The Oscar nominated director and musician allege breach of agreement after their score from 'Phantom Thread' was reused in the controversial documentary ‘Melania’.
Director Paul Thomas Anderson and Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood have requested that their Phantom Thread music be removed from the Melania Trump documentary.
In Melania, a segment of music from the 2017 film Phantom Thread is played – a long excerpt of Greenwood’s ‘Barbara Rose’.
Directed by Anderson and featuring a score from Greenwood, the film was Oscar-nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Original Score. Both the director and the composer have requested that the music be removed from the Brett Ratner-directed documentary, claiming that its inclusion is a “breach” of their composer agreement.
“It has come to our attention that a piece of music from Phantom Thread has been used in the Melania documentary,” the pair said in a statement, which was obtained and published by Variety.
“While Jonny Greenwood does not own the copyright in the score, Universal failed to consult Jonny on this third-party use which is a breach of his composer agreement,” it added. “As a result Jonny and Paul Thomas Anderson have asked for it to be removed from the documentary.”
No one from the Melania team has yet publicly responded to the request.
Melania strives to provide an inside look at the life of the First Lady of the United States.
Amazon MGM paid a staggering $40m to acquire streaming rights for the film, followed by another $35m to market it in theaters – representing an unprecedented sum for a nonfiction film. These sums have prompted speculation that Amazon made the purchase to curry favour with Trump.
The project also marks the return of Ratner to Hollywood. The director of the Rush Hour franchise moved to Israel following multiple sexual misconduct allegations in 2017. The director has also appeared in a recent release of photographs from the Epstein files.
The film has been critically torched but did exceed box office projections in the US, earning $13.3m domestically, in large part thanks to the reported rallying of Republican women, who have made up the largest portion of the audience.
In Euronews Culture’s review of Melania, we wrote: “Many were quick to accuse 'Melania' of being a despicable piece of propaganda even before seeing it. It’s not. Propaganda has a point. Forceful tools of hatred like Triumph of the Will and Birth of a Nation had evil purpose. Melania can be mentioned in the same sentence as these films but only remains as a staged puff piece, (...) a shallow, 104-minute-long vanity project whose staggeringly misjudged timing reveals it to be the ultimate "F*ck you”.”
Jonny Greenwood and Paul Thomas Anderson have worked together for nearly two decades, with the Radiohead guitarist writing scores for several of the director’s films, including 2007’s There Will Be Blood, 2012’s The Master, 2021’s Licorice Pizza and last year’s One Battle After Another.
One Battle After Another is seen as the frontrunner – alongside Sinners – at next month’s Oscars. It is nominated for 13 Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, and Best Original Score.
