{"id":103799,"date":"2024-06-10T20:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-06-10T20:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/10\/ren-faires-darla-jeff-and-louie-on-surviving-hbos-real-life-succession-and-king-george\/"},"modified":"2024-06-10T20:00:00","modified_gmt":"2024-06-10T20:00:00","slug":"ren-faires-darla-jeff-and-louie-on-surviving-hbos-real-life-succession-and-king-george","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/10\/ren-faires-darla-jeff-and-louie-on-surviving-hbos-real-life-succession-and-king-george\/","title":{"rendered":"Ren Faire\u2019s Darla, Jeff, and Louie on Surviving HBO\u2019s Real-Life Succession and King George"},"content":{"rendered":"<p> <br \/>\n<\/p>\n<div>\n<p class=\"has-dropcap\">When <strong>Lance Oppenheim<\/strong> first touched down in Todd Mission, Texas to document <strong>George Coulam,<\/strong> the eccentric 86-year-old founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the battle to inherit the kingdom he created, the filmmaker was thinking of the project as a comedy.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe first thing George said to me was that he used to play the king at the fair, and now he\u2019s a horny old man,\u201d Oppenheim says, explaining that it was exciting to find a subject who didn\u2019t censor himself for the camera. \u201cA lot of people around him were saying, don\u2019t do this. So he invited us into his life for almost three years.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">By the end of that time, though, Oppenheim says the resulting docuseries\u2014the three-episode\u00a0<em>Ren Faire,<\/em> which ended Sunday\u2014no longer qualified as a comedy. \u201cIt became a tragedy,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s fitting for the reality that exists there.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">In <em>Ren Faire,<\/em> Coulam claims that he wants to retire to focus on art, gardening, and \u201cchasing pussy.\u201d But the series ends after Coulam has <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/05\/30\/arts\/television\/ren-faire-is-succession-with-turkey-legs.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">humiliated<\/a> his staff over and over, spiked what general manager <strong>Darla Smith<\/strong> claims was a perfectly good offer to buy the festival, and revealed that he is more interested in power than a pay day. (\u201cThat kind of power is not much different than an addiction,\u201d Smith says in the docuseries.) <em>The<\/em> <em>New York Times<\/em> <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2024\/05\/30\/arts\/television\/ren-faire-is-succession-with-turkey-legs.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">dubbed<\/a> the show \u201c<em>Succession<\/em> with kettle corn,\u201d given the backstabbing amongst the potential successors\u2014Smith, the decades-long lieutenant <strong>Jeff Baldwin,<\/strong> and the Red Bull\u2013swilling kettle corn king and ren-faire entrepreneur <strong>Louie Migliaccio<\/strong>\u2014and the way the show\u2019s curmudgeonly patriarch figure plays his potential successors off each other for seeming sport.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">When Oppenheim, the 28-year-old documentary wunderkind who directed <em>Some Kind of Heaven,<\/em> showed Coulam the first episode, the filmmaker says, \u201cHe couldn\u2019t stop laughing the whole time. Even in the moments that felt darker, he was smiling.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">On a phone call with Smith, the only <em>Ren Faire<\/em> contender to escape Coulam\u2019s clutches, she tells me, \u201cMost faires are kind of crazy. But honestly, George has got the biggest faire and he\u2019s got the biggest craziness.\u201d<\/p>\n<figure class=\"AssetEmbedWrapper-eVDQiB byBkf asset-embed\">\n<div class=\"AssetEmbedAssetContainer-eJxoAx dBHGoQ asset-embed__asset-container\"><span class=\"SpanWrapper-umhxW kGxnNB responsive-asset AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__responsive-asset\"><picture class=\"ResponsiveImagePicture-cWuUZO dUOtEa AssetEmbedResponsiveAsset-cXBNxi eCxVQK asset-embed__responsive-asset responsive-image\"><noscript><\/noscript><\/picture><\/span><\/div>\n<div class=\"CaptionWrapper-jSZdqE KeCSR caption AssetEmbedCaption-fNQBPI fmQnYP asset-embed__caption\"><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptionText-bHjzlu iUEiRd eurnFY iXWezO caption__text\"><\/p>\n<p>Darla Smith in <em>Ren Faire<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p><\/span><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-gjQpdd BaseText-ewhhUZ CaptionCredit-ejegDm iUEiRd bCPQcu fNaHcW caption__credit\">Courtesy of HBO.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p class=\"has-dropcap paywall\">Of <em>Ren Faire<\/em>\u2019s potential successors, Smith is the most clear-eyed and direct about Coulam\u2014presumably because she has the least to lose. Though she has worked in ren faires for about 30 years, she has not invested decades of her life and\/or business directly into Coulam\u2019s TRF like Baldwin and Migliaccio. In fact, after starting work with TRF in 2020, Smith tried to avoid Oppenheim\u2019s cameras until Coulam promoted her to general manager and thrust her directly in the line of succession and into competition with Baldwin in particular.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Asked what she thought of the docuseries, Smith shoots straight. \u201cI thought it was way too Jeff-centered,\u201d she laughs. Referring to her former coworker, a semi-professional actor turned entertainment director who frames the festival going-ons in terms of <em>King Lear<\/em>, she adds, \u201cBut Jeff is a thespian, so he just pandered to the camera any chance he could get.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Migliaccio was in no danger of stealing the spotlight. The entrepreneur was busy running the immersive kingdom he created within the walls of TRF, which includes Dragonslayer Souvenirs, Champion Rickshaws, Da Vinci Dots Ice Cream, and Wyrmwood Public House on top of his kettle corn operation, and managing a team he says consists of 160 people. Because Migliaccio is a private and fast-moving person, his storyline was hard to capture.<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">\u201cThe challenge of filming with him was just like, How do we match the ferocity of how he\u2019s moving?\u201d laughs Oppenheim. \u201cEspecially when my cinematographer, <strong>Nate Hurtsellers,<\/strong> is operating a 60-pound camera in a hundred-degree weather.\u201d (Indeed, the only time I can get Migliaccio on the phone is when he is restrained in a seat by law\u2014on a plane taxiing in the moments before takeoff\u2014and that is for less than a minute.)<\/p>\n<p class=\"paywall\">Coulam could also be difficult to film and refuse direction. Oppenheim says he wouldn\u2019t stop looking into the cameras no matter how many times he was asked. (When his manicurist looked into the lens, though, Coulam immediately reprimanded her.) He also didn\u2019t give the filmmakers the luxury of setting up a shot. \u201cIt was always: \u2018Get your ugly ass in here,\u2019 \u2018shut up and sit down,\u2019 and \u2018let\u2019s go.\u2019\u201d Every time we put the microphone on him, he complained that we were taking too long.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><br \/>\n<br \/><a href=\"https:\/\/www.vanityfair.com\/hollywood\/story\/hbo-ren-faire\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When Lance Oppenheim first touched down in Todd Mission, Texas to document George Coulam, the eccentric 86-year-old founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the battle to inherit the kingdom he created, the filmmaker was thinking of the project as a comedy. \u201cThe first thing George said to me was that he used to play [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":103800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-103799","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103799","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103799"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103799\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}