On Saturday, the same day that an ICE agent shot and killed ICU nurse Alex Pretti as he was restrained, face first on ground in Minneapolis, a few dozen VIPs — including Apple CEO Tim Cook, Queen Rania of Jordan, and former heavy-weight champion Mike Tyson — gathered at the White House for a lavish party, complete with custom-made popcorn buckets and gift boxes emblazoned with the first lady’s portrait, to celebrate the forthcoming documentary Melania: Twenty Days to History.
The private sneak peek screening was held ahead of the Brett Ratner-directed film’s world premiere, slated to take place at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., on Thursday. The fine print along the bottom of an invitation to the premiere reads: “If you are a government employee or a government official, by accepting this invitation you are confirming that you have received approval from your ethics officer or legal department to attend this event and accept any provided items.”
The boilerplate language refers to the fact that federal officials and government employees are subject to strict rules on accepting gifts from anyone who does business with the government to avoid conflicts of interest — or even the mere appearance of a conflict.
The irony is thick: A little over a year ago, Melania sparked a bidding war among Hollywood studios eager to curry favor with the incoming Trump administration. Amazon MGM Studios ended up beating out both Disney (which had just donated $15 million to Trump’s future presidential library to settle a dubious defamation claim the soon-to-be president had levied against its subsidiary ABC) and Paramount, which was seeking good relations with the White House ahead of a blockbuster merger that would be subject to FCC approval.
A few weeks before Amazon MGM Studios offered an eye-watering $40 million dollars for the film rights — the most the streamer had ever paid for any piece of content — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos dined with Trump and his wife at Mar-a-Lago.
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According to The Wall Street Journal, the first lady kept roughly 70 percent of the licensing fee, $28 million, herself. And, technically, there is nothing illegal about that. “The First Lady is, for ethical purposes, considered to be a private citizen, and so the conflicts of interest statutes, the regulations for other executive branch employees, simply don’t apply,” says Don Fox, the former acting director of the U.S. office of government ethics, who worked under Presidents George Bush and Barack Obama.
But, Fox adds, his office would have advised against accepting such a lucrative deal with Amazon at the start of a new administration because of the extensive business Bezos had before the federal government: “It just looks like it’s buying access and buying favor.” Amazon Web Services is a giant federal contractor supporting numerous government agencies including the Department of Defense, and Bezos’ aerospace company, Blue Origin, has NASA contracts worth billions of dollars.
A spokesperson for Amazon MGM Studios denied that the studio had any ulterior motives, telling Rolling Stone: “We licensed the film for one reason and one reason only — because we think customers are going to love it.”
Amazon’s purchase of Melania set off a frantic scramble to get as much footage as possible of the first lady in the weeks leading up to the inauguration. It was a chaotic process that involved hiring and coordinating three separate production crews working in Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City. Each had its own heavyweight cinematographer: Jeff Cronenweth, best known for his collaborations with David Fincher; Michael Mann’s go-to cameraman Dante Spinotti; and Barry Peterson, cinematographer most recently of the infamous Colleen Hoover adaptation It Ends With Us, each shot portions of the film.
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“People were worked really hard. Really long hours, highly disorganized, very chaotic,” one person who worked on the set said. “It wasn’t easy money,” another added. “It was very difficult because of the chaos that was around everything. … Usually [for a documentary] it’s like, ‘Oh, follow the subject.’ Well, it’s Melania Trump. With the first lady and Secret Service, you can’t just do things you usually do.”
A full-time travel coordinator was brought on to deal with logistics issues that would invariably arise when, for example, members of the crew would board the Trump Organization’s Boeing 757 to film the first lady on a flight en route to Mar-a-Lago and end up without a ride home.
One person familiar estimated that some two-thirds of the crew members who worked on the film in New York had requested not to have their names formally credited on the documentary. A separate person who will be credited on the film said that, after experiencing the first year of Trump’s presidency, they now wish they had not put their name on it. “I’m much more alarmed now than I was a year ago,” that person said.
People who worked on the film said they had fewer problems working with Melania Trump herself, who was described as friendly and very engaged in the process, than they did with the director, Brett Ratner. (“She was totally nice,” one person said. “She was the opposite of Brett Ratner.”)
Melania is the first movie Ratner — who is known for directing the Rush Hour movies and X-Men: The Last Stand — has made since he was publicly accused of sexual harassment and assault by six women in 2017.
Actress Natasha Henstridge told the Los Angeles Times Ratner forced her to perform oral sex on him when she was 19, while Olivia Munn recalled Ratner masturbating in front of her when she visited the set of one of his films as a young aspiring actress. Ratner denied the accusations and was never charged. More recently, a photograph of a shirtless Ratner with model scout and Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel appeared in the newly unclassified Epstein files. (On the day the Los Angeles Times’ investigation into Ratner was published, Epstein sent an email to his personal lawyer that reads “brett ratner now. Oy.”) Through an intermediary, Ratner denied ever meeting Epstein to Rolling Stone.
“I feel a little bit uncomfortable with the propaganda element of this,” one member of the production team said, “But Brett Ratner was the worst part of working on this project.” That person said they weren’t aware Ratner’s involvement until just days before filming began, and they would not have accepted the job if they’d known.
Another confirmed: “There was more talk about Brett being slimy than there was about Melania.”
Ratner left a trail of detritus — discarded orange peels, gum wrappers — wherever he went on set. “He did actually chew a piece of gum and throw it in a coffee cup on my cart,” one said, [but] “didn’t acknowledge my existence for even one nanosecond.”
Another recalled a long day during which the crew wasn’t allowed to break for meals, and no outside food was allowed to be brought into the space where filming was taking place. Everyone was starving. “Brett, unknowingly or maliciously, got his own food, went up there, was just eating it and just licking his fingers in grubbiest way possible, either being a dick or [having] no awareness whatsoever to the fact that everybody else is working and no one’s eating,” one person recalled.
A third person involved in the production defended Ratner, and praised his contributions. “He’s an intuitive, incredible, emotional, intelligent director, and you will see that on the screen,” this person said. “It’s not just a documentary, it’s a film — he’s a filmmaker that can go long shots, big shots. He sees everything from a different point of view [than a documentarian].”
It’s not clear how Trump and Ratner initially connected, but the director has become close with the president and his wife: He is reportedly living in a villa at Mar-a-Lago and is said to have continued to film the first lady after production of the documentary concluded.
A review of his political contributions indicates Ratner never donated to any of Trump’s three presidential campaigns. (To the contrary, records show multiple contributions to Hillary Clinton during the 2016 race as well as gifts to Kamala Harris, when she was still a California senator.)
Despite the unfettered access to the first lady — described as extraordinary by people involved — and the exorbitant sums of money that went into the film, viewers shouldn’t expect huge revelations about Trump’s wife, who has largely remained a cipher even after decades in the spotlight. “Some people are boring,” one crew member said. “Some people also never let their guard down.”
Amazon has declined to share the film ahead of its release on Friday. But, having spent $40 million to acquire the rights to the movie, the streamer is reportedly now spending an additional $35 million to promote it, according to Puck News, with a campaign that includes TV spots airing during NFL broadcasts and a takeover of the Las Vegas Sphere. Whether or not the studio’s investment will pay off in ways other than goodwill from the Trump administration remains to be seen.
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Forecasts for how the film will perform vary: BoxOffice.com has predicted Melania could take in as little as $1 million its opening weekend, while National Research Group’s estimate pegs it around $5 million. But there are a few recent examples of films that cater to conservative audiences outperforming expectations: Dennis Quaid presidential biopic Reagan was panned by critics, but took in $30 million in 2024, and the similarly-pilloried Daily Wire-produced film Am I Racist?, brought in $12 million, making it the highest-grossing documentary that year.
“Unfortunately, if it does flop,” one member of the Melania production team said, “I would really feel great about it.”