MAX’s new short-run documentary “Ren Faire” is a spotlight on the Texas Renaissance Festival’s 86-year old owners’ search for a successor. It’s an interesting narrative that writer/director Lance Oppenheim has cobbled together. For people who are not familiar with the world of Renaissance Faires, the series comes off as a spotlight on various individuals who seem alternatively well-meaning, sycophantic, and desperate – all for the time, attention, and most paramount, the approbation of the owner George Coulam. Or as everyone seems intent on calling him- King George.
Full disclosure- I have been affiliated with, performing at, or producing Renaissance Faires since ’86 (shout out to Bonner Springs and Kansas City Renaissance Festival). One thing that is shockingly consistent is the archtypes of characters one finds populating these festivals is consistent, both on stage and behind. Watching the power plays on display, and the eccentricity of King George with how the people who orbit around him play to his vanity. It has always made my teeth itch to see a faire (or performance troupe) where fantasy character and real-life persona blend together. It’s one thing to only know and refer to someone as a character name, but when they start believing that they are noble when they’re in a t-shirt and jeans, then things have started to run wildly off the rails.
In some ways, the show might have been better served as a reality-competition series, as there are a number of people who are trying to convince George to sell the faire to them. In the end, the show isn’t about finding an heir to the kingdom, but rather someone who can convince George to sell it off before he changes his mind…. again.
There are various moments that create genuine dread, as I’ve seen and experienced many of those same examples of the horribly poor leadership on display. Firing people on a whim- and not ONLY firing them, but being unable to disentangle personal relationships from business ones so that it winds up effectively being a form of excommunication. Watching George put new people into positions of leadership and instead of mentoring them along, calling them out on their shortcomings and lack of preparedness. There are any number of moments where the camera grabs onto George’s face, just as he is making someone squirm, and you sense that he is doing it for the pleasure of seeing them try to dig themselves out of the hole he just made them dig for themselves.
You get only the most limited context around TRF (as the Texas Renaissance Festival is typically referred to). There are a few brief interviews and behind the scenes footage. Most of these soundbites tend to be around how King George is the most amazing human being. One quote goes so far as to express how, when George passes, he should be canonized as a saint.
One of the candidates for acquiring TRF is the owner of the faire’s Kettle Korn booths, Louie Migliaccio. While we get the sense that he’s an apt food booth owner, and that his family has money, we never get to know him as a person – beyond the fact that he never loses an opportunity to be on his cell phone while walking through the middle of the faire (any self-respecting faire participant would at the least slip backstage). There are moments, but much of the central narrative is comprised of filler around intermittent business meetings.
Rewriting Faire History
An infuriating aspect is that both in the trailer as well as in the episodes there are a number of moments where people are effusive in speaking about how all the faires of the country owe their existence to TRF. It’s worth noting that Faire in America was pretty much created by Ron and Phyllis Patterson in 1963. Which is most definitely frustrating given that George mentions multiple times that he had first gotten the idea while working the stained glass booth at faires in California. He mentions it as being in San Francisco, but it would have originally been located at China Camp before shifting over to Black Point. This was just before George moved away and first attempted to create a faire in Minnesota before trying again a few years later in Texas.
There’s no question that he pulled off quite the coup, taking lessons from Walt Disney’s operations for setting up Disney World, and finding an old strip mining region and buying it, eventually incorporating it into it’s own municipality. However the backstory around that rise and creation is sadly only given the broadest of strokes before delving into being a King George spotlight.
An Old Man’s Search for a ‘Partner’
If there’s anything most uncomfortable, is how we keep returning to a thread about King George and his sex life and his search for a partner. A scene hits where his computer-using assistant (it appears that George is most definitely not a computer user), on prodding from George informs the camera that George is set up with profiles on more then 40 dating sites. To which George makes a point of talking about how he’s on various sugar baby seeking websites. There’s nothing wrong in the least about either sugar babies or sugar daddies, however, in the way he portrays it (with brief scenes of a scheduling calendar where George is setting up dates, mostly it seems to be had at Olive Garden), is with a shocking lack of tact. With these scenes out there, nearly anyone he’s with in the future will be socially assumed to be sugaring.
There’s really nobody in the documentary who comes out seeming like a particularly good (or at least emotionally healthy) individual. George probably comes off the worst of it, as a boss, a mentor, a leader, or as a prospective partner; his only redeeming quality seems to be his wealth and arguably his eccentricity. His alternative possible heirs or buyers, again, we only know one particular facet of them, so they aren’t rendered as fully fleshed out individuals, so it’s hard to really root for any of them.
In the end, is it a good documentary about Renaissance Faires? Oh heavens no- the audience learns little about them if you’re unfamiliar with such events, and even if you are, all you really know is that if you’re sufficiently rich, people will want to do anything to appease your whims, no matter how off kilter that individual may be.
You can watch the first episode now on MAX. The final two episodes will both drop on June 9th.
Rating: 4 stars out of 10.
