A landmark profile on The Apprentice creator Mark Burnett has provided news details about the show’s creation, including the significant creative leaps required of editors to make series star Donald Trump seem like a halfway-normal boss.
Oh, there’s also the accusation that Trump made yet another gross, leering, and deeply sexist remark to an employee.
[jwplayer oeDNQjvn]
Jonathon Braun, an editor who worked on Burnett’s breakout hit Survivor and several early seasons of The Apprentice, told The New Yorker that he and others would “reverse engineer” footage to account for Trump’s seemingly random decisions.
While selective editing is standard practice in reality television, Braun said Trump often interrupted the natural progress of the competition with his ignorance of how the competitors had actually performed. This forced editors to blow minor infractions into huge mishaps for viewers to understand Trump’s final decisions, Braun said.
He added that Trump often dumped people from the show just because he felt like it, which is a theme he appears to have carried into his new job.
The Apprentice producer Katherine Walker corroborated that statement, saying “we cleaned it up so that he was his best self,” but asserted “I’m sure Donald thinks that he was never edited.”
The piece also dwells on allegations that Trump used the n-word on set. While one unnamed Apprentice worker told the outlet Trump once said “How about those boobs? Wouldn’t you like to fuck her?”, Braun doubts any audio of Trump using racial epithets exists – and if those tapes do exist, their existence would hardly impact a president whose campaign was barely swayed by the “grab her by the pussy” recording.
You can read the full piece HERE.
