Days before its premiere, things are looking rough for the Melania Trump documentary. It sounds like the film is on track to flop hard at the box office next weekend, despite Amazon’s efforts to bolster sales. And the White House is getting flak for going ahead with a glitzy private screening of the film on Saturday night as the nation was reeling from the fatal ICE shooting in Minneapolis. But hey, at least they had a blast making it!
Well, not exactly. Rolling Stone has a new report on all the behind-the-scenes gossip that makes the whole process sound nightmarish.
While Trump ventures often do no attract the best of what the entertainment business has to offer, the cinematographers involved in the film had surprisingly impressive résumés, and none of the sources mentioned any drama among crew members. But Rolling Stone reported that the “frantic scramble” to gather footage of Melania in the 20 days leading up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration presented huge logistical issues:
It was a chaotic process that involved hiring and coordinating three separate production crews working in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
“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.”
A full-time travel coordinator was brought on to deal with logistics issues that would invariably arise when, for example, members of the crew would board the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 to film the first lady on a flight en route to Mar-a-Lago and end up without a ride home.
Melania herself didn’t add to the problems; sources described her as friendly and engaged in the process. Brett Ratner, however, was another story. The director was “canceled” in Hollywood following sexual-harassment and misconduct allegations in 2017. While no one quoted in the Rolling Stone piece specifically raises those kinds of allegations, one person said they wouldn’t have signed on for the job if they knew he’d be involved. Another source said there was a lot of talk of “Brett being slimy” among the crew, but perhaps they meant that more literally:
Ratner left a trail of detritus — discarded orange peels, gum wrappers — wherever he went on set. “He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” one said, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”
Another recalled a long day during which the crew wasn’t allowed to break for meals, and no outside food was allowed to be brought into the space where filming was taking place. Everyone was starving. “Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” one person recalled.
“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.”
An estimated two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York asked to not be credited. Another told Rolling Stone that after experiencing Trump’s second term, they now wish they’d done the same. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” the person said.
Sure, you could argue that these crew members should have guessed where things were going in the weeks before Trump’s second inauguration. But it’s hard to find work in Hollywood these days. And few people would have guessed in late 2024 that the Melania documentary would also be an attempt to rehabilitate Bret Ratner because Donald Trump has a secret passion for the Rush Hour movies.
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