Long before he was President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon was an investment banker living in Hollywood.
With an interest in Tinsel Town, Bannon signed on as executive producer of the Sean Penn-directed The Indian Runner and would later become a key investor in Seinfeld, with the sitcom still filling his coffers today.
But perhaps the most surprising thing to come out of Bannon’s days as a Hollywood bigwig is a script he co-wrote for a rap musical adaptation of the Shakespearean tragedy Coriolanus – set during the infamous LA Riots of 1992, a reaction to the notorious “not guilty” verdict in the Rodney King trial.
The script to the film has been making its way around Hollywood since Bannon emerged as a linchpin figure in the ascendancy of Alt Right politics. And now the online news network NowThis has staged a live table reading of Bannon and Julia Jones’ co-authored screenplay The Thing I Am.
Speaking to the New York Times last December, Jones revealed that Bannon pitched the plot to her as a hybrid of the bard’s verse with Los Angeles hood vernacular. Of Bannon’s input, Jones said he would frequently offer “a particularly aggressive line.”
A typical line of dialogue reads: “They say! F*** they! They hang out shooting pool and think they know what’s going down – who’s up, who’s out, who bounds, and if there’s a crack enough. If I had my way, I’d make a quarry of these slaves.”
Actor Rob Corddry, perhaps best known for Hot Tub Time Machine, took part in the table read, telling Salon: “When I heard that NowThis had the Bannon script and was planning a staged reading, I got really excited about it and have to be involved.
“It’s one thing for NowThis to have been able to uncover the script, but to film it is another thing entirely. It’s pretty eye-opening to imagine Steve Bannon writing this. People need to see it to believe it.”
See it to believe it yourself below:
