When Lance Oppenheim first touched down in Todd Mission, Texas to document George Coulam, the eccentric 86-year-old founder of the Texas Renaissance Festival, and the battle to inherit the kingdom he created, the filmmaker was thinking of the project as a comedy.
“The first thing George said to me was that he used to play the king at the fair, and now he’s a horny old man,” Oppenheim says, explaining that it was exciting to find a subject who didn’t censor himself for the camera. “A lot of people around him were saying, don’t do this. So he invited us into his life for almost three years.”
By the end of that time, though, Oppenheim says the resulting docuseries—the three-episode Ren Faire, which ended Sunday—no longer qualified as a comedy. “It became a tragedy,” he says. “And I think that’s fitting for the reality that exists there.”
In Ren Faire, Coulam claims that he wants to retire to focus on art, gardening, and “chasing pussy.” But the series ends after Coulam has humiliated his staff over and over, spiked what general manager Darla Smith claims was a perfectly good offer to buy the festival, and revealed that he is more interested in power than a pay day. (“That kind of power is not much different than an addiction,” Smith says in the docuseries.) The New York Times dubbed the show “Succession with kettle corn,” given the backstabbing amongst the potential successors—Smith, the decades-long lieutenant Jeff Baldwin, and the Red Bull–swilling kettle corn king and ren-faire entrepreneur Louie Migliaccio—and the way the show’s curmudgeonly patriarch figure plays his potential successors off each other for seeming sport.
When Oppenheim, the 28-year-old documentary wunderkind who directed Some Kind of Heaven, showed Coulam the first episode, the filmmaker says, “He couldn’t stop laughing the whole time. Even in the moments that felt darker, he was smiling.”
On a phone call with Smith, the only Ren Faire contender to escape Coulam’s clutches, she tells me, “Most faires are kind of crazy. But honestly, George has got the biggest faire and he’s got the biggest craziness.”
Darla Smith in Ren Faire.
Courtesy of HBO.
Of Ren Faire’s potential successors, Smith is the most clear-eyed and direct about Coulam—presumably because she has the least to lose. Though she has worked in ren faires for about 30 years, she has not invested decades of her life and/or business directly into Coulam’s TRF like Baldwin and Migliaccio. In fact, after starting work with TRF in 2020, Smith tried to avoid Oppenheim’s cameras until Coulam promoted her to general manager and thrust her directly in the line of succession and into competition with Baldwin in particular.
Asked what she thought of the docuseries, Smith shoots straight. “I thought it was way too Jeff-centered,” she laughs. Referring to her former coworker, a semi-professional actor turned entertainment director who frames the festival going-ons in terms of King Lear, she adds, “But Jeff is a thespian, so he just pandered to the camera any chance he could get.”
Migliaccio was in no danger of stealing the spotlight. The entrepreneur was busy running the immersive kingdom he created within the walls of TRF, which includes Dragonslayer Souvenirs, Champion Rickshaws, Da Vinci Dots Ice Cream, and Wyrmwood Public House on top of his kettle corn operation, and managing a team he says consists of 160 people. Because Migliaccio is a private and fast-moving person, his storyline was hard to capture.
“The challenge of filming with him was just like, How do we match the ferocity of how he’s moving?” laughs Oppenheim. “Especially when my cinematographer, Nate Hurtsellers, is operating a 60-pound camera in a hundred-degree weather.” (Indeed, the only time I can get Migliaccio on the phone is when he is restrained in a seat by law—on a plane taxiing in the moments before takeoff—and that is for less than a minute.)
Coulam could also be difficult to film and refuse direction. Oppenheim says he wouldn’t stop looking into the cameras no matter how many times he was asked. (When his manicurist looked into the lens, though, Coulam immediately reprimanded her.) He also didn’t give the filmmakers the luxury of setting up a shot. “It was always: ‘Get your ugly ass in here,’ ‘shut up and sit down,’ and ‘let’s go.’” Every time we put the microphone on him, he complained that we were taking too long.”
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