Reports that Sacha Baron Cohen has filmed and test-screened a sequel to his 2006 comedy hit, Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, have gathered pace with the news that a title for the film was submitted to the Writers Guild America.
Borat: Gift of Pornographic Monkey to Vice Premiere Mikhael Pence to Make Benefit Recently Diminished Nation of Kazakhstan was submitted to the Writers Guild America in recent days, but the page has since been taken down.
Film website Collider first broke the news that Borat 2, filmed during the coronavirus pandemic “has already been shot and even screened for a select few industry types”. The site adds that the fame of the first mockumentary means Borat can no longer interview unsuspecting Americans as himself, so is forced to go incognito, with varying degrees of success.
The report contained a YouTube clip of a scene from the film apparently being shot in Los Angeles in the middle of August.
The previous month it emerged that Rudy Giuliani had reported Baron Cohen to the police following an interview in which he apparently entered his office wearing a pink bikini.
“This person comes in yelling and screaming, and I thought this must be a scam or a shake-down, so I reported it to the police,” Giuliani told Page Six.
Meanwhile, Film Stage reports that the film focuses on the global pandemic, as well as Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Baron Cohen was also seen in various disguises at a far-right rally in June, encouraging a crowd of 500 or so at March for Our Rights 3 to sing along to a country-and-western-style anthem that included the lyrics, “Obama, what we gotta do, inject him with the Wuhan flu.”
Baron Cohen’s appearance was denounced by a local council member, who called it a “smack in the face of the great people who put on this event”. Far-right militia group the Washington Three Percenters allegedly organised the rally.
The efficacy of measures to eject Baron Cohen and his crew from the event were questioned after the actor appeared to be seen later filming interviews with outraged organisers.
The stunt recalls a similar scene in one of Borat’s early TV appearances, on Da Ali G Show, when he enthuses a crowd at an Arizona country-and-western club with a supposedly Kazakh song featuring the chorus, “Throw the Jew down the well.”
The first film was a critical and commercial hit, taking $262m worldwide, winning a Golden Globe for Baron Cohen and an Oscar nomination for its screenplay. In 2009, the Guardian named the film the second best film of the noughties.
Last year, it emerged that Pamela Anderson’s role in the film so incensed her then husband, Kid Rock, that he filed for divorce. Whether the former Baywatch star reappears in the sequel is not known. The level of involvement of director Larry Charles or studio 20th Century Fox, which has since been bought by Disney, is also unknown.
An acclaimed satire, Who Is America?, featuring Baron Cohen interviewing assorted US figures in a variety of disguises, screened on Showtime in 2018.
