Although the Texas Renaissance Festival takes place during September and October, it is so large that the people working are there year-round; George Coulam even incorporated a town called Todd Mission, where the fair is located and the people who work there live.
The fair has brought King George much wealth, but his general distrust of the people and devotion to his creation has left him with no company other than the people on his payroll. According to Victor's young assistant, his profile is now on fifteen different online dating sites, many of them "sugar daddy" sites, where he is looking for a much younger woman to be with him. His huge house is decorated to look like a medieval castle. He also seems to have an obsession with death; He is scheduled to travel to Switzerland and die by assisted suicide when he is 95 years old.
Stars: Jeffrey Baldwin, George Coulam, Darla Smith
One of the people looking to take over is Jeff Baldwin; He has worked for the fair for more than 40 years and was recently promoted to the position of general manager. “This is Willy Wonka; and I’m lucky to be the leader of the oompa loompa,” he says. He comes from the world of entertainment and, although he is not the strongest on the business side, he believes he knows inside and out how the fair works, second only to King George himself. He claims that he is the executor of George's estate and that there is an estate plan.
The other rival is Louie Migliaccio, the Red Bull-devouring “Corn Lord”; He started with a boiled corn stall at the fair and quickly expanded his empire to several vendor stalls and the fair's main pub. Not only does he have ideas to modernize and expand the fair, but he also has his family's money to back those plans.
He thinks Jeff is the wrong guy to replace King George, and one of the main pieces of evidence is that when Jeff was promoted from entertainment director to general manager, he put his wife Brandi in her old job. The two met and fell in love at the festival, and Jeff truly feels she's the best person for the job, given her acting experience and at ComedySportz. But when we see George talking to his driver about it, he keeps spitting out the word “nepotism”; he believes there is no place for it in business.
While Jeff and Brandi travel to Germany to examine how Renaissance festivals are organized there, Louie meets with King George and Jeff's assistant calls him with bad news.
What Oppenheim is trying to do with Ren Faire is take the docuseries genre and infuse it with as many dramatic elements as possible. So there are extreme close-ups and ominous background music. But what he does most is take images and turn them into what look like peyote-infused fantasies, whether through images, sound, or both.
But what we find interesting is that he doesn't do this to push a story that would seem boring if presented simply. King George is quite a character, a guy who built this festival from nothing, in the middle of nowhere, until it became the largest in North America. But that dedication has turned him into this death-obsessed mess who wants to control every aspect of his life, until the day he and the thirty-something woman he'd like to spend the years with die. that are left. Everyone who works for him seems to think he is fair and generous, but he certainly comes across as a bitter eccentric whose business mind guides his behavior.
Jeff and Louie are also fun characters to follow, because they have such opposite personalities. While both are intense, Jeff's intensity comes from his love for the festival and for George, to whom he dedicated his entire adult life. Louie, on the other hand, has ideas and knows that if George sells him the fair, he will make it grow even more. His laser focus on taking control is fueled by caffeine and sugar, and he's convinced that Jeff will simply ruin George's creation if he takes control.
So there are already many intriguing stories in this real-life Succession story. But we enjoyed touches like when Oppenheim uses muffled audio to show that George's mind is elsewhere while he has his weekly briefing with Jeff, or the altered sights and sounds Jeff experiences after his assistant's phone call while in Germany. . We're also intrigued by how he got people to participate in those scenes; Were these things filmed later and re-cropped to add drama, or was this footage altered in real time to amplify the drama?
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