The Death of King George: Big Drama at the Texas Renaissance Festival

We seem to to be all about the headlines today, although I think you’ll agree we are keeping it on mission. Dramatic events concerning the Texas Renaissance Festival, generally touted as the biggest one in the nation, broke this week. Before we get to that news, I’ll connect you to the background that leads up to the recent developments.

First: please note this is my second post about the phenomenon of Ren Fests. The previous one is a sort of critical history of the genre. It might make for useful background, if you’ve never been to one of these things. You can read it here.

Secondly, I was reminded yesterday that my good friend Kathy Biehl is a veteran of the Texas Renaissance Festival. She worked there as a Soothsayer many moons ago, and she wrote a hilarious portrait of the madness of the place in her recent book Confessions of a Third rate Goddess, which I told you about here.

Lastly, as the banner above (ha! I said “banner”) indicates, the headlines drove me to HBO’s three part documentary mini series Ren Faire, which premiered in 2024. And what a feast! Yea, heartily!

Texas being Texas (they have the biggest of everything), it makes sense that they would have the biggest Renaissance festival, I guess. On the other hand, a Ren Fest in Texas makes no sense at all! Isn’t it a bit like a rodeo in Canterbury? Well, whatever. The whole point is escapism, I guess. Lapsed Mormon George Coulam (b. 1938) started his operation in 1974, having experienced the original Southern California fair while attending San Fernando State College. Which school, I feel compelled to assert, apparently gave him a very poor working knowledge of the art and customs of any known historical period. The irony of just about all of Renaissance festivals is that they actually fetichize medievalism, the period BEFORE the Renaissance. What you encounter is basically a Chaucer and Beowulf scene, filtered through a pot haze of D & D, Tolkien, and a tsunami of tacky anachronisms, ranging from steampunk gear, to junk like sexy pirate chick costumes from the Halloween store, to community theatre actors with terrible accents uttering stupid things like, “Hear ye, hear ye, my Lords and Ladies!” There’s 30,000 people at the fair that day — they’re ALL Lords and Ladies? Who’s minding the castle?”

So anyway, there’s clearly nothing else to do in this part of the country, so Coulam’s fair exploded in scale to the point that by 1982 he incorporated his 800 acre dirt patch as its own town, and proceeded to remain its only mayor for over 40 years. People spoke of him in awe as the “King”, King George. Believe it or not, weird things like that have happened in America. Let’s not forget the Patroons of New York, and Colonial nobility like Lord Cornbury and Lord Dunmore, or for that matter, The Baron of Arizona. In modern times, it seems rare and unusual, but upon further contemplation of the billionaire class maybe not so much. The fair seems to employ everyone in the area, and some of the employees have been with the operation 40 or 50 years. 500 people work at the fair; 500,000 attend it annually. It may look like a carnival mixed with a junkyard mixed with an eight year old’s idea of Game of Thrones, but to these people the fair is life itself.

And King George, this mean, lecherous, nasty old coot rules this empire, this fiefdom, whatever you want to call it, in the hinterlands outside of Houston with an iron fist encased in a gauntlet of tempered steel. I use my adjectives advisedly. We glimpse Coulam’s heartlessness — and hear about his hard-ons — on camera unendingly. He may be in his 80s but he’s still sharp as a tack in matters of business, and (like Scrooge) more ruthless than he’s ever been in his life, not to mention friendless and without family. So those closest to the top of his management team start jockeying for power.

Lucky for director Lance Oppenheim there are three of them, and he masterfully whips the story into as Lear-like an experience as possible. The would-be heir apparent (in his own mind) is a a guy named Jeff, a hapless lummox who was promoted past his competency into the role of General Manager, a very hard job which he only possesses some of the requisite skills for. Midway through the series, George forces Jeff to share the job with another manager named Darla, who for all the world has the LOOK of a confident, stylish C.F.O. type — until she gets the job and becomes a deer in the headlights. Coming up from the outside is another long term employee named Louie (Luigi), a confident Red Bull-swilling rake who was once thrown out of the air force for unauthorized stunt flying. He, too, seems to be blowing a lot of hot air about his abilities, but on the other hand, has put together the millions of dollars it will take to actually buy the fair, which he is chomping at the bit to do. And it seems like it’s going to happen. King George will finally retire to focus on art, gardening, and poking one of the long list of prostitutes he has been interviewing for the job of wife throughout the film.

Because this is ripped from the headlines, I’m going to go ahead and give you the spoiler: in the end, George rejects all three aspirants to the crown and names himself (85 years old by that point) General Manager. That’s how the film ends. But that was not the end of the story. Ren Faire was released in June 2024. Events moved swiftly after that. The investors who had signed a deal with Coulam to buy the fair’s assets sued him in court to make good on the deal he had signed off on. Earlier this month (May, 2025) the plaintiffs won — King George had lost his fair. Mere days after that, he lost the election for Mayor for the first time ever as well. He was now a King without a Kingdom. Or a wife, children, or a friend.

Then, about a week ago, Coulam’s body was found on the fairgrounds. He’d been killed by a gunshot wound. Yesterday the local authorities announced their determination that it was a suicide. The news quite naturally reminded me of this famous ending.