Actors Read Steve Bannon’s Shakespearean Screenplay About the 1992 LA Riots — Watch
In the 1990s, long before becoming Donald Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon was a Hollywood investment banker, who executive produced Sean Penn’s directorial debut “The Indian Runner,” and later invested in “Seinfeld.” During his Hollywood days, Bannon co-wrote a rap musical adaptation of Shakespeare’s Roman tragedy “Coriolanus” based on the 1992 Los Angeles Riots, which began on April 29, 1992 following the announcement of the “not guilty” verdict in the Rodney King case. Now, the digital video-based news organization NowThis has staged a reading of the play Bannon co-authored with Julia Jones, titled “The Thing I Am.”
READ MORE: Steve Bannon and Jared Kushner Vie for Power Over Trump on ‘SNL’ — Watch
Last December, Jones told The New York Times that Bannon came up with the ideas for the play, while she wrote it, mixing Shakespeare’s verse with Los Angeles street talk. However, Bannon would often chime in with “a particularly aggressive line.”
“They say! Fuck 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 crack enough. If I had my way, I’d make a quarry of these slaves,” one section of dialogue goes.
“When I heard that NowThis had the Bannon script and was planning a stage reading, I got really excited about it and had to be involved,” actor Rob Corddry said in a press release, according to Salon.com. “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.” Watch the video below.
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