The White House Restricts Press Access to Melania Trump's Documentary | Vanity Fair
I had been chatting with one of the producers of the new Melania Trump documentary for a few weeks when he started behaving strangely. Fernando Sulichin is a curious character to begin with. The Argentine producer is relatively unknown, but tends to pop up on the front lines of the action, working with political iconoclasts of all stripes. He’s produced several of Oliver Stone’s documentaries, including an interview series with Russia’s Vladimir Putin that was criticized for Stone’s obsequiousness toward the strongman. When Sean Penn traveled to Mexico to meet with drug baron El Chapo, Sulichin was there with him. And when disgraced Hollywood mogul Brett Ratner returned from a long exile to direct the documentary Melania wanted to make about herself, Sulichin was announcedas an executive producer.
That is how I came to know him. We chatted a couple of times in the last month; he spoke excitedly about the documentary and expressed hope it would be well-received. He invited me to join him at the premiere, held at the Center formerly known as Kennedy. Then, a day before the event, his tone turned from warm to concerned.
“I am sticking my neck for [sic] you so dont [sic] write sarcasm,” he texted. A few hours later, he insisted on an embargo of two days on the story, meaning I could not publish a piece on the documentary, the premiere of which was being held on Thursday night, until Saturday. I noted that the premiere would be attended by a legion of influencers who would no doubt post about the event online. Not to mention the fact that the documentary opens in theaters across the country on Friday (today), and every major news outlet is covering it. How on earth did the minds behind Melania expect to maintain this 48-hour bulwark against press coverage?
My protests fell on deaf ears. When I called Sulichin on Thursday to confirm my attendance, the prognosis wasn’t good. “I am trying my best,” he claimed. He told me to expect a call from his PR agent in London, who might be able to sort this all out. She never called. He eventually stopped responding to me.
“For me, it’s the biggest moment of my whole life, my whole career,” said Ratner, whose pre-Too credits include directing the Rush Hour franchise, which brought an $850 million box office haul, and producing The Revenant, for which Leonardo DiCaprio won an Oscar.
I would soon learn that my fate was one shared by the rest of the press, the vast majority of which was barred from the premiere of Melania, a documentary that Amazon bought for an eye-watering $40 million and reportedly spent another $35 million promoting. That $75 million price tag is a steep hill to climb for a movie expected to bring in just a few million on opening weekend. As Amazon flooded televisions and billboards across America with the striking face of the first lady, social media matched it with screenshots of theater floorplans showing few, if any, seats reserved.
It is a peculiar situation, a film in desperate need of promotion being so stridently withheld from the very reporters the studio needs to cover it. It wasn’t just Sulichin who helped maintain a hermetic seal on the theater doors: Amazon did not allow reporters beyond the Trump-Kennedy Center’s red carpet. The center’s chief Ric Grenell was of no help either, though this should come as little surprise—despite his past as a diplomat, Grenell has stood out in Trumpworld as particularly hostile toward the press. (I recently sent him an email greeting, but was met with a rather undiplomatic reply in which he diagnosed the media with “an extreme case of TDS,” or Trump Derangement Syndrome.) In the run-up to the event, Ratner’s team agreed to an exclusive interview with a Vanity Fair writer, only to ghost her when the appointed interview date approached.
While barred from the screening itself, the press was allowed to cover the procession of cabinet secretaries and elected officials who marched the black carpet, which kept with the monochrome branding Melania used for both her autobiography and the new documentary. There was Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., House Speaker Mike Johnson, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, and Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick. “I’m a big fan of Melania,” said Kennedy, adding, “she’s a supporter of my agenda.” Ratner—whose Hollywood career was derailed in 2017 by a suite of sexual misconduct allegations, claims that he denied at the time—arrived with Marc Beckman, a producer on the film and a longtime adviser to Melania. “For me, it’s the biggest moment of my whole life, my whole career,” said Ratner, whose pre-Too credits include directing the Rush Hour franchise, which brought an $850 million box office haul, and producing The Revenant, for which Leonardo DiCaprio won an Oscar. How will he measure the success of this film? “Definitely not by the box office!” Ratner said. “I’ve already succeeded.” And where have you been all these years? “I was lying low,” he replied cryptically. (Ratner will direct the upcoming Rush Hour 4, which Paramount greenlit after Trump privately and publicly urged the Ellison family, which owns Paramount, to bring back the franchise.)
Among the assembled press, Dan Ball, a host at the pro-Trump outlet OANN, spent much of this time loudly insulting the reporters around him. When he interviewed Alina Habba, a former Trump lawyer who recently lost her job as New Jersey’s top prosecutor, he asked what she thought of the “shitty” media on the black carpet that night. “The fake news?” Habba asked. Ball, becoming increasingly agitated as the interview went on, complained that the media “never covers” Melania and concluded by calling the reporters in the room “mongrels.” Ball’s wife, a producer at OANN, chuckled. The floor around her was covered with glitter that had fallen off her body. “I feel like I’m at a strip club,” muttered one photographer. Ball was overheard saying glitter would be all over his face later in the evening.
Melania and Donald Trump arrived last. At first, Trump appeared interested in letting Melania have her moment; they posed for a few photos, then he gestured toward her and stepped aside to let the cameras enjoy her dazzling smile and black dress from Dolce & Gabbana. He ignored the shouts down the carpet from reporters asking about a potential government shutdown. For a moment. After a few seconds, he walked over to the velvet rope and, for the next 27 minutes, answered questions. Melania answered some as well, but was characteristically taciturn. Will the documentary win over people who aren’t Trump supporters, one reporter asked. “I don’t know, we’ll see,” she said.
President Trump holds forth as first lady Melania looks on.
Trump answered almost everything, though he bristled at an inquiry from New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh about whether the huge sum Amazon spent on his wife’s movie was a case of “corporate corruption.” Trump frowned. “Who are you with?” he asked. The New York Times. “Fake news!” Trump shot back. Ball, leaning in with a microphone, cackled and dutifully repeated the jab for his audience watching at home, in case they hadn’t heard it. “Fake news!” Trump continued down the carpet. Another reporter asked about the cost of the documentary. “I think you have to go and ask President Obama, who got paid a lot of money and hasn’t done anything,” Trump said. (Barack Obama’s Higher Ground production company has produced a series of feature films, including the Oscar-winning 2019 documentary American Factory.) “If you take a look at others, they’ve been paid a lot of money, but this is somebody, Melania, who really produced; she’s done a great thing.”
The horde of reporters became so fixated on the president that they seemed to forget about the evening’s star. As Trump held forth on everything from the new Fed Chair to war in Iran, Melania silently walked back to the wall, which was emblazoned with giant black letters spelling her name, and posed for more photos. Inside, she delivered a speech to the packed opera house as Trump looked on from his box. There was Donald Trump Jr. and his fiancée Bettina Anderson, Dr. Phil, Maria Bartiromo, Hegseth, Kellyanne Conway, Marco Rubio, Dr. Oz, Susie Wiles, and Nicki Minaj. “Some have called this a documentary,” Melania told the crowd. “It is not. It is a creative experience that offers perspectives, insights, and moments.”
Melania the creative experience has been cited by critics as yet another example of Trump’s hostile takeover of American culture. Before Trump was inaugurated this time around, Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez made their pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to pay their respects. At dinner, according to The Wall Street Journal, Melania pitched the billionaire Amazon founder on her documentary. “Just over two weeks later, Amazon, a company that prides itself on frugality and sharp negotiating, agreed to pay $40 million to license the film—the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary and nearly three times the next-closest offer,” the Journal reported, adding that Melania stood to rake in more than 70% of that fee as executive producer. Combined with the additional $35 million that Puck’s Matt Belloni reported Amazon is spending to market the film, the total is an astounding sum that makes it hard to dispel the perception that the project is a tithe paid to a president who has proved willing to use his awesome power as a battering ram against private institutions.
Rome burns on. The split screen was striking: These elites, packed into a once revered institution that the garish emperor has desecrated by renaming it after himself, gorging themselves on canapés and washing them down with Champagne, all while people whom those in this room might, in stump speeches, call “everyday Americans,” take to the streets of Minneapolis to protest the thousands of masked federal agents who have invaded their city, leaving chaos and bloodshed in the government’s wake. Trump, as decadent and unpopular as Nero, promised on the black carpet that the $75 million movie his wife made about herself “really brings back the glamour.”
The press wouldn’t know; as Trump walked inside to enjoy the show, we were ushered out into the night.
