Watch a Reading of Steve Bannon’s Screenplay Which Attempted to Turn Shakespeare’s Coriolanus Into a Rap Musical

Some­where between work­ing at Gold­man Sachs, and call­ing the shots for Bre­it­bart and Don­ald Trump, the Volde­mor­t­ian Steve Ban­non went to Hol­ly­wood and made 18 films, many of them polit­i­cal. Described “as the Leni Riefen­stahl of the Tea Par­ty move­ment” (by Andrew Bre­it­bart him­self), Ban­non helped pro­duce the Ronald Rea­gan doc­u­men­tary In the Face of Evil and Fire from the Heart­land: The Awak­en­ing of the Con­ser­v­a­tive Woman. But he’s per­haps best known for writ­ing a treat­ment for the nev­er-made doc­u­men­tary, Destroy­ing the Great Satan: The Rise of Islam­ic Fas­cism in Amer­i­ca. The eight page draft, writes The Wash­ing­ton Post, pro­posed “a three-part movie that would trace ‘the cul­ture of intol­er­ance’ behind sharia law, exam­ine the ‘Fifth Col­umn’ made up of ‘Islam­ic front groups’ and iden­ti­fy the Amer­i­can enablers paving ‘the road to this unique hell on earth.’ ” Look­ing back, it’s no won­der that Ban­non tried to engi­neer a ban of Mus­lims immi­grants upon enter­ing the White House.

For any­one inter­est­ed in revis­it­ing anoth­er unre­al­ized Ban­non pro­duc­tion, you can now watch (above) a table read of his screen­play for The Thing I Am. Co-writ­ten with Julia Jones dur­ing the late 1990s, it’s a “rap musi­cal adap­ta­tion of Shakespeare’s Cori­olanus set in South Cen­tral Los Ange­les dur­ing the 1992 riots after the LAPD beat­ing of Rod­ney King.” Put togeth­er by an orga­ni­za­tion called Now This, the read fea­tures Rob Corddry, Lucas Neff, Parvesh Cheena, Daniele Gaither, Gary Antho­ny Williams, Char­lie Carv­er, Cedric Yarbor­ough, and hip hop artist A.J. Crew. And, as the web­site Refinery29 warns, it’s “full of cussing, the n‑word, and men­tions of crotch grabs.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Sin­clair Lewis’ Chill­ing Play, It Can’t Hap­pen Here: A Read-Through by the Berke­ley Reper­to­ry The­atre

A Free Course from Yale on the U.S. Civ­il War: Because Trump Just Gave Us Anoth­er Teach­able Moment


by | Permalink | Comments (1) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (1)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast
Open Culture was founded by Dan Colman.