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As actor Matt Damon told The Hollywood Reporter in 2017, flattering Donald Trump’s ego by granting him a brief cameo in the film was a common way to get permission to shoot scenes at his properties.
“The deal was that if you wanted to shoot in one of his buildings, you had to write him in a part,” Damon recalled, adding that director Martin Brest had to do the same thing for his 1992 film, “Scent of a Woman.” “The whole crew was in on it. You have to waste an hour of your day with a bulls*** shot: Donald Trump walks in and Al Pacino’s like, ‘Hello, Mr. Trump!’ — you had to call him by name — and then he exits.” However, most of the time his scene would simply be cut out.
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The situation was similar for “Home Alone 2.” As director Chris Columbus told Insider in 2020, Trump, who owned the Plaza Hotel at the time, essentially “bullied” his way into the scene. “We paid the fee, but he also said, ‘The only way you can use the Plaza is if I’m in the movie,'” Columbus recalled. “So we agreed to put him in … but he did bully his way into the movie.”
