To humiliate Donald Trump, Marvel director Taika Waititi proved no actor or actress should ever trust him.
“I directed Trumpy,” Waititi claimed on a podcast. “There was a piece of paper with a list of demands. The height of the camera had to be a certain height to make him look a little thinner.”
“I think it had whatever the Pantone for orange was that he had to appear as on screen,” Waititi said, adding: “He had a makeup person who was also his ego booster and she would touch him up and say, ‘Oh, Mr. Trump, oh Mr. Trump.'”
Back in 2012, Waititi directed a Super Bowl ad for NBC highlighting their television lineup, which included Trump’s hit primetime show The Apprentice.
Waititi is not doing this because Trump’s demands are unheard of or even unusual for a celebrity of Trump’s stature. When you are as big of an icon as Trump was in 2012, image and branding are everything. You protect that image at all costs because once you dent that image, it all comes apart. Stars telling directors where to put the camera goes back nearly a hundred years.
In this July 9, 2004, file photo, Donald Trump, seeking contestants for “The Apprentice” television show, is interviewed at Universal Studios Hollywood in the Universal City section of Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Ric Francis, File)
Entire sets had to be rebuilt because Claudette Colbert would only allow the left side of her face to be photographed. When Marlene Dietrich was on set, dictatorial directors like Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles allowed her to do her own lighting. Manly men like John Wayne wore bronzing makeup. Humphrey Bogart wore three-inch platform shoes while filming Casablanca because five-foot, ten-inch Ingrid Bergman was an inch taller. Alan Ladd, a tough but short guy (5’6″), had to stand on boxes or have his leading ladies stand in holes.
Every public figure — male or female — wants to look their best, and that requires knowledge of cameras, lighting, and makeup. Nothing Trump requested is out of the ordinary in the least.
What is out of the ordinary is a director revealing these secrets. Waititi is only doing this to Trump because Trump has fallen out of favor with Waititi and the left-wing elite. But now everyone who has or intends to work with Waititi knows they cannot trust him; that if they fall out of his favor, he will humiliate them with secrets that are supposed to remain on the set.
During my limited and not-at-all-successful time in Hollywood, I saw all kinds of things that would make for interesting anecdotes. Actors and actresses behaving badly… Ego trips, vanity, demands, temper, etc. To be clear, almost everyone I had the pleasure of meeting and working with was great. I still have a genuine affection for those folks — actors, producers, and crew. But there were the rare exceptions, and I could get some mileage out of those stories. But I would never do that. There’s a trust, you see, an unspoken agreement that what happens on stage stays on stage.
After the failure of Thor: Love and Thunder and his latest flop, Next Goal Wins, Waititi appears to be having some sort of breakdown. To begin with, he’s running around bad-mouthing Marvel movies as being beneath him.
“You know what? I had no interest in doing one of those films,” Waititi said last week. “It wasn’t on my plan for my career as an auteur [LOL, auteur]. But I was poor, and I’d just had a second child, and I thought, ‘You know what, this would be a great opportunity to feed these children.'”
He’s trying to cope with his own fall from grace with the bizarre claim that no one remembers who directed Casablanca (Michael Curtiz). He’s hoping to pre-excuse his next high-profile failure, a Star Wars movie that probably won’t get made, by saying it will “piss people off.”
And now, like an old woman, he’s betraying people’s trust to tell smarmy secrets.
Trump looks like a pro. Waititi looks like what he is — a jerk.
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