On the day of 9/11, which is famously the best way to begin a lighthearted blog post, a lot of Americans described the carnage they had just witnessed as “like something from a movie.” The truth, of course, was that they had it exactly backward. Movies were like 9/11, not the other way around.
The same cannot be said of the Donald Trump presidency.
Everything that has happened in the past nearly two years has been so ludicrously over-the-top movie-esque that it would never fly in a movie. From looking straight into an eclipse, to John McCain’s last-second healthcare shocker, to showing Kim Jong-Un an action-movie trailer for the meeting they were about to have, we’ve long ago graduated from “you can’t make this stuff up” territory into the “nobody would believe you if you made this stuff up” zone. The heightened state of our actual reality has rendered any movie about this era completely redundant.
Naturally, a number of Trump movies are already in the works. A number of films at this year’s Sundance Festival focused on Trump or his presidency in some way. There’s also The Apprentice from reporter Gabriel Sherman, and a religious “documentary” that posits Trump is God’s celestial handpicked president. But a glimmer of the first film about Donald Trump that Fast Company would actually be excited to see arrived today in the form of the below tweet:
Film pitch.. Trump drugged and moved to a replica Whitehouse, where he carries on thinking he’s governing. Millions spent on hiring actors to play his staff, Senators, news anchors, people at rallies.
There you go. Studios, your highest bid please.— Armando Iannucci (@Aiannucci) September 5, 2018
Veep creator Armando Iannucci (whom we spoke with earlier this year about his film The Death of Stalin) has the right idea. Dramatizing what has actually happened in the past two years will be both painfully boring and boringly painful, but using it as the basis for a satirical farce could be fun and cathartic.
In fact, the project, which will likely never happen and was just a slapdash tweet idea, already has one aspiring screenwriter: The New Yorker’s Adam Davidson.
https://twitter.com/adamdavidson/status/1037352593259941888
Would you go see Iannucci’s cheekily proposed ‘Trump in a replica White House’ movie? Let us know why or why not on Twitter.
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