Bannon failed bigly in Hollywood, then found RWers easy to

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Oct 21, 2017 at 1:37 PM 233

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Bannon failed bigly in Hollywood, then found RWers easy to sway, decided to become Leni Riefenstahl

Interesting background on Bannon from an NPR story published yesterday:

How Steve Bannon's Time In Hollywood Changed Him

http://www.npr.org/2017/10/20/558906151/how-s...hanged-him

Around that time, Bannon created his own film company, called Bannon Film Industries, where he worked with his brother Christopher T. Bannon.

The film company, like Bannon himself, went on to focus on politics. Its most famous production is probably the anti-Hillary Clinton film Clinton Cash, based on a book released around the time Clinton launched her 2016 presidential campaign.

But that's not how it started.

NPR's Embedded team unearthed a 1993 article in the Richmond Times-Dispatch, Bannon's hometown newspaper, featuring the kind of headline you don't usually see associated with Steve Bannon: "THE FAMOUS CHICKEN IS POISED FOR BARNEY-STYLE CAREER LAUNCH".

The Famous Chicken is also known as The San Diego Chicken, who is also known as Ted Giannoulas, who is also known as "a guy who dons a chicken suit for fun and notoriety."

Bannon and his brother had huuuuge plans for the Chicken -- a series of videos, a TV show, toys, games, and movies. They were out to copy the success of Barney the Dinosaur.

But they weren't smart enough or creative enough to pull it off.

Another piece of evidence that Bannon's views evolved in Hollywood comes from Julia Jones, a screenwriter who worked on-and-off with Steve Bannon for more than a decade.

-snip-

Jones provided NPR with a document listing their planned projects as of March 2004, none of which are overtly partisan. This document has not previously been reported.

-snip-

Later in 2004, Bannon got involved with a project that actually got made.

It was a documentary about Ronald Reagan called In The Face Of Evil: Reagan's War In Word And Deed, and the film dramatically changed his trajectory.

-snip-

The film was not a major success. It has an 11% rating on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, and the film only grossed $110,000, according to Box Office Mojo.

But then Bannon screened the film at a conservative film festival in Los Angeles, and according to Joshua Green, author of Devil's Bargain: Steve Bannon, Donald Trump, and the Storming of the Presidency, that's where Bannon met Andrew Breitbart. At the time, Breitbart had just co-written a book that excoriated Hollywood's culture of celebrity, and would soon start making plans for his own website.

-snip-

Around that same time, Bannon also met David Bossie, the head of the conservative group Citizens United, a key source of funding for conservative documentaries. Bannon and Bossie would both go on years later hold top positions in Donald Trump's 2016 presidential campaign.

And at that point, the list of projects from Steve Bannon and Julia Jones changes. Jones provided NPR with a second document from November 2004, which includes many overtly partisan projects.

-snip-

The bottom of the document also includes this paragraph, "The key to the success of the conservative documentary lies in tying together compatible funding sources, e.g., the NRA, church and political groups, while leveraging off the media base of AM Talk Radio and Cable news."

At some point, Jones says, Bannon told her he wanted to be "the Leni Riefenstahl of the GOP."

Probably would've needed to lose some weight.

So Bannon, like so many aspiring Hollywood writers and filmmakers, failed miserably.

Unlike most of them, he had enough resources after years on Wall Street to keep trying until he finally found an audience.

A very gullible audience.

More gullible than the children he'd been trying to impress with his plans involving the Chicken.

He discovered the deplorables could be swayed by his clumsy attempts at filmmaking.

He was quite cynical and methodical about it: "The key to the success of the conservative documentary lies in tying together compatible funding sources, e.g., the NRA, church and political groups, while leveraging off the media base of AM Talk Radio and Cable news."

In other words, he'd figured out how to push the right buttons to motivate -- and make money off -- right wing nuts.

Probably the world would be much better off if Bannon had been clever enough to market a successful avian version of Barney.

But he failed, and failed again, until in his trajectory downward he bounced off that RWNJ ledge, and found support to start leveraging himself into a media power, thanks to their gullibility and his Wall Street experience

So now we have this wannabe Leni Riefenstahl. This crass, puffed-up propagandist of the deplorables.

I can't say I wish he'd found his gullible market, his suckers, among children instead. The thought of someone like Bannon having any sway over children makes my skin crawl.

But at least, if he'd been able to succeed in cynical Hollywood projects aimed at a different market, we wouldn't have to be worrying about his influence on the over-age child in the White House, with all his potential to harm the country and the planet.

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