ON 17 APRIL 2002, a 48-year-old fi nancier arrived at Michael Ovitz’s
offi ce with some very bad news. Ovitz’s ambitious company, Artists
Management Group, was bleeding cash and the super-agent was out of
options. This meeting was to negotiate the sale of AMG to an aggressive
rival called The Firm. Ovitz was hoping for $40 million. The man from The
Firm offered $5 million. After a stunned pause, Ovitz said: “If I didn’t
know you personally, I’d throw you out of the room.”
Fourteen years later, the same man who humiliated Michael Ovitz was
responsible for the undoing of Hillary Clinton. The man from The Firm
was Stephen K. Bannon, a former Navy offi cer and Wall Street banker who
became the canniest far-right propagandist in Hollywood and then the
brains behind Donald Trump’s Presidential election campaign. Until
stepping down in August (the White House claimed the decision was
mutual), he was Trump’s special advisor, billed by Time magazine as ‘The
Great Manipulator’. Now back to running far-right website Breitbart
News, Bannon is “going to war for Trump against his opponents”.
Ovitz could not have predicted that the brash fi nancier in his offi ce
would one day wield such extraordinary power. Nobody could have. The
story of Bannon’s long journey through Hollywood is a weird and winding
tale, with cameos from Jerry Seinfeld, Mel Gibson, Sean Penn and Dan
Brown. Most people who live and work in Hollywood hate Trump and
everything he represents, so it’s ironic that the man who masterminded his
victory lived among them for over 20 years, hustling, mingling, observing,
and learning lessons that would help him orchestrate the biggest upset in
US political history.
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S TITUS Andronicus is a notoriously
gory revenge tragedy involving rape, torture, mutilation and cannibalism.
Steve Bannon’s unproduced early ’90s screenplay adaptation is a lurid sci-fi
fable about an authoritarian populist from another planet who tries to save
humanity from itself while indulging in “ectoplasmic sex”. Julia Jones,
his screenwriting partner for 16 years, last year called it “really dreadful”.
The pair followed up with another mindboggling Shakespeare adaptation,
a hip-hop version of Coriolanus set during the 1992 LA riots. Bannon’s
inability to sell these outré projects is what recently led George Clooney to
describe him as “a failed fucking screenwriter”. But Bannon didn’t come to
Hollywood to write screenplays. He came to make a ton of money.
Bannon’s path to Hollywood was unusual. Born in 1953, he grew up in
an extremely religious blue-collar family in Virginia and attended a Roman
Catholic military academy, where he was taught that history was a long,
fi ery struggle between Christianity and a series of existential threats, from
Islam to Communism. Raised as a Democrat, Bannon was politically
radicalised by seven years in the US Navy. President Carter, he decided, was
too weak to fi ght the crucial battles, but the new conservative superhero
Ronald Reagan had the right stuff.
After leaving the Navy, Bannon set his sights on Wall Street and
enrolled in Harvard Business School in 1983. Two years later, he joined
illustrious Wall Street institution Goldman Sachs. Hyper-competitive and
hard-working, he climbed the ladder fast. In 1987 Goldman dispatched him
to Los Angeles to capitalise on the frenzy of mergers and acquisitions that
was convulsing Hollywood. Bannon had an uncanny ability to diagnose the