Donald Trump says the world has “stolen” the US film industry, “like candy from a baby”. What a caper! But what if this were not another wild rant but an admission of vulnerability?
What if other countries have secretly pulled off a daring theft in a manner not quite akin to taking candy from a baby – a phrase that usually describes something easy, not villainous – but more like a good old-fashioned casino heist?
Sure, some people claim that the film industry is an amorphous concept that transcends borders and that, as any one release is typically the product of a complex multinational collaboration on creativity, finance and tax policy, Trump’s revived plan to impose a 100 per cent tariff “on any and all movies that are made outside of the United States” is unworkable nonsense.
But the US president once ruled over a serially bankrupt casino empire. He knows things most people don’t about the ways in which money can vanish. He’s also likely to have seen Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 version of the 1960s heist classic, if only because Trump Plaza, erstwhile feature of the Atlantic City skyline, appears in it.
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So it’s possible that Trump, and only Trump, was sufficiently alert to the risk of grand-scale industrial robbery, and that he has chosen now to reveal an audacious smash-and-grab previously kept under wraps.
It’s best, in this scenario, to think of the US “movie-making business” as a discrete, portable entity – a form of revenue-generating magic that can be bottled and housed in a seemingly impregnable room. Los Angeles is a decoy site. The real jewel in the American crown is stowed 60m below solid earth in Las Vegas, Nevada, in the hope that this keeps it safe from the influence of Gavin Newsom, the allegedly “weak and incompetent” governor of California.
The plot begins with Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister dubbed the George Clooney of world leaders, gliding up a gold-dripped escalator to conspire in plain sight with Keir Starmer, prime minister of Hollywood’s home away from home, aka the UK.
Soon the pair recruit a crew of international counterparts, including Australia’s Anthony Albanese, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and whoever is in charge of New Zealand these days.
Micheál Martin, after a last-minute invitation to join the group, is given the mission of distracting Trump by being lovely to him. Newsom is the inside man. And Christopher Luxon, who is indeed the current prime minister of New Zealand, is tasked with walking across the casino floor – no one will recognise him – and deactivating a key surveillance camera via the strategic deployment of a cloud of party balloons.
Our fiendish industry-snatchers study maps of the vault where the US movie-making business is located. The ringleaders deliver a presentation on the challenges involved in liberating it unimpeded, then smuggling it out of the country without getting shot.
Some nerves are expressed after it emerges that the vault is guarded by the beefy acting trio of Channing Tatum, Jason Momoa and Dwayne Johnson, while no one fancies being the one to shimmy down the lift shaft.
Still, everyone wants their respective economies to get their cut, so internal strife is put aside and the US film industry is soon packed into a cabin-sized briefcase, clearing Trump-controlled air space.
Alas, when our intrepid allies later regroup they discover that quite a lot of movie-making activity was accidentally left behind on US soil. The five-star thriller One Battle After Another, for instance, was not only filmed stateside but much of the location work took place in Newsom’s California, the state that Trump this week declared “particularly hard hit”.
The US president will doubtless be pleased. There’s no reason not to be – Paul Thomas Anderson’s film is a triumph of American cinema that showcases the unique machismo of the ultraconservative elite. Some of them are even still alive at the end.
For our international dream team, however, the desire for greater movie riches poses a dilemma. Is it time for one last job?
Dissenters argue that all countries have to do – and are doing – to lure Hollywood farther away from Hollywood is commit to a string of competitive tax credits. Give US studios a tax break and they will come. Voluntarily. No theft detected. There’s no need for an elaborate plan involving light sabotage, faked surveillance footage or the impersonation of cleaning staff.
The alternative tactic is to just let Emmanuel Macron, the French president, lead a stirring fightback against tariff threats, while taking comfort in the fact that the California governor’s office isn’t alone in thinking Trump’s vision for saving the US film industry “100 per cent stupid”.
Who knows? This latest Trump salvo may well swiftly implode, much like all semblance of logic and plausibility in the White House – or, say, a defunct former casino that long ago fell into disrepair.
