It all started with a joke on a movie marquee: “To defeat your enemy, you must know them. ‘Melania’ starts Friday.”
Lake Theater and Cafe in Lake Oswego doesn’t shy away from an edgy marquee. “Rated R for bloody violence and disturbing images,” reads one message regarding the 2024 horror film, “Longlegs.”
But the “Melania” marquee, apparently, was a bridge too far for at least one entity, the company that acquired the authorized documentary about First Lady Melania Trump for $40 million, Amazon.
“Got a call that the higher ups (i.e., at Amazon) were upset with how our marquee marketed their movie (i.e., Melania), that, per them, Sunday would be its last day here,” the theater wrote on Instagram Monday.
Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
It wasn’t just Amazon that was upset. Plenty of other entities, this time, one assumes, people, took issue with either the marquee or the fact that the theater was showing the Brett Ratner vehicle at all.
The theater got “countless emails and voicemails and Google/Yelp reviews (Google/Yelp took them down) wondering why the hell we had Melania here, or disdaining our disparaging of her,” they said on Instagram.
According to Jordan Perry, who manages the theater, it was almost lucky that Amazon asked the theater to stop showing the film. The negative response “paired with its milquetoast attendance here and most definitely not by our regulars,” had him asking if the theater could cut the booking from two weeks down to one without getting into any trouble.
Before the message could get to Amazon though, the studio called the booker who works with Lake Theater and Cafe and “relayed this message to him, that the studio was not happy and/or did not appreciate my take on ‘marketing’ their film to our own public.”
The studio decided that Sunday would be the film’s last day at the Lake Oswego theater.
After the kerfuffle, in a post on the theater’s website, Perry decided to explain why he brought “Melania” to the screen.
“Mostly,” he wrote, “I thought doing so would be funny.”
But, he added, there was also another reason: “Financially, the film marketplace this week and next were a desert.”
With limited options and his own curiosity about “this inexplicable vanity piece from the current president’s wife,” he said, he chose “Melania.”
This, too, came back in part to humor. Instead of showing a horror movie, he thought, “Wouldn’t it then be exponentially weirder, to the point of being funny, to show (’Melania’) here, at your obviously anti-establishment, occasionally troublemaking, neighborhood cinema?”
After watching, Perry said he wouldn’t call the movie “propaganda,” though it did have “intentional blind spots.”
Instead, he wrote, “This is ‘Melania’ as Melania herself wants to be known, and not everyone will find it flattering.”
But, he will be one of only a small number of people who will be able to say they saw the film at Lake Theater and Cafe.
“We contributed, in all, $196 to the Jeff Bezos Trust Fund this week (far more to the Hamnet Trust Fund, thank you, Hamnet lovers),” Perry wrote. “Jeff Bezos won’t notice the $196. He wouldn’t notice $1,960, though someone on his team noticed our marquee.”
Some entities do not appreciate a joke. Now, Perry wrote, “We may be on Amazon’s black list for awhile.”
On the marquee, he wrote: “Amazon called. Our marquee made them mad. All ‘Melania’ shows canceled. Show your support at Whole Foods instead :(.”
Still, the show will go on. “Wuthering Heights,” distributed by Warner Brothers, starts Thursday, Feb. 12.
The marquee at Lake Theater and Cafe after “Melania” was taken off the screen.Brian Harvey/Lake Theater and Cafe
