"Melania" Is Not a Documentary

And Amazon is not a media company.

Don’t be fooled: the new Melania Trump “movie” and its mega-marketing campaign—defiling social media feeds, billboards, buses, NFL playoff breaks, and even the New York Stock Exchange—is not a documentary. It is an advertisement and money-making venture for the Melania Trump brand, just as is almost everything else about the Trump Presidency is for the Trump brand.

Documentaries aren’t licensed for $40 million; documentaries don’t have $35 million marketing budgets; documentaries aren’t released globally on 3,300 screens, and documentaries (at least not ethical ones) aren’t defined, directed, and controlled by their celebrity participants. (According to one report, Melania positioned cameras and adjusted lighting on the set, and worked on the edit of the trailer.)

Call it a very expensive commercial; a campaign ad; glossy propaganda; MAGA porn—but it is not a documentary, and to call it one is an insult to documentary filmmakers everywhere. My fellow media, please stop calling it a doc.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the first lady’s cut of the $40 million licensing deal was more than 70%, and Melania’s agent was additionally selling “sponsorships” for the film—starting at $10 million—to prominent CEOs and billionaires who could get a thank you in the end-credits (not even $10M gets you an EP credit!) There’s nothing about the financing, the production, or the distribution of this project that resembles anything like a documentary.

“Melania” is a transaction, plain and simple. And it is what Amazon has always been about at its core. Even though Jeff Bezos’ retail company started a streaming platform and gobbled up long-standing film studio MGM, and the entity has acquired and supported many great independent films and documentaries over the years—including Nanfu Wang’s “One Child Nation” and Garret Bradley’s “Time”—it isn’t a media corporation. It is a seller of goods. It is a marketplace. And they can pretend that their films and TV shows are, at the very least, “content,” but they are actually even less than that: They are drivers of your online shopping cart.

As former Amazon Studios co-head Ted Hope said in our book about working at the company, “I never thought I would make films to peddle power drills.”

Ted was referring to Bezos’ explanation in 2015 to The Hollywood Reporter about their then new model: “When people join [Amazon] Prime, they buy more of everything we sell,” he said. “They buy more shoes, they buy more power tools and so on. How you pay for great content is an important part of making great content available.”

And nowadays, increasingly, Amazon and Bezos are also in the business of selling products for and normalizing an authoritarian and unabashedly White Supremacist leader who has shown an unceasing appetite for corruption, kleptocracy, cruelty, and flouting the rule of law and diminishing our democratic values. You go, Jeff Bezos, and all the people who enable him!

I don’t know if any Amazon executives were on the ground at Sundance looking to acquire films, but I would hope that filmmakers would be giving them the cold shoulder. During this year’s Sundance, the world premiere of “Melania” at the White House was shown, after all, one day after Trump’s ICE forces killed an innocent U.S citizen, so it’d probably be a bad look for filmmakers (other than Brett Ratner, I guess) to get into bed with Amazon.

It’s hard enough for creators these days to find distribution platforms for their work, but I'm starting to think this is one step too far. While top corporate media executives from Paramount to Apple to Disney have kissed the Trump ring, there’s something particularly and grotesquely sycophantic and morally bankrupt about Bezos’ recent reign—from reinventing the Washington Post editorial board as a right-wing mouthpiece to the “Melania” bribery deal—that might make filmmakers, directors, showrunners, and writers, et. al. think twice about working for the company these days. If some tech workers are finally waking up and resisting the complacent politics of their overlords, maybe it’s time film companies, film unions, and others in the creative community start making some noise, too.

I should say obviously there’s nothing wrong with producing or supporting films and TV shows for those with politically conservative views, as these are people who certainly also need to be entertained and want content that satisfies their taste. But there’s something very different about that than paying the Trumps tens of millions of extra dollars to curry their favor. (According to the WSJ article, Paramount offered $4 million and Disney offered $14 million for the rights to “Melania,” along with its episodic offshoot, which both seem high, but still somewhat in the realm of business realities.) I would also think conservative audiences would also appreciate work that doesn’t blatantly pander to the Trump regime.

There’s also a difference between conservative ideals and far-right xenophobic and autocratic ideologies. If Elon Musk was going to produce or distribute an independent film, would filmmakers take him up on it? If not, why are they still doing business with Jeff Bezos’ Amazon/MGM Studios?