‘The Apprentice’ Backer Lauds Briarcliff’s Tom Ortenberg – The Only Distributor “That Had The Balls To Get Us Here” – As Film Set To Open

deadline.com:

James Shani, whose new company Rich Spirit helped stepped in to help release Ali Abassi’s The Apprentice, was ebullient at the film’s New York premiere days ahead of a wide theatrical release. “We did it.

I don’t know how many of you guys know what it took to get here,” he told a crowd at the DGA Theater in midtown. The film, which chronicles the early rise to real estate moguldom of Donald Trump (played by Sebastian Stan) under the tutelage of Roy Cohn (Jeremy Strong), hit turbulence after producer-financier Kinematics — some of whose projects, including The Apprentice, have been backed by Trump supporter Dan Snyder — decided to exit the film.

Trump’s attorneys meanwhile issued a vitriolic cease and desist letter and threatened to sue Abassi. So after screening at Cannes, Telluride and TIFF to critical acclaim it remained in limbo until Tom Ortenberg‘s Briarcliff Entertainment, backed by Shani, picked it up for U.S.

distribution. “A shout out to the only distributor and the only person that had the balls to get us here,” Shani said at the event Tuesday night. “It’s really sad to think that in today’s world, with everything going on, that it took a person who had spent, 20 to 30 years building his career to put his neck out and put resources out, and that he was literally the only one.