Good Guy Ben Stiller Won’t Edit ‘Zoolander’ 20 Years After the Fact
People are, as a whole, dumb babies. And one of the things dumb babies do is throw tantrums when they don’t like something and want to make it disappear from the world so no one else can like it, either.
Not content with poking holes in the online availability of some of the best sitcoms ever like 30 Rock and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (even to buy!), the whiny babies want Ben Stiller to edit Zoolander, a feature film that will be 20 years old next September, to remove a minor cameo from future President Donald Trump and his wife Melania.
Yeah, and let’s put pants on the David and cover up the Mona Lisa’s cleavage.
I know Zoolander is just a dumb comedy film and not a work of one of the Old Masters, but still. Thankfully, Ben Stiller has no plans to sign off on this kind of insanity, according to the New York Post.
“I’ve had people reach out to me and say, ‘You should edit Donald Trump out of “Zoolander,” ‘ but at the end of the day, that was a time when that exists and that happened,” said Stiller of refusing to alter his film.
“There were so many movies [back then] that had a silly cameo from Donald Trump,” Stiller said. “He represented a certain thing.”
Part of the reason for this is that Trump owns a lot of iconic locations that movie producers want to film in and at the time he would demand cameos in the films, which would often not be included in the final cut of those films. Matt Damon said of his demands “You have to waste an hour of your day with a bullshit shot: Donald Trump walks in and Al Pacino’s like, ‘Hello, Mr. Trump!’ — you had to call him by name — and then he exits. You waste a little time so that you can get the permit, and then you can cut the scene out.”
This doesn’t seem to be the case in Zoolander, as Stiller described Trump as simply being at an event they were filming part of the film at.
“We were shooting at the now defunct VH1 Fashion Awards … and as people were coming up the red carpet, we pulled them aside and asked them to talk about Derek Zoolander, and so Trump and Melania did that,” Stiller said on the podcast.
We still look at Birth of a Nation as a masterpiece of filmmaking that inspired the way cinematography is done to this day, and we’re all adult enough to understand that it’s clearly racist. Lots of things from the past are outdated, that’s part of being from the past. We can’t just erase them, though, and it doesn’t make us good people to try to.