The screenwriter of ‘The Apprentice’ reveals real stories behind the wildest scenes

Warning: This article contains spoilers from the learner

A good rule of thumb for those watching the learner: If a scene seems too outrageous to be true, it probably is.

“The funny thing is that everything that seems most shocking in the film is completely based on real events,” says the film’s screenwriter, journalist Gabriel Sherman. Weekly entertainment. “Very little has been dramatized. It’s one of those stories where truth is stranger than fiction.”

Sherman wrote the controversial new film, which follows a young Donald Trump’s rise to power under the tutelage of his celebrity lawyer, Roy Cohn, after covering the former president for the better part of 20 years, first as a real estate reporter at the New York Observer and later as a political reporter for New York Magazine.

While Sherman and the filmmakers intend to humanize Trump, the film does not present an entirely flattering portrait of the future president. Throughout everything the learnerthe real estate mogul, played by Sebastian Stan, is seen taking diet pills, battling erectile dysfunction, getting plastic surgery and, in the film’s darkest moment, raping his wife Ivana (Maria Bakalova ), as she stated happened in her divorce filing. . (Ivana later recanted her initial testimony, saying she felt “raped” but did not want to allege rape “in a literally criminal sense.”)

Given the controversial material and its famously litigious subject matter, Sherman and the filmmakers were careful to thoroughly analyze the script before the cameras rolled. “I sent an annotated draft of the script to our lawyers that articulated point by point where the information came from and how I dramatized the scenes,” Sherman explains. “So it was rigorously backed by research, and everyone on the filmmaking team was comfortable with that before we went into production.”

The reporter then gives the backstory to some of the film’s most outrageous moments, revealing what was dramatized and what was ripped straight from the headlines.

The blackmail tapes

Trump’s biggest early real estate victory was the construction of the Grand Hyatt Hotel in Manhattan in 1978. He was able to complete the deal thanks to a substantial loan from his father and a huge $400 million tax break of New York City dollars, which was bankrupt at the time. In the film, Trump is only able to get the tax cut after Cohn (played by Jeremy Strong) blackmails a city official with a compromising phone call, which he had illegally recorded.

“Roy’s use of blackmail, and especially of taped phone calls, is well documented,” Sherman explains. “Roy had a woman in the basement who actually had a switchboard, and she would record and listen to every conversation. I found it so powerful that Roy would basically tape record his own clients for blackmail and leverage. I thought it was a way to illustrate to Trump his philosophy to win, and how you have to be willing to almost betray your people to win.”

Whether Cohn actually used blackmail tapes to help Trump get a tax break for the Grand Hyatt is unknown, but it appears the lawyer’s dirty tricks were at play in the deal. “Stanley Friedman, the deputy mayor at the time, signed the deal at the last second, shortly before he left office, and then went to work for Roy Cohn at his law firm a week later .So basically Roy gave the city official who got the deal for Donald a job.

the parties

Cohn was known for throwing lavish parties at his Manhattan home, which also served as his law office. In the film, while his celebrity guests get high and strip, an out-of-place, sober Trump seeks out Cohn for company and finds him having sex with a man.

“Roy’s house parties were famous because he mixed up all his different worlds,” says Sherman. “Roy was really at the intersection of the underworld and the legitimate world, so you had his mob boss clients, but then you had Upper East Side society women, and these people like Rupert Murdoch, George Steinbrenner and Andy Warhol.Roy basically opened the door and allowed Donald access to the secret world.

Still, the parties at Cohn’s house were not usually fueled by drugs and sex, which would later happen at Studio 54. But since it was too expensive to recreate the famous nightclub on screen, the filmmakers decided to shoot the party wild after hours at Cohn’s house.

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“Now, as far as the after party and the debauchery, that scene was done for production reasons in the script,” explains Sherman. “We had planned to shoot the after party at Studio 54 because Roy represented (Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager) the owners of Studio 54, and Roy was a frequent guest at Studio 54, which of course was famous for its complete excess and fueled parties with drugs”.

While it’s unclear whether Trump engaged Cohn by having sex, it was no secret that the lawyer was gay. “I wasn’t shy about it,” Sherman says. “I felt that the movie needed to dramatize and really capture that aspect of Roy’s sexuality and also have Donald struggle with this unspoken truth that no one ever talked about, but everyone knew. So I thought it would be very compelling that Donald came face to face with Roy’s sexuality, but they never spoke of it again.”

The prenuptial

One of the film’s funniest scenes shows Cohn meeting with Trump and his fiancee, Ivana, to go over the prenup he’s created for them. Sitting together in a restaurant, Ivana carefully reads the paperwork, much to Cohn’s chagrin. When he comes to a clause stipulating that he returns any gifts in the event of a divorce, he walks away from the table and threatens to call off the wedding. Trump is only able to convince her to stay with him after he chases her down the street and confesses his love.

“What surprised me in the research was that it really didn’t take much to bring the page to life because the actual events were so dramatic to begin with. And that divorce scene is almost verbatim as told in different books.” , says Sherman, “The final straw was the gifts.”

Even Trump chasing Ivana down the street is based on actual reports. “The sidewalk scene was inspired by Harry Hurt’s book, The Lost Tycoonwhich tells how Donald ran to the sidewalk and convinced her to go back to the restaurant.”

A slight variation on the film is that in real life Ivana had a lawyer with her at the meeting. But as Sherman explains, “It was a lawyer that Roy arranged to have for her. So the lawyer was basically in it with Roy. He was so corrupt.”

Plastic surgeries

At the end of the film, Trump visits a plastic surgeon to address his receding hairline and expanding waistline. First, the doctor advises Trump to stop taking his weight loss medication, which amounts to cheap speed. When he later recommends diet and exercise, Trump informs him that the human body has a finite amount of energy that should not be wasted on physical exertion, an argument he has continued to make over the years. So opt for liposuction and scalp reduction surgery.

While Trump has denied going under the knife in the past, the scene is once again based on actual reports The Lost Tycoon. “In Ivana’s divorce filing, which she said under oath, she talked about how Donald had liposuction, scalp removal surgery and was also taking diet pills. So that scene was really something that was supported by the record,” Sherman says.

As for Trump’s “ridiculous ideas” about exercise, “I thought it was a really appropriate place to show that he’s not interested in working out to get in shape,” Sherman continues. “He just wants the quick fix of surgery.”

The rape scene

One of the most controversial scenes in the film shows Trump raping his wife, Ivana (who died in July 2022), in their home. The assault comes after Ivana, dissatisfied with her love life, gives Trump a subtle hint on his birthday, the 1982 international bestseller, The G-spot and other recent discoveries about human sexuality. Already aggravated by his marriage, Trump does not take well to his manhood and attacks Ivana in retaliation.

Although the assault is based on Ivana’s 1990 divorce filing, the circumstances that led to the film are different. “His deposition is actually much more graphic than what we portray in the film,” Sherman explains. “The way she described it, Trump was recovering from scalp surgery and he was having these debilitating headaches, and she provoked him a little bit, and he got mad and threw her on the bed and took her hair and assaulted her.”

He adds: “The scene that we dramatize in the film is a compilation of that scene, but also the fact that near the end of her marriage, Ivana talked to her friends about how her sex life had basically disappeared and bought this book. and showed it to his friends over lunch. It’s actually a more tragic scene because she’s trying to connect with him.”

Cufflinks

After coming to terms with a serious fallout from an unpaid hotel bill, Trump gives Cohn a pair of diamond buttons for his birthday. In one of the film’s most tragic moments, when Cohn proudly shows the gift to Ivana, she quietly reveals to the lawyer that they are imitations.

While it’s unlikely that Ivana broke the news in real life, Trump really did give his former best friend and mentor a pair of fake buttons. However, the timing was not initially in the script. “That was Jeremy Strong’s idea,” Sherman reveals. “Jeremy had done a lot of research on his character, and when we were doing script notes, he told me this great story that he had remembered but hadn’t included in the script about how Donald gave Roy these fake diamond Tiffany buttons .”

He adds: “It was a great idea that we put it in because it’s the perfect expression of Donald’s shamelessness.”

the learner it’s in theaters now.