In Emmy-Contending ‘Ren Faire,’ An Aging Ruler Struggles With Relinquishing His Crown: Director Lance Oppenheim On Parallels To Biden & Trump

Elon Musk got his wish. Voters in the southern tip of Texas just approved his plan to incorporate Starbase as its own city, at the SpaceX boss’s behest.

But Musk isn’t the first magnate to get his own town in Texas. Long before him, George Coulam – creator the of the world’s largest Renaissance Fair – incorporated Todd Mission, TX, where he rules as King George surrounded by vassals, courtiers and other minions in medieval garb. The story of Coulam and his kingdom, and the succession battle over his throne, is told in the Emmy-contending HBO documentary series Ren Faire, directed by Lance Oppenheim.

“He has power, as the elected mayor of the town he incorporated,” reads a Ren Faire synopsis. “He has glory, as the undisputed employer and self-proclaimed ruler of thousands.”

But in his mid-80s, King George ponders whether to abdicate and devote his remaining days to finding female companionship (the aging potentate remains potent with the help of Viagra and similar pharmaceuticals). Colorful characters like him have proven intriguing to Oppenheim, who – not yet 30 – has already directed two acclaimed feature documentaries – Some Kind of Heaven (2020) and Spermworld (2024). The filmmaker is in post-production on his first narrative feature, Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson in the role of a crusading journalist who launches a television show in the mold of To Catch a Predator.

DEADLINE: How quickly did you realize, after meeting George, that he was documentary gold. He’s so compelling.

LANCE OPPENHEIM: We had heard all kinds of stories about George. Some people hadn’t seen him in years, so there was kind of this Wizard of Oz thing that was happening. Was he alive? If he was alive, what is he actually doing? And it’s almost like the Hobbit version of the Playboy mansion that he lived in… We drove down the driveway to his house and it’s littered with all of these artistic sculptures and monstrosities and creations of ‘the history of the world’ is what he would say, on the sides of his driveway. And there was Egyptian art and Mesopotamian art, and then a Harley-Davidson. Basically from the moment we were entering the zone of his house, I knew that there would be someone very interesting on the other side of it. And we were right.

The first time I met him, he was not very interested in kind of a sit-down interview. But when I told him that I wanted to really talk more about not just the Renaissance Fair, but his legacy and kind of the Howard Hughes-esque figure, the John Ford-esque figure, the Noah Cross-esque figure that he kind of reminded me of, he was interested even in all the complexities of what that could look like for him.

DEADLINE: By invoking those characters — some real and some fictional — you’ve certainly laid it out there that you were not going to put him on a pedestal necessarily. One doesn’t think of Noah Cross of Chinatown as the most heroic of fellows.

LO: He loved John Huston. John Huston, David Lynch, all of these guys speak in such a specific kind of a way of being that doesn’t exist anymore. George, having spent a lot of time in California when he was young, probably around the time that those guys were there, it felt like he was cut from both real and imaginary cloth. The guy was obsessed with self-mythologizing in his own way.

I think he wanted to be shown as a ruler with an iron fist. And I think a lot of that goes back to probably just being of advanced age and people thinking that he didn’t have the capability to run the fair and wanting to prove to people that he still could.

DEADLINE: There are some jaw-dropping moments in your conversations with George, like where he refers to his penis as “Leonard” and he describes “Leonard” making decisions for George.

LO: That was a very strange moment. I mean, honestly, most times you get George on his feet, something jaw-dropping will happen. There are things that are just burned in my brain forever that I’ll never forget, [like] throughout the project when he says, ‘Do you see why I suffer the gross inadequacies of the human race?’ And this is in response to someone not having a Renaissance hat.

A large part of this project was just, we have a great setup, but where is it going to go and how is it going to end? Is George going to sell the place? Is Louie going to absorb it somehow? Is Darla going to get it? Is Jeff going to get it? Who will win? Who will get the throne?

When we finished this show, I thought this had a lot to do actually with Joe Biden and his unwillingness initially to step down. And now that we are where we are politically in a whole different world, and the past has repeated itself yet again, I find that oddly so many of the events of this just correspond to so many different things going on in our country.

DEADLINE: I didn’t think about Biden so much as Trump, who is a monarchical figure and sort of surrounded by these courtiers. I thought there was something Trumpian about George.

LO: He’s sort of a combination between Biden and Trump in a way. Both people are defined — maybe they don’t like to be defined by it — but by their age. It’s like America is a gerontocracy. Most small businesses in the country that have been around for a while are run by people that are probably around George’s age. It’s a very human question, ultimately, that I think the project is aiming to ask — despite how absurd his behavior may be or some of the things that he says or other people say in the project — it goes back to his question of, ‘What is a king without his kingdom?’ And in the beginning, he says he’s free and by the end he says he’s nothing.

I think all of the projects I’m making are sort of about people with some desire to have control over their lives, to enact kind of a dream that becomes a tomb… I entered into this project thinking that this would be a comedy, and I didn’t really think about how it would become a tragedy by the end. It’s a human drama.

DEADLINE: There’s very distinctive camera movement in Ren Faire. I don’t know if you were on a jib or using a steady cam but it really takes it very much out of the vérité world into the fantasy land that is a Ren fair.

LO: A lot of it is credit to Nate Hurtsellers, my cinematographer on the series who did just an unbelievable job. And there were so many complexities of how to figure out how to capture the magic of this place.

The Renaissance Fair, just in walking around, it’s all defined by movement. Most of the performers themselves are constantly moving. It’s an immersive theater. Very quickly, Nate and I just started thinking, well, how do we adapt? What do we do to capture the magic of this place so we don’t have the audience gawking at the people in the project. We want them to be right alongside their struggles, what they’re going through. We want them to be with them inside of that immersive stage, so to speak. So, a lot of it came down to camera movements. We wanted to feel kind of Kingdom of Heaven, like a great Ridley Scott Epic or something like that. And it came down to a lot of steady cam, a lot of handheld camera movements. A lot of days in the beating hot Texas sun.

DEADLINE: Ren Faire has earned nominations for the Film Independent Spirit Awards, the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards, the Cinema Eye Honors – where it won for an award for Nate Hurtsellers’ cinematography — and the Gotham TV Awards, among others, and now it’s in the running for Emmys.

LO: I just look back at the experience of making this series — it was really a very foundational moment for all of our lives. And I couldn’t have done it without the people that I worked with. Making two films at the same time [Ren Faire and Spermworld] was very tricky, to say the least. And it took a while to do, but Abby [Rowe]who produced it, found the story. Dave [Gauvey Herbert]my co-creator, and Ronnie Bronstein, Dani Bernfeld, there’s a lot of people. And the people who edited and wrote the project with me, Max Allman and Nicholas Nazmi, they were really the co-authors of this whole thing with me to try and figure out how to just make something that feels like There Will Be Blood and Vanderpump Rules, like taking the low-brow kind of reality TV-ification of a story that you could see on Bravo or something, which I love, with the high art and the kind of stylization of something that feels extremely serious. And always just trying to find a way to emotionally map how the style of the movie, where it lives and the point of view.

DEADLINE: What are you able to say about your next project, the narrative feature Primetime?

LO: It was a great time making it. I’m in post-production now, and I also had a baby with my wife, Abigail Rowe, who I met making Ren Faire. And so it’s been a very busy time, but it’s funny. I look back at the last few years, it’s all just such a blur. All of these things are all interrelated with each other. I think thematically, a lot of the ideas of power and how power is obtained and how power is maintained and what happens when you have it, and what happens when you don’t have it, I think these are kind of constant. They’re perennially fascinating subjects, but I think I like looking at that lens and kind of applying it to, whether it’s the Renaissance Fair or The Villages [in Some Kind of Heaven] or broadcast television with the film I just made, I think there’s a lot of overlap with a lot of the subjects.

I can’t say probably much more about it right now, but in terms of the performers, we worked with some amazing, amazing actors and the crafts people that worked on it. It was the stuff of dreams. So, I’m very excited to get it done.