Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Jorie Graham, considered one of the most celebrated poets of the postwar American generation, today published a response to an op-ed by Michelle Goldberg in the New York Times that appeared on Friday.
The Times article complained that the rights to The Apprenticea powerful film starring Jeremy Strong and Sebastian Stan that depicts the relationship between Roy Cohn and Donald Trump, has not yet been selected for theatrical distribution or streaming service in the United States and may therefore not be available to view.
The film was well received at its premiere in Cannes last month.
“Unfortunately, you probably won’t have a chance to see the film any time soon, at least not in the United States,” Goldberg wrote. “The distributors have the rights to The Apprentice in Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan and many other countries. But the filmmakers have not yet signed a deal to release the film here, either in theaters or on streaming services.”
Fear of the political consequences of distributing the film seems to be preventing any deal, as some experts noted in the Times article. Trump also threatened to sue.
Today, a horrified Jorie Graham condemned in an X-post the lack of support for the film and for artistic vision in general in these times, calling it “actually appalling.”
“Beyond the article, Jeremy Strong is exceptionally vocal about Hollywood’s fear – and its apparent refusal to distribute ‘The Apprentice’ – which is otherwise distributed worldwide,” Graham wrote. “Is the censorship of artistic expression already beginning – as if a pre-internalization of the autocratic world threatens us? Is Hollywood giving up without a fight, as much of Silicon Valley has done?
“Art is, by definition, resistance – as much as it is celebration and initiation. Listen to this wise man and his wise choice of words: “I would say that Hollywood needs to be reminded of Shakespeare’s words – that our job as storytellers is to hold up a mirror to nature… and show the age and body of time, its shape and its pressure.”
“If we are afraid to hold up a mirror to nature, afraid to show the shape and pressure of the age and the body of our time, then that is the beginning of the end of film as a valuable piece of culture and we have fully entered an age of decadence in our culture which, as history shows us, is the last stage before collapse.”