In January 2023, the roid-rage-fueled, Taxi Driver–esque bodybuilding drama Magazine Dreams flexed its awesome muscularity at the Sundance Film Festival with all the coiled grandeur of a back double-biceps pose. Plotted around a bravura performance by Jonathan Majors — who physically transformed into an actual bodybuilder for the role as a driven but mentally unstable brute-naïf — the indie garnered a standing ovation in Park City’s Eccles Theater and sparked a bidding war between Sony Pictures Classics, Neon, and HBO. Searchlight Pictures ultimately walked off with domestic-distribution rights to Magazine Dreams for a reported $10 million.
After winning Sundance’s U.S. Special Dramatic Jury Award, the film seemed bound for awards glory. Searchlight teed up a December 2023 release at the peak of prime Oscars campaigning season with Majors — then gaining additional cultural momentum as Kang the Conqueror in Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — as the face of its awards offensive and a seeming Best Actor nominee shoo-in. Then Majors was arrested on domestic-violence charges — including choking his then-girlfriend, Grace Jabbari, in March of that year — dropped by his management team, fired by Marvel (as the chief supervillain of its Phase 5 Avengers franchise), and convicted of assault and harassment. (Jabbari also sued Majors for defamation; the suit was settled.) In January 2024, Searchlight quietly returned the rights of Magazine Dreams to its filmmakers: the active supposition being that a Majors star vehicle was too radioactive to release, especially for the prestige art-house studio division of Disney.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the cinematic junk heap. In October, up-and-coming indie distributor Briarcliff Entertainment snapped up distribution rights to Magazine Dreams for an undisclosed sum. Now, the Los Angeles–based production-distribution company that was formed in 2018 specifically to release the hot-button Michael Moore documentary Fahrenheit 11/9 — and increasingly specializes in putting out films considered “distressed assets” — is finally giving Magazine Dreams a wide theatrical release on March 21.
Even within Hollywood, Briarcliff is still somewhat of a little-known media entity. But since August, when it acquired the controversial Donald Trump biopic The Apprentice — another movie no other studio would touch that yielded an October release garnering a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Sebastian Stan and a Best Supporting Actor nod for co-star Jeremy Strong — Briarcliff has become known as a studio of last resort for hard-to-market, contentious yet compelling titles. In an increasingly compartmentalized media landscape when the entertainment industry has never been more risk-averse, when theatrical distribution has never been more iffy and the economics of independent film are in turmoil, Briarcliff is making a name for itself by championing difficult projects where other, more deeply funded and longer-established movie purveyors fear to tread. “I spent many years trying to get the movie made … so when distribution fell through, I accepted this was the journey for Magazine Dreams; I had to make peace with the idea that the movie may never get released,” says its writer-director Elijah Bynum. “I’m very grateful for Briarcliff taking a chance on this film, and I appreciate their willingness to support all kinds of films and filmmakers. I think they like being underdogs. I think they like swimming against the current.”
Briarcliff is the brainchild of Tom Ortenberg, a visionary executive with decades of experience navigating culture wars, juggling Hollywood hot potatoes, and turning profits from titles mired in conflict. As president of theatrical films at Lionsgate in 1999, he cut a deal to put out Kevin Smith’s Dogma after Disney stifled the fallen-angel comedy’s release (it had come under fire at Disney subsidiary Miramax for spoofing tenets of Christianity) going so far as to debate a senior official at the Catholic League on the movie’s merits. Ortenberg was an early champion of Moore, releasing in 2004 the Flint, Michigan firebrand’s Fahrenheit 9/11 — a connect-the-dots investigation of the George W. Bush presidency, the Iraq war, and corrupt wartime profiteering — which still stands as the highest-grossing documentary of all time. He topped that feat by acquiring North American rights to the low-budget ensemble drama Crash out of the Toronto International Film Festival for $3.3 million. Through aggressive marketing and savvy campaigning, Lionsgate parlayed that slim outlay into a robust $54 million at the box office and an Oscars sweep of major awards including Best Director and Best Original Screenplay for Paul Haggis and Best Picture (upsetting presumed winner Brokeback Mountain in the process). Then, as co-founder and chief executive of Open Road Films (the now-shuttered production and distribution venture backed by AMC and Regal Theatres), Ortenberg co-financed production of the $20 million Todd McCarthy–directed journalism drama Spotlight — plotted around a Boston Globe investigation of child sex abuse by Catholic clergy — and oversaw its platform release en route to a 2016 Best Picture Academy Award.
Speaking from his Santa Monica office, Ortenberg notes that his — and by extension Briarcliff’s — release agenda encompasses more than just trafficking in outrage. “I certainly do not shy away from controversy; I kind of run toward it,” the CEO says. “But I don’t want to be known just as the guy who does the controversial films. I love all movies.”
To that end, the company has traversed the high-low, putting out schlocky Liam Neeson thrillers like Honest Thief (2020) and Blacklight as well as the gun-control advocacy documentary Gabby Giffords Won’t Back Down and The Dissident (a doc examining the assassination of political dissident-journalist Jamal Khashoggi in context of Saudi Arabia’s efforts to suppress international dissent).
But it is fair to say The Apprentice first put Briarcliff on the cultural radar. In May, the biographical drama (which follows the young Donald Trump’s professional and political coming-of-age mentored by ruthless legal fixer Roy Cohn) received a ten-plus-minute standing ovation at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, also drawing “audible gasps” for a scene in which Stan as Trump throws his first wife, Ivana, to the ground and rapes her. Also depicting the future 45th/47th president experiencing erectile dysfunction, popping amphetamines, and receiving liposuction, the fact-based film made a huge splash on the Croisette but failed to find a North American distributor. At issue: a Trump spokesman castigated The Apprentice as “pure malicious defamation” and the president’s attorneys issued a cease-and-desist letter to the filmmakers effectively warning any potential studio partner that they’d be “buying a lawsuit.”
Ortenberg, however, saw an opportunity. “As I’m watching it, I’m thinking, Trump supporters — if they give it a chance — will probably like it,” he recalls. “If you’re anti-Trump, the film reinforces it. If you are pro-Trump, you watch The Apprentice and you think to yourself, Yeah, that’s my guy. This movie is far from some left-wing hatchet job. It’s an intense, searing, sometimes very funny character study of one of the most important and certainly iconic figures in modern American history. I thought it was going to please audiences on both sides of the aisle to pretty much the same degree. It deserved to be seen.”
The film’s producers spent the summer of 2024 untying a sticky legal predicament (buying out an ownership stake by Kinematics, a production company bankrolled by billionaire Trump supporter Dan Snyder). Then, with virtually no domestic competition, Briarcliff appeared like a savior out of the mist to buy The Apprentice just days before awards season kicked off. “After those threats were made by Trump, it created fear in the industry; you can imagine why these companies didn’t engage,” Apprentice producer Dan Bekerman told me in the fall before the film’s release. “But we’re extremely happy with Tom Ortenberg of Briarcliff. Tom’s experience is exactly right for this movie.” (While The Apprentice has only earned $4 million at the North American box office and Briarcliff has yet to negotiate a deal for its streaming-video on-demand rights, Ortenberg says: “I can tell you with confidence we did not lose money on the deal.”)
Haggis’s 2004 ensemble drama, Crash, explores incendiary racial and social fault lines baked into turn–of–the–millennium Los Angeles — a setting notably absent of clear heroes and villains that intentionally backs off moral absolutes. “The lesson I took away from the movie is none of us are as good as we appear on our best day and none of us are as bad as we appear on our worst day,” Ortenberg says. “Is Matt Dillon the racist, misogynistic cop? Or is he the loving son trying to get his dad basic health care?”
The executive says he applied that rationale to Magazine Dreams when a source attached to the film approached him last summer about acquiring its distribution rights. Moreover, at a cultural pivot point when a growing number of performers canceled by Me Too and sexual misbehavior allegations — Aziz Ansari, James Franco, Louis C.K., and Kevin Spacey among them — are returning to work onstage or in front of the camera, Majors is hardly alone in attempting to bounce back from career oblivion. “I’m certainly not condoning any inappropriate behavior by anybody, but does a misdemeanor conviction mean that somebody doesn’t get to work again?” Ortenberg asks. “Los Angeles Media Fund are financiers on this movie. Do they have to light their money on fire? The dozens, the hundreds of people who worked on this movie, everybody has to pretend it doesn’t exist anymore. We’re just going to burn the negative? I say no.”
“I’ve gotten to know Jonathan over the past several months and I’m proud to consider him a friend,” he continues. “It’s not my business to speak to what happened a couple of years ago. But I’ll tell you this: I wouldn’t mind everybody remembering me on my best day, whatever that might have been, but I’m glad that not everybody throws my worst day in my face.”
Indisputably, there will be an odd, meta-narrative spectacle attached to watching an acclaimed, Yale-educated Serious Thespian transform himself into a brutal, homicidal Mr. Universe wannabe almost two years to the day since Majors’s assault arrest. Indeed, Magazine Dreams’ opening scene features his musclebound character Killian Maddox attending court-ordered counseling for his lack of impulse control and violent episodes.
Just days before Rolling Stone published an article featuring an audio recording in which Majors seems to acknowledge strangling his girlfriend, I ask Ortenberg how Briarcliff intends to overcome toxic discourse surrounding the star — or if the company’s goal is now to galvanize curiosity surrounding Majors’s comeback to get people into theaters? “For those who want to point out art imitating life, or the film being a little on the nose as it relates to real life, so be it. But we’re not focusing on the controversy at all,” says Ortenberg. “We’ve moved on. I think most of the American moviegoing public has moved on.”
After Searchlight Pictures dumped the Jonathan Majors bodybuilding drama, only one studio dared touch it — the same one that rescued The Apprentice.
