Big budget Melania Trump documentary premieres with splashy rollout

If you’ve been watching TV, you’ve probably seen the ads. “Melania,” a big budget movie about first lady Melania Trump, premieres today with a splashy event at the newly-renamed Trump Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. It is set to open on 1,500 screens in the U.S. this weekend, a highly unconventional rollout compared to other films of this type.

Amazon acquired the film for $40 million and is spending another $35 million on marketing, according to a source with direct knowledge who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media.

“It’s just hard to imagine why this number is justified for ‘Melania,'” said Jason Spingarn-Koff, a professor of journalism at UC Berkeley.

Spingarn-Koff is a former Netflix executive who has worked on hundreds of documentaries. He says the market for documentary films these days is depressed, and even Oscar-nominated documentaries aren’t getting shown on as many screens, if any.

Questions about how much the first lady is personally making from the film and whether its outsized budget could have been an effort to curry favor with the president, were not answered by the White House or Mrs. Trump’s personal office.

The film follows Mrs. Trump for 20 days in January as she prepares to re-enter the White House as first lady.

“Here we go again,” she says looking directly at a camera as she enters the US Capital for her husband’s second inauguration. It is one of several quick cuts in a trailer that features dramatic music, glamorous visuals and an intriguing moment of spousal interaction, where she calls him “Mr. President.”

“Did you watch it,” he asks, though the trailer doesn’t reveal what “it” is.

“I did not, yeah, I will see it on the news,” Mrs. Trump says as the music swells again.

In an interview earlier this week on “Fox and Friends,” Trump was asked about the decision to include that scene. She said she was “very involved in leading the production and choosing the trailer.”

“I want to show the people that they will see the communications and private communications between me and my husband,” said Mrs. Trump, further teasing her film.

Amazon did not release an advance screener to journalists and reviewers as is typically done to promote a film and all scheduled Thursday screenings in theaters were cancelled. Ticket sales had been anemic and were getting mocked on social media, as well as by late night talk show hosts.

On its surface, this would seem to be a documentary, but the first lady is also an executive producer.

“In these situations, you could only have one take, so whatever we got it, we got it,” Mrs. Trump said in her “Fox and Friends” interview. “And I had a great team around me and a very talented director.”

That director is Brett Ratner, known for the Rush Hour action films and for being ostracized in 2017 after accusations of sexual misconduct. He denies wrongdoing. He is not a documentary filmmaker. Mrs. Trump said in another Fox News interview that she chose him because he would execute her vision of a cinematic film.

“Once the subject of the film is a producer or has … editorial input or even editorial control, then I really think we are in the realm of public relations or in this case it seems to be a work of myth making,” said Spingarn-Koff.

The first lady has a very carefully cultivated and controlled image, which has created an air of mystery around her one she is capitalizing on with this film.

Kate Bennett wrote a book about Melania Trump and covered her for years at CNN says people are always looking for clues about what Melania Trump is really thinking or who she really is.

“I don’t think the public will ever really know the deep inner thoughts and behind the scenes moments of Melania Trump, by design,” said Bennett. “She is a private person in her DNA.”

And, Bennett says, she is also at her core a Trump, a marketer, who rarely appeared during the campaign without getting a financial cut.

“There’s something really interesting to the fact that we’re seeing her the most during this presidency on a screen, in a theater,” said Bennett. “That’s unlike anything we’ve seen in traditional politics.”

Editor’s note: Amazon is among NPR’s recent financial supporters and pays to distribute some NPR content.