‘Ren Faire' director Lance Oppenheim on the corrupting influence of power and accidentally capturing ‘America in miniature'
We live in an escapist era. Nostalgic IP-mining reboots abound, large-scale video games are more popular every year, and escape rooms, immersive experiences, and other real-life novelties are now commonplace. Nowhere is this world-outside-the-world energy more prominent than the Texas Renaissance Festival. Founded by George Coulam in 1974, the Texas Renaissance Festival is the largest Renaissance festival in America, encompassing its own Texas town, with Coulam serving as both town mayor and festival king until his death on May 21.
Ren Faire, a three-part HBO docuseries created by Some Heaven and Spermworld director Lance Oppenheim, explores a tumultuous time in the fest's long history, as Coulam looks to retire from the festival he's long been synonymous with. Vying for control over the fest's future are Coulam's longtime right-hand man, Jeff Baldwin, ren faire tycoon Louie Migliaccio, and a host of other players. While there's organic humor in the concept — it's a struggle over succession of a fake kingdom, after all — it ends up a dramatic microcosm of the perils of power.
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Oppenheim spoke to Gold Derby about capturing truth in a fantasy land, power struggles, accidentally capturing America in miniature, and the lessons he's taking into his narrative feature debut in Primetime, starring Robert Pattinson and distributed by A24.
Note: This interview took place prior to Coulam's death.
Gold Derby: You hit on such a tumultuous time for Ren Faire's future. How did Ren Faire come to fruition when it did?
Lance Oppenheim: The project began with David Gauvey Herbert and Abigail Road, two journalists who came to me with the story. They found the world of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and George Coulam, the king and the mayor of this town that he had created around the Faire. … I love the idea that there was a real-life fiefdom that had been created by this very eccentric, iconoclastic dude, who cosplayed and also lived a real life as a king … though it's a very stylized portrayal of the succession crisis, every moment was born out of real, intense investigative journalistic practice, and so it was a lot of fun trying to crack it and put it together.
You had so much access, including in many private moments. How did you gain that level of trust?
Time is really the leveling force with a lot of these things. It took us three years to make this project. It was over 100 shoot days — I was basically living in Texas more than I was living in my own apartment here in New York. I think the other part of this that was a really important piece was that everyone at the Renaissance Festival, more or less, is an actor, in a way. … They move through an almost 80-acre stage, and it's very immersive, so the idea of us coming to them with not just a traditional, fly-on-the-wall [documentary] approach [is appealing]. With George, it was a different story. When we met George, I think he was trying to figure out what we were after. He wasn't interested in talking about the Faire, he was interested in talking about himself as this Hugh Hefner-type, a Howard Hughes-type — one of the first things he said to me was that he was a horny old man. I saw that something in him lit up. He was so interested in saying all the things that everyone around him told him not to say.
I would come to him bearing gifts. Sometimes I'd have to convince him to keep up filming with us by gifting him books about the magic of obelisks. At that point in time, once he'd received it, he'd be like, "OK, yeah, I guess I can communicate with [these people] on an artistic frequency, they're not just interested in making some sort of boring documentary," and that's when we were able to keep doing it.
Photo: HBO
Any time anyone even almost remotely challenged him, he'd balk at that, so I would imagine that receptivity went a long way.
Yeah, it was interesting for him. I think we were the first people in his life that weren't employed by him. We had editorial control. And I think, in a weird way, George is one of these people — even though he's so obsessed with controlling everyone and everything around him — I think he also loves being shocked. Even though he is this controversial dude who says all this wild, crazy shit, I do think he is someone who is lonely, and [he] doesn't really have an outlet or anyone to really talk to. I think that's what also happened while we were there.
The way I like to work is I usually tell people, "Listen, I'm not gonna tell you what to do or how to do it, but I am going to ask you not to acknowledge the camera." With George, there was none of that. I'd come to him, and he'd always say, "get your ugly ass cameraman out here," and "you get your ugly ass inside my room, and we're gonna start shooting" … then he'd tell us the moment we'd get there, "turn the cameras on, I'm gonna be going off the wall." I realized at that point in time he knew exactly what we were hoping to do, and how I was hoping to shoot things. But because he's the king, and because he identifies as such, I think he wanted to be the king of our process.
The series spends a lot of time on the conflict over succession between Jeff, who appreciates the Faire's theatricality, and Louie, who has built a proto-capitalist empire within it. Very different visions. I wanted to know if you could speak to that conflict.
I think you nailed it. There's also a little bit of a thing going on there about tradition versus change. Jeff Baldwin — the general manager there — it's the only job he's ever worked. He's been working there for 40-plus years. Louie came from a different place. He did start as an actor there, but he also developed a business of making kettlecorn and all kinds of other products. He really sees himself as an entrepreneur, whereas Jeff really sees himself as a guy that came from the traditions of the space.
It's a fascinating idea, the idea of Renaissance festivals, because in some ways, they are the most capitalist environment on the planet. It almost feels like going to Vegas, where the only way to actually have a good time at these places these days is to spend serious cash … it's like it requires a pay-to-play existence.
The thing that's interesting, and ultimately I think starts to animate the rest of the series, is at first it almost seems like George is actually thinking pretty deeply about the two different ideas or philosophies, but it becomes clear the more time that we spent with him that he doesn't really care about anything. He just wants the money, and he wants to get out … and then over time, ultimately, the money was sort of secondary as well. It's really just about self-importance, and purpose, and meaning… But yet it's sort of stuck in this never-ending cycle where George controls and dictates every rule in very arbitrary ways.
On the topic of its never-ending cycle, there is a rhythm and circularity to the events that occur. Fortunes rise and fall. Tell me about your process of finding the narrative in that, and how you work with the editors to shape it into what it became.
It goes without saying for every documentary, the editors don't get enough credit. Max Allman and Nick Nasmee, who edited this series, were really were like my co-authors. They were amazing. They were working with me basically from the first day of production. It was like a three-year edit, in a way.
From the very beginning of the process and just meeting people, people would always talk about [how] so many people were cast out of the kingdom… this idea that George likes to flirt with people all the time, and make them feel like they're going to potentially be the heir to his fortune. It's almost a test. The moment you become maybe too big for your britches, or you do something that could bother him, he totally will throw you out. I thought for a long time, just like Jeff and Louie, this time would be different … and by the time that second year came to an end, I guess that it was around 2023, I realized that the cycle was just going — it was a Mobius strip — that the series would operate and tell a story that has happened many, many years before.
I went back, and we re-edited some parts of the first two episodes just to make that through-line a lot clearer. This was a story about people who were giving all of themselves to their work in the hopes of some sort of grand prize at the end. What you see by the end of the series is just that there's no end in sight. I thought, it couldn't have ended any other way.
Photo: HBO
I also want to congratulate you on moving into your first narrative feature with A24's Primetime. How has your experience with Ren Faire affected how you approach narrative filmmaking?
A lot of the stuff I had done in the documentary space feels very similar, I think, to some of the stuff that I was doing with this fiction film I just wrapped pretty recently. [In Primetime], working with actors and, for me, having a moldable story that I could keep discovering while we're shooting, was really important. I think the difference of working with untrained actors is that I would always find myself just observing, watching things … just making sure that we were in the right place and position, and then once that thing would happen, I would shoot another two hours in that specific scene … and so it was always like a dance, where what I was photographing had to be real, but also allowing the performance to come into it allowed for almost another form of documentary truth in there.
On the fiction film, there were parts of it that were similar. William Friedkin said something once, I'm probably butchering the paraphrasing of it: "You inherit the lives and the lived experiences of where your performers are when you're making the film." In that way, there is almost a documentary dimension. No matter what they're doing, what choices they're making, it's coming from where they are in their lives, and so a lot of that too I was trying to pull into it. I [also] liked that I could look at another story about power, and proximity to power, and what power does to you. I did that with Ren Faire, and I liked doing it within the world of broadcast television in this very specific time period, [and] we were looking at it with the Primetime movie.
I love that, congratulations on both projects.
Thank you so much. It's funny — I'm just thinking about that first question you asked, too. Going back to that, when I went into making this thing, I thought it was going to be a comedy, and it became a tragedy by the end of it. And I think so much about America, where we are now. … It's funny how George in some ways almost represents both [Joe] Biden and [Donald] Trump, both in his decision-making [and in] the way he moves. He's of advanced age. Maybe he's sharp, maybe he's not sometimes, and then [there are] also all these people that are just scurrying around him, constantly losing favor with him because maybe he doesn't like the way they look on a specific day, or he doesn't like the joke they're telling him.
Just the idea of power and what that does to people, to me, it almost makes the documentary feel almost like a story of the American empire in decline, or America in miniature, but just inside this very specific subculture.
Ren Faire is now streaming on Max.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
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