Sony Pictures Classics has unveiled the first trailer for the Sundance selection Where’s My Roy Cohn? Directed by festival alum Matt Tyranauer (Studio 54, Citizen Jane: Battle for the City), he takes a searing look at the infamous attorney and his brutal tactics to serve right-wing causes including working as Joseph Mcarthey’s Chief Counsel during the Red Scare, making sure that Julius and Ethel Rosenberg received the death penalty for their part in trading secrets to the USSR, and finally becoming Donald Trump’s mentor and personal attorney till his untimely death from AIDS-related complications.
The film conveys not only his life as a ruthless right-wing despot, but also his closeted homosexual cavorting at Studio 54, a life he denied until his dying day. This aspect of his life was most famously fictionalized in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Angels In America by Tony Kushner and subsequently the HBO adaptation in which he was portrayed by Al Pacino.
Dan Mecca said in our review, “Strangely, the pace Tyrnauer employs is rather slow and methodical, making it all play like an interesting, steady stroll through bullet points. It’s hard not to think of Angels In America and how much Tony Kushner does with Cohn while imagining his final, painful days of the earth, dying of AIDS. Where’s My Roy Cohn? is a worthy documentary, though it’s hard not to want more.”
See the trailer and poster below, and our interview with the director here.
One of the most controversial and influential American men of the 20th Century, Roy Cohn was a ruthless and unscrupulous lawyer and political power broker whose 28-year career ranged from acting as chief counsel to Senator Joseph McCarthy’s Communist-hunting subcommittee to molding the career of a young Queens real estate developer named Donald Trump.
Where’s My Roy Cohn? hits theaters on September 20.