Donald Trump may have pursued his Hollywood dreams if it weren’t for Tim Allen.
That’s what the Home Improvement star told Bill Maher on the Club Random podcast, as he recalled his first time meeting Trump in his The Apprentice days.
“I met the dude at a dinner with his wife, who was genuinely a wonderful person,” Allen said of the president and First Lady Melania Trump. “I think it was the second-to-last year of The Apprentice. And he was thinking of moving to Los Angeles and being a movie producer, and he was talking about movies. He said, ‘I really like the film business.’”
Allen said that after he was done explaining to Trump how difficult it was to make money in Hollywood, “He, like, completely decided at that moment, I’m not gonna get in this business.”
Trump hasn’t let the presidency distract him from his love of movies, however. In November, he reportedly leveraged his relationship with billionaire David Ellison, owner of Skydance and Paramount, to bring back his favorite movie franchise, Rush Hour.
But Allen said the would-be president was more interested in easy money, which making movies is not. The conversation began when Trump suggested he and Allen “get a studio.”
“He said, so if we got a studio together, let’s say the movie cost” around $1 million, Allen recalled. “And then I said, you gotta double that, at least for the promotion… He goes, ‘What if the ticket sales are slow?’ You lose. And he goes, ‘But you gotta make up the loss somehow. How do you make up the loss?’ I said, ‘Well, there’ll be some tax benefit, but you lose the money. That’s how come the studios struggle. They looking for winners. You amortize your loss with losers over winners.’ He goes, ‘Oh.’”
“He says, ‘If I buy a bad building, and it won’t sell, I still have the f---ing building. If you have a s---ty movie...’” Allen recalled. “And he says, ‘No, this is not an easy business.’”
Allen expressed tepid support for Trump on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast in 2021, when he told the host, “Once I realized that the last president pissed people off, I kind of liked that.”
Allen and Maher agreed that Trump was a “genuine” and “different guy in person.”
“He’s a good listener,” Allen said, recalling their initial meeting. “The guy’s addicted to comedy,” he added, explaining that Trump seemed to envy his ability to make people laugh. “I was killing at the table, and he’s going, ‘What a gift. What a gift to do that.’”
“It reminds me. And I love Howard Stern. It’s like Howard in person is a genuinely kind, wonderful guy. But he gets on the air, and I don’t know what happens,” Allen added. “I always said if I was the adult in the room, I would take Donald’s phone away from him and get him involved in infrastructure.”
