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


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