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.”

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.”

Baldwin, on the other hand, was a willing dramatic collaborator—so comfortable with the camera that, at one point, he sang, unprompted, a long ballad from Shrek the Musical!, a show in which Baldwin once starred, onscreen. Oppenheim credits Baldwin as “the skeleton key to this whole project” and “the heart of the series,” given the extent of their collaboration. Baldwin was so open to baring his soul that, in one scene, he reads aloud from a letter he wrote groveling to Coulam. At his lowest point in Ren Faire, Baldwin is fired by Coulam, the man he considers a father figure, in an exchange Baldwin did not realize Oppenheim caught on audio.

Though the firing was “very difficult” to relive, Baldwin wasn’t angry at the filmmaker: “It showed me standing up to George and speaking my voice, which is hard to do with someone that’s a steamroller like he can be.” Baldwin’s wife, Brandi, commends Oppenheim for capturing the TRF chaos without getting in the middle: “They were like true animal documentarians,” she tells me on a Zoom. “‘We’re not going to help the antelope that is being mauled by the cheetah.’”

Ren Faire ends with emotional carnage, as each season at TRF seems to. “That cycle is something that every single person in [Coulam’s] past has gone through so many times,” says Oppenheim. The only way he would return to TRF to film more episodes, he tells me, is if that cycle is broken and Coulam loses power of the festival. (At present, Coulam and TRF are in litigation with several parties over the business deal he struck down in the docuseries.)

Even knowing that it’s a cycle, it is still maddening—after the abuses and indignities Ren Faire captured—to see Baldwin, Brandi, and Migliaccio return to the festival, as they have for decades. Their livelihoods and businesses—like many of the TRF vendors and employees—are simply too enmeshed with and dependent on Coulam’s festival to leave it or him.

Smith, who has family and friends in ren faires across the country, hopes that TRF finds a manager who can insulate the workers from the king’s wrath, as she tried to do. “There’s thousands of people that depend on that fair. There aren’t many opportunities for an artist to make a full-time [income] with their arts,” she says. “And there’s this person that has so much power. My intention was to keep the business afloat and protect these people’s wellbeing and their life’s work.”

Though Baldwin still considers Coulam to be “a benefactor,” “mentor,” and yes, even a “father figure,” Brandi has her own opinion of Coulam, which aligns with Smith’s. “He is a capricious individual who can take our livelihood and then it’s gone at his whim,” she says.

If anyone wants a part of the magic that he created, though, they need to keep putting up with the man running the business until he loses it or he dies. “If you don’t learn from history, you’re destined to relive it. We relive a lot of history here,” Baldwin tells me.

In an email, Migliaccio responds to my question about Coulam and the humiliations he suffered onscreen with this statement: “I love the community of TRF. I want to continue to be a part of a community where we uplift thousands of artists, merchants, and entertainers and to create a magical environment for our patrons.”

He only wishes to clarify that, in spite of how he was depicted on the docuseries, “I am not a millionaire, and I wasn’t born into a wealthy family.” The most personal detail he offers is that he typically consumes between eight and 14 energy drinks a day compared to just two or three off-season. He avoids mention of Coulam but shares his mission statement, which seems diametrically opposed to Coulam’s management style: “to inspire our staff to achieve their personal goals and dreams without the fear of judgement.”

Baldwin told the Ren Faire cameras that the TRF magic was gone for him after his firing, but he backtracks on Zoom. “The festival is a very, very magical place,” he says, adding that the camaraderie amongst his fellow artisans, whom he views as family, is what fuels him each year. Though the docuseries captured his humiliation and beamed it into an unknown number of households, Baldwin is still squarely on Team Coulam and excited about the exposure Ren Faire could give TRF in its 50th year.

“We couldn’t have prayed for anything better,” he says. “We always wonder how can we get people to the festival who don’t know about us. And I think Lance has just handed us the golden ticket for that.”

In my conversation with Oppenheim, the Ren Faire director says that Smith, Baldwin, or Migliaccio would have all been “great leaders of the faire,” but Coulam’s refusal to give up control is “the tragedy.” He says, “It’s almost like the only way to win his game is to exit it.”

If that is the case, then Smith emerges the queen of Ren Faire. A single mother of three sons, she tells me she’s taken the time since her firing “to heal” from what she endured. “It’s like getting away from an abusive spouse,” she says. “You don’t realize the dynamic has gotten so crazy until you step away. So I’ve spent quite a bit of time healing and spending time with my boys…just centering myself and getting my cortisol level down.”

Though he demeaned her onscreen, as he did most of his employees, Smith doesn’t wish Coulam any personal ill will. As long as the TRF employees and vendors are protected, she tells me, she even has a positive though for him.

“I hope every gold digger in this country calls that man up,” she says. “That’s what he wants. And I hope he spends the rest of his life fending them off.”