As if anyone here needed another reason to loathe Donald Trump, mega-arrogant tycoon, card-carrying member of the 1% and all-around birther thug, you have it in the form of a new British documentary film, You've Been Trumped, directed by Anthony Baxter. It just played at this year's St. Louis International Film Festival, with Baxter himself in attendance, making the rounds on the festival circuit. The movie needs financial help (more about that later), and there'll be a link to donate to help support the film at the end of this diary.
The film concerns The Donald's actions to build a new golf course in Scotland (as if they really need another golf course), which is leading to the ruining of a rare environmentally sensitive area in the process, and include harassment of the local residents. DK'er Lib Dem FoP diaried this story back in 2007. However, Trump isn't the only villain in the movie. More below the flip.....
In a nutshell, if you remember Bill Forsyth's 1983 film Local Hero, imagine the story in real life, except change:
* The film's oil refinery to a golf course,
* The film's beach resident Ben, who refuses to sell out his space, to real-life farmer Michael Forbes, who refuses to sell out his space in the Menie Estate.
In fact, there are several residents in that space who don't want to sell out. Not that this stops Trump, who had purchased land in the Menie Estate some years back. He and his minions start their construction of the course/destruction of the area, and in the process:
(a) Cut off water to Michael Forbes by disrupting the underground feed to his well.
(b) Pile up dirt around resident's areas to obstruct their view of the region.
(c) Start ruining the protected area, known as the Foveran Links Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI).
In brief, while the story is still sort of on-going, to pull a spoiler here, the film basically ends unhappily in a slow trainwreck manner, because Trump's minions have begun the trashing of the Menie Estate, and the damage can't be reversed any time soon.
As you can imagine, the film is pretty one-sided, but given that the other side is Donald Trump, is anyone surprised? Trump has condemned Walker as a fraud, as well as calling Michael Forbes a "pig" on tape, in footage shown in the film. If you want a more detailed sum-up of the story, you can read this blog post from The Guardian by Bob Ward, of the London School of Economics' Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, in addition to Lib Dem FoP's earlier diary. Ward's blog post has this link to Scottish Natural Heritage's analysis of the Foveran Links SSSI and its environmental value and unique status. Given the complication of the story, I'm going to try to limit discussion to the film itself and various aspects of it.
As part of his filmmaking, Walker gave one of the subjects whose home is under threat a small digital video camera to shoot footage of the area and the Trump group's systematic destruction of the area. Unfortunately, I forgot to note her name, but she is credited for the footage that she shot in the movie. It's pretty sad and infuriating to see.
But speaking of attribution of footage, Trump's side has accused Baxter of stealing footage from CBS (the David Letterman show), the Golf Channel, as well as Scottish Television and the BBC, for the film. Lizzie Crocker quotes a Trump representative in this article from The Daily Beast a few weeks back:
"In a phone conversation with The Daily Beast, George Sorial, the Trump Organization's managing director and assistant general counsel, elaborated on the statement:
'Anthony Baxter was a guy that hid in the bushes, we dealt with him for weeks. He showed a shot of a field [in the film] and described that area as this terribly important scientific site. He will allege that we destroyed it, when we only ended up touching 3 or 4 percent. He stole footage from the golf channel and David Letterman. That gives you some insight into the veracity of this guy.'"
First, per Sorial's smarmy dismissal of the Foveran Links SSSI, that earlier report shows that Foveran Links SSSI is a very important scientific site. In addition, at one point, if you watch footage of one of Trump's early press conferences, Baxter is shown in full view among the other journalists. However, if Baxter truly used network footage without permission, that is a serious slip-up on his part. It would be understandable if the networks were reluctant to grant permission, given the end result, although if memory serves, all the media outlets were credited in the end titles. (To split hairs, granted, that's not the same as actually having permission.) Our side has the higher bar to match in being purer than Caesar's wife on matters and details like that, unfair as that is in that Trump doesn't get held to the same standards of general integrity (or Trump doesn't care as much about violating them).
One of Baxter's general assertions is that at the time the golf course was proposed, the Scottish press fell over backwards in swallowing Trump's hyped up pro-golf course arguments whole, and didn't cover the people opposed to Trump and those who wanted a more go-slow approach, i.e. the Scottish media equivalent of DK'ers bashing the MSM here in the US. Some more recent articles in The Scotsman news paper have appeared on 6/10/11, 6/12/11, and 6/28/11. The counter to this argument would be a paper like The Guardian (natch), in particular the paper's Scotland correspondent, Severin Carroll. Examples include one article about the filmmakers being arrested in the course of filming, where Baxter tells his side of what he was doing trying to make this film and cover the story:
"It is alleged we were photographing confidential documents. We certainly didn't and we've the footage to prove it. It was alleged we were members of Tripping up Trump and that's absolutely incorrect.
"We were legitimately carrying out an interview with a member of Mr Trump's workforce at the site, and he participated in that interview, freely exchanging information, over a period of time.
"Basically, I was being prevented from doing my job, and my legitimate duty is to follow events for that film. [As] journalists we should be allowed to carry out our legitimate normal duties."
Other Guardian articles, after completion of the film, include these:
(a) A delay on opening of the full resort
(b) The movie winning a prize at the 2011 Sheffield Doc/Fest
I mentioned at the start that Trump, vicious slimeball as he is, isn't the only villain in this story. Obviously a project like this couldn't go ahead without government consent. This is where Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland, comes into the story. Severin Carroll noted in this 2007 article that after the local council rejected Trump's proposal, by 1 vote, Salmond intervened:
"....in a surprise move, the Scottish executive announced last night it would take charge of the application, under rarely used powers in the 1997 Town and Country Planning Act, on the grounds it 'raises issues of importance that require consideration at a national level'.....
Salmond is MP for the Balmedie area where Trump plans to build the resort and had dinner with the property magnate in New York last month. He is known to have been furious at the local council decision."
Nothing like overriding the will of the people, isn't there? If nothing else, this is one argument against Scottish independence, if Salmond is going to behave like this. One would infer that Salmond and Trump are financially in bed over this deal, which makes Trump's recent whining protests about wind farms in the same area the height of hypocrisy, as stated in this report:
"He wrote to the first minister at the beginning of September, saying the turbines were 'disastrous and environmentally irresponsible', and left an 'ugly cloud hanging over the future of the great Scottish coastline'....
'People do not want to travel from all over the world to go to Scotland in order to stare out at big, ugly structures.'"
In other words, Trump doesn't want his view of the golf course ruined by the wind turbines. He doesn't appreciate that he and his minions inflicted the exact same fate on the people who have refused to sell out, by piling dirt around their residences, which obstructs their view of their surroundings. IOKIYAR extends everywhere in the world, sad to say.
Baxter is obviously fighting an uphill battle against Trump with this film. To be honest, I don't expect Baxter to win, since the golf course can't be stopped by fair means at this point, and the damage to the residents' environs has already begun. But he's obviously going to continue the good fight. You can see a video of him from the Sheffield festival at this video link. Other video interviews include these:
Crocker notes one possible meta-like hurdle towards this film not yet finding a distributor:
"'You have to take everything Donald Trump says with a grain of salt,' says Baxter. He imagines many people in America would agree with him after the real-estate magnate's public support of 'birther' conspiracies. 'I think the U.S. now sees him as a cartoon character.'....
But Trump was a caricature long before he was a birther. Saturday Night Live has been spoofing him ever since he became a public figure. And the fact that Baxter's film paints Trump as a serious threat and not a laughable buffoon may be one of the reasons You've Been Trumped has not yet secured distribution. People may prefer to think of Trump as the absurd host of Celebrity Apprentice, not a hardened criminal."
I saw a poster for You've Been Trumped hanging in the lobby of the Tivoli Theatre here in a "Coming Attractions" frame, so who's to say, at least locally, regarding distribution. The house wasn't packed out, but the crowd was respectably sized, given the plethora of selections available at SLIFF currently.
Finally, if you want to help Baxter and his film with a donation, you can go to this link. They're barely 1/4 towards the goal as of this posting, and obviously Occupy Wall Street and related issues are taking up most of the oxygen here. But if you have change to spare, Baxter would certainly appreciate it. William Underhill noted in this article from The Daily Beast earlier this year that:
".....British director Anthony Baxter....remortgaged his home to finance the picture"
Need more be said?