Steve Bannon Wrote a Screenplay for a Major Movie Adaptation — And Star Author Michael Lewis Is Interested

Steve Bannon, years before he helped Donald Trump win the presidency or started his daily political show on Rumble, wrote a screenplay for a feature film adaptation that Liar’s Poker writer Michael Lewis is going to check out.

Huh? It’s true. Lewis shared some details on their near-collaboration on fellow writer Douglas Brunt’s Dedicated podcast on Tuesday.

Lewis has had massive crossover success with several of his books, including The Big Short and The Blindside, turning into box office hits. But back in 1990, Lewis said Bannon bought the movie rights to his first book, Liar’s Poker, which was based on Lewis’s time as a young man on Wall Street.

“Here’s a weird story,” Lewis started off saying. “My connection to Steve Bannon — he bought the movie rights to Liars Poker.”

“Oh my God, I didn’t know he was even in that business,” Brunt said.

“You did know he was in that business. Where do you think his money came from? Seinfeld,” Lewis said.

“Steve Bannon was involved with Seinfeld?” Brunt asked incredulously.

Lewis explained that Bannon went from the Navy, to Harvard Business School, to Goldman Sachs, to Hollywood in the years before he entered politics. His biggest deal, as Lewis mentioned, was acquiring a stake in Castle Rock Entertainment, the production company behind Seinfeld, in the early 1990s — a move that earned him big bucks down the line.

He told Brunt that “nothing came of it” and that because he sold his script outright, rather than optioning it, it remains under Warner Bros., the company Bannon had a production deal with at the time. Even though the book never got turned into a flick, Lewis said something still came of it.

“Bannon told me — I just found this out like a month ago — that not only did he buy the movie rights, but he was so pissed off by how bad the script was that they got from a very fancy script writer, that he went off in a little dark room by himself and wrote a Liar’s Poker screenplay himself,” Lewis said. “He was obsessed with it.”

Brunt asked whether he has read the Bannon screenplay yet. Lewis said no, but he plans on it.

“This is the next thing — I’m going to see him and he says he has a copy somewhere,” Lewis said. “I want to read it. I want to see what he did. Steve Bannon’s Liar’s Poker? Isn’t that crazy?”

Maybe it still has a chance of getting made, 35 years later.

Watch above.