Ari Emanuel is seemingly trying to use whatever leverage he may still have with President Donald Trump to convince POTUS to pay more attention to Hollywood.
The WME Group Executive Chairman and Trump’s former agent recently rang up the president while the latter was sitting for an interview with New York Magazine, according to a story from the publication on Monday. In it, correspondent Ben Terris says one of the most powerful agents in Tinsel Town was calling to discuss a federal tax incentive for domestic film, television and commercial production.
Per the report, Emanuel wrote Trump “a memo” about the topic, which Trump said “he’d take a look at.”
Emanuel repped Trump for several years but stepped back not long after the former Apprentice host became POTUS for the first time. While Emanuel is an avowed Democrat, he and Trump have maintained contact in various forms over the past decade, including through their respective relationships with UFC and its founder Dana White.
During the phone call with Trump, Emanuel apparently told Terris that he hadn’t seen the former reality TV star “in about five years” but also posited “it doesn’t seem like he’s changed at all: his wit, his remembering everything, being on it. He seems normal.”
WME declined to comment.
Trump has been flirting with ideas to “make Hollywood great again” since he took office again just over a year ago but, so far, has made no meaningful progress toward any solutions that would help boost domestic film production in the U.S.
As Deadline exclusively reported in December, Trump advisors met with stakeholders just before the holidays who attempted to steer the administration away from POTUS’ proposed plan to tariff films made overseas in favor of a 15% to 20% stackable federal tax credit to bolster state incentives.
After appointing Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone and Mel Gibson his special ambassadors to Hollywood at the start of his term, Trump has expressed multiple times that he intends to impose 100% tariffs on overseas movies. In a September Truth Social post, he wrote that the country’s “movie making business has been stolen from the United States of America, by other Countries, just like stealing ‘candy from a baby.’”
However, those declarations have been met with a mostly negative sentiment from industry stakeholders, who insist that tariffs, in addition to being difficult to implement on an entity that isn’t a physical good, would be disastrous for an already struggling domestic film and television business. Even Voight, who presented his own plan to revive the industry to the president in May, suggested midsize tax incentives in addition to a harsh tariff that would seek to eliminate advantages from competing foreign incentives.
Lawmakers have also warned Trump about the downside to tariffs. Earlier this year, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) suggested a bipartisan effort to instead pass a federal tax incentive.
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