Guns N’ Roses, Grace Jones and Prince’s estate refused to allow their songs in ‘Melania’
Melania producer Marck Beckman reveals that Guns N’ Roses, Grace Jones, and the Prince estate rejected a bid to license their songs for inclusion in the First Lady’s documentary.
The Rush Hour director helmed the new documentary, which follows the First Lady in the 20 days running up to Donald Trump’s 2025 inauguration.
In an interview with Variety, Beckman confessed, “There was music that we tried to get, but sadly, there were politics to it.”
He added, “For example, the guys from Guns N’ Roses split down the middle politically.”
Beckman said that there was a “beautiful song” we wanted to use, and one of the guys — I don’t want to name, it’s not fair —said, ‘You got it. Go.’ And the other one was basically like, ‘There’s just no way.'”
Beckman couldn’t land the musical addition as he “needed everybody’s approval to get it in the film”. The filmmaker deemed this a “disappointment for us; we all have a lot of respect for Guns N’ Roses.”
Back in 2018, frontman Axl Rose slammed Trump’s administration for using their songs at any political event, sharing in an official statement that the band had “formally requested our music not to be used at Trump rallies or Trump associated events.”
Beckman also faced the same issue with Grace Jones, though he caveated this with the admission that “obviously, [the team has] also a tremendous amount of respect for her.”
The producer went on, “She apparently couldn’t get over the political hurdle, notwithstanding the fact that the film is not a political film. So that was disappointing, too. It’s disappointing when people put politics so far ahead, and that happened a little bit with the film, for sure.”
The controversial documentary faced backlash in the musical licensing department when Jonny Greenwood and Paul Thomas Anderson called for a section of music originally from the film Phantom Thread to be removed from the project.
Allegedly, Universal, which was one of the companies behind Phantom Thread, did not seek permission from Greenwood to use the music. Beckman deemed this a “blatant lie”.
It also recently emerged that the film’s director, Brett Ratner, has been named in the Epstein files. The filmmaker spoke out in his own defence, claiming that the woman he was seen with in the documents was his partner at the time.
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