The “studio” that created that Trump-Kim trailer doesn’t exist
Yesterday, we were all given front-row seats to the diplomatic strategy of Donald J. Trump, which, of course, took the form of a poorly edited faux-movie trailer meant to flatter and impress a known dictator. As the trailer made the rounds online, people began to reach out to “Destiny Pictures,” the production company named in the video, presumably to ask them, “Why have you done this to us?” But, they quickly ran into a small problem: Destiny Pictures doesn’t exist. At least, not the one that’s responsible for this atrocity:
“We had nothing to do with Singapore video. Woke up to 100’s of e-mails and calls from all over the world. Crazy,” reads a tweet from Mark Castaldo, the founder of the real Destiny Pictures, a small, independent studio in Los Angeles. Castaldo added that he is currently “trying 2 find out why they used my company name,” clearly wanting to distance himself as much as possible from the widely-panned video. A disclaimer now sits at the top of the Destiny Pictures website, informing visitors that they “had no involvement in President Trump NK Summit video.”
It didn’t take long for the National Security Council to admit they were the sole creators of the slapdash montage of stock footage, but their spokesman refused to comment further when asked about the use of a fake production company. Former NSC spokesman Ned Price told The Guardian that he believes the thinking behind the name ultimately boils down to a bit of failed wordplay, meant to allude to the prosperous potential of Trump and Kim’s historic meeting. “From my understanding, they were just using ‘Destiny Pictures’ as a play on words,” Price said, adding that it seems no one bothered to check whether that was already the name of a company. “Leave it to this White House to fail to conduct basic due diligence.”
Of course, if you were to ask Trump himself, the video was a huge success, and this bit of verisimilitude may have even appealed to Kim and his subordinates. “I showed it to them today,” Trump said in a press conference. “About eight of their representatives were watching it. I thought they were fascinated by it. I thought it was well-done. I showed it to you because that is the future.”
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