Steven Bannon, president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming chief strategist, has been known for penning far-right leaning articles, but at one time he was an aspiring screenwriter. The former Breitbart executive apparently wrote an adaptation of a Shakespearean pay with a sex scene set in outer space. Eat your heart out, Lin-Manuel Miranda.
It had been previously reported Bannon and his former writing partner Julia Jones had penned an adaptation of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, about famed Roman leader Caius Marcius Coriolanus. But the duo wanted to contemporize the story and set in among the 1992 Los Angeles riots. But that is not all, as they planned for it to be a rap musical.
He seemed to have an affinity for Bill Shakespeare’s work, as The Daily Beast reports that he also helped write a take on Titus Andronicus, but set “on the moon with creatures from outer space.”
It’s an imaginative way to look at one of the world’s greatest writers plays, but Bannon apparently thought the play didn’t have enough pizazz to it and spiced it up by adding some sex scenes. Jones told The Paris Review it was a pretty bad script, but he was pretty gung-ho about it:
“It’s really dreadful, the dialogue and such. It was mostly his vision and he was in agreement, and enthusiastic, about what was written. He liked certain words. He liked the word Dharma.”
While nothing became of the script, Jones emailed it to The Paris Review and it contained some surprising scene descriptions: “He climbs onto her and their forms dissolve, blend and blur in an erotic scene of ectoplasmic sex.” With lines like that, it’s a surprise Pulitzer wasn’t calling.
(Via The Daily Beast & The Paris Review)