Let’s be honest: First Lady Melania Trump doesn’t do anything. She’s not in front of the camera. She barely promotes or even talks about her “Be Best” children’s wellbeing. (The program which was started during President Trump’s first term in office has been around since 2018 and yet, nothing.)
According to reports, Mrs. Trump spends her days exercising and spends a lot of time in a bathrobe, listening to gossip and checking her assets. And somehow, someway, someone thought it was a good idea to make a documentary about the first lady squatting in the presidential quarters like a cousin that just won’t leave.
Amazon MGM won a bidding war for the $40 million film rights to the upcoming documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History and Rolling Stone notes that it’s the most the production company has ever paid for any piece of content.
And get this: The first lady kept the lion’s share of that, some 70% of the licensing fee, $28 million, for herself. And, Rolling Stone reports, there’s nothing illegal about that.
“The First Lady is, for ethical purposes, considered to be a private citizen, and so the conflicts of interest statutes, the regulations for other executive branch employees, simply don’t apply,” Don Fox, the former acting director of the U.S. Office of Government Ethics, told Rolling Stone.
Apparently the documentary was a mad rush to get all of these people involved in the film to follow the first lady in the weeks leading up to the inauguration.
“People were worked really hard. Really long hours, highly disorganized, very chaotic,” one person who worked on the movie, told Rolling Stone. “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.”
Because the Trump family, at its least, is a series of embarrassments, one crew member guesstimated that at least two-thirds of the crew who worked on the film didn’t want their names credited on the documentary.
The doc was directed by Brett Ratner, who made his name directing the Rush Hour and X-Men movies and hadn’t done much since 2017 when he was publicly accused of sexual harassment.
Actress Natasha Henstridge claimed that Ratner forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 19. In a separate allegation, actress Olivia Munn also claimed that Ratner masturbated in front of her. Ratner denied all accusations and was never charged.
Ratner has become a close friend of the Trumps and is reportedly living in a villa at Mar-a-Lago, Rolling Stone reports.
Crew members warned that viewers shouldn’t walk into this documentary thinking they are going to get some real behind- the-scenes dirt. Because they aren’t.
“Some people are boring,” one crew member told Rolling Stone. “Some people also never let their guard down.”
The movie is set to release Friday and Amazon is investing an additional $35 million into promoting the film. But, mostly because no one cares, predictions for Melania “could take in as little as $1 million its opening weekend, while National Research Group’s estimate pegs it around $5 million.”
One crew member is hoping it flops.
“Unfortunately, if it does flop. I would really feel great about it,” the production team member told Rolling Stone.
