Hi,
It’s been impossible to escape advertising for Melania, the documentary Jeff Bezos backed with around $40 million – making it the most expensive documentary ever produced.
I say “documentary”, but I don’t mean “documentary”.
As a producer, Melania Trump had full control of the whole thing – so any objectivity is immediately out the window. There’s also the fact that this whole thing is essentially just a bribe to Donald Trump from a man worth around $240 billion dollars.
Lauren Sánchez-Bezos and Jeff Bezos at New York fashion week
The bribe is directed by sex pest Brett Ratner – a man who hasn’t made anything since 2017 when he was accused of rape and sexual assault by multiple women, and who has also just surfaced in the Epstein files.
Melania director Brett Ratner is on the right.
With all those facts buzzing around in my brain, of course I was curious what this film turned out like. For one thing, $40 million is objectively a lot of money to spend on a doc. As in – I don’t understand where that money could have gone. Even taking into consideration Melania’s $28 million bribe licensing fee, Ratner was left with $12 million to spend. There are no special effects involved, very little travel, and it was shot over an incredibly short period of time. For some context, Tickled cost about $600,000 to make – and a lot of that budget was lawyer fees due to our subject being incredibly litigious.
Don’t get me started on the marketing budget, which has Melania plastered on every bus shelter in my neighbourhood, and promos appearing at the start of every episode of The Daily I listen to.
With all that in mind, the only way to know how the thing turned out was to watch it. The problem was, it’s only in theatres at the moment. There’s no way I was putting money towards this film, or contributing to box office stats that said even one more person had watched it.
Unfortunately for me, there was a way around this: I could buy a ticket for another film, gain access to the theatre, then just go and watch Melania instead.
I checked my local listings, and found a Melania screening at 6.45pm. There have been a lot of people sharing screenshots of entirely empty screenings – so I was surprised to see this theatre, albeit the smallest in the complex, half full.
A half full cinema for Melania at 6.45pm
Scanning the listings, I saw horror 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple was playing 25 minutes later. I bought a ticket to that, and my fate was sealed.
28 Years Later: Bone Temple playing at a similar time to Melania
Turning up, it was like any other cinema experience. After staff scanned my ticket for the horror film I’d purchased, there was the problem of finding what cinema the other horror film was playing in.
I didn’t have to play detective for long. A group of women, one clutching her recent purchases from Nordstrom, were posing for a group photo in front of a giant Melania display inside the foyer. They were grinning and excited.
It was clear what movie they were here for, and so I just followed them down the hall. We walked, and we walked some more. “Where is cinema 7?” one of them asked. We kept walking. Turns out cinema 7 is the oldest and smallest theatre in the building, nested at the far end of the complex on the far left.
The seats hadn’t been updated in awhile, the red fabric stained with thousands of cases of spilled food, drinks, and bodily fluids. I counted about 27 people in the theatre. I would describe them as white and old, with a few of them in a particular state of decay.
Then there was me. The first three rows were entirely empty, and so I took a seat dead centre in row three.
The trailers were tailored for the audience. The Sheep Detectives – an animated film about sheep solving a murder – got big laughs.
Young Washington appeared to be a hagiography about former president (and slave owner) George Washington, released by Angel films – a group behind many “Christian” films including The Sound of Freedom. Then there was a trailer for A Great Awakening, a story about Benjamin Franklin’s friendship with George Whitefield, one of the founders of the Evangelical movement in the United States.
Both of those trailers received hushed mumblings of approval and awe from my audience, which gave me a preview of what I was in for.
Watching Melania
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