be reversed anytime soon. In that sense, then, the Trump biopic is symbolic of our troubled times. Think of that when America votes.

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