An Eric Kohn Indiewire piece reports that Steve Bannon, the Lucifer-like alt-rightist who became the honcho of Donald Trump‘s presidential campaign last August and who will become Trump’s chief strategist and senior counselor as of 1.20.17, worked in indie film distribution in 2004 and ’05.
Bannon’s company, American Vantage Media Corp., bought Wellspring Media in ’04, which led to his overseeing distribution of (a) Jonathan Caouette’s Tarnation (a critically admired, low-budget gay-identity film that was made for next to nothing with loads and loads of found footage), (b) Vincent Gallo’s The Brown Bunny (notorious for that Chloe Sevigny blowjob scene, and directed by a fellow Republican!), Todd Solondz’s Palindromes (which I never saw as I kind of hate Solondz, no offense) and Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark.
Which of these four films would arouse President-elect Trump’s interest the most, presuming he hasn’t seen any of them? Three guesses and the first two don’t count.
Kohn also reports the somewhat embarassing information that Bannon worked in ’04 and ’05 with Cinetic Marketing’s Ryan Werner as well as The Orchard’s Dan Goldberg, whom I was just hanging with last weekend with at the Key West Film Festival. The seeming horror of the association! But no one should look askance at these poor guys for being strange bedfellows with Bannon 11 and 12 years ago. One has to maintain a sense of humor about such things. Back then Bannon, who split his time between New York and Santa Monica, was politically obliged to go along with the indie mindset. Now he’s about to become a modern-day “Thomas Cromwell in the court of the Tudors,” as Bannon described himself in a recent Hollywood Reporter interview.