Before presiding over what he proudly described as “the platform for the alt-right” and before serving as chief strategist to President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon was a struggling Hollywood screenwriter.
Bannon, who was recently let go from the Trump administration, peddled a series of bizarre screenplays throughout Hollywood during the ‘90s and ‘00s. One was a sex-filled adaptation of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus set in outer space; another a Hitler-inspired film about the eugenics movement featuring abortion, mutants, and cloning that he hoped to make with fellow right-winger Mel Gibson.
Speaking to The Daily Beast about his impressive new film Suburbicon, actor and humanitarian George Clooney addressed Bannon’s Hollywood failings ahead of his good pal Charlie Rose’s exclusive sit-down interview with the Breitbart overlord on Sunday’s 60 Minutes.
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“Steve Bannon is a pussy,” said Clooney. “Steve Bannon is a little wannabe writer who would do anything in the world to have had a script made in Hollywood. He wrote one of the worst scripts I’ve ever read—and I’ve read it. His fake Shakespeare-rap script about the L.A. riots. Oh, you’ve gotta read it! It’s just fuckin’ terrible.”
The script Clooney is referring to was tentatively titled The Thing I Am. It was co-written by Bannon and his writing partner of 18 years, Julia Jones, who described it as “a rap film [based on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus] set in South Central during the L.A. riots.” The Daily Beast’s Asawin Suebsaeng got ahold of the wacky script that includes “rap music, racial tensions aplenty, looting, gangster ‘foot-soldiers,’ and chaos at ‘ground zero of the 1992 L.A. riots.’ Oh, and a lot of angry black characters referring to white characters as “whitey.”
“Here’s the truth: if Steve Bannon had Hollywood say, ‘Oh, this is really great, and a really good script,’ and had they made his movie, he’d still be in Hollywood writing his fuckin’ movies and kissing my ass to be in one of his fuckin’ films!” said Clooney. “That’s who he is. That’s the reality.”
He added, “Someone in Hollywood should’ve given him a script—or approved one of his scripts—just to keep him out of the right wing.”
Bannon—who, through an odd series of events, got rich off the television series Seinfeld—eventually went on to produce and direct a number of exceptionally poor documentaries, including the Sarah Palin stroke-fest The Undefeated. The last film he helmed was 2016’s Torchbearer, a documentary on the radical views of Duck Dynasty star Phil Robertson. It currently has a rating of 1.8/10 on IMDb.
Stay tuned for our full interview with George Clooney out next week.
