Hivemind And Brian Taylor To Develop The Illuminatus! Trilogy For Television
by Erik Amaya
If you can read this, you are a pope.
Conspiracies, worlds ending, and cycles of life are just some of the concepts tackled in Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea’s The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Published from 1975 to 1984, the books set off the popular imagination’s obsession with the Illuminati, presented in theseries as all-powerful elite who manipulate the populous by controlling the pillars of civilization. And now, it’s coming to television.
On Wednesday, Hivemind announced it and production company Kallisti have acquired the rights to the book series with an eye toward television. Along for the project is Brian Taylor, one of the men behind Crank and the Syfy Series Happy!. He will serve as executive producer and showrunner. Hivemind’s Dinesh Shamdasani and Hunter Gorinson, and Kallisti’s Iris McPherson and Kirstin Winkler, will also be executive producers on the series.
The program will tell the tale of anti-authority reporter George Dorn, who begins a search for his editor when their offices are bombed. Along the way, he begins to suspect his editor’s investigation into a wide-reaching conspiracy is the key to unraveling all the conspiracies from the Kennedy Assassination to the existence of UFOs. He eventually finds himself caught between two groups: the Discordians, a clandestine band of chaos-loving guerrilla fighters led by the enigmatic modern-day pirate Hagbard Celine, and the Illuminati, who plot to escape the limitations of human existence. And it just gets wilder from there.
“[It] is a kind of mind-blowing literary miracle … It manages to be completely seminal while as relevant today – if not more so – than the day it was published,” said Taylor in a statement. “Wilson and Shea have created a fractal-like world of conspiracy inside conspiracy that completely anticipates today’s internet-fueled, Post-Truth culture.”
Of course, it is unclear how quickly the series will come to television or even if they will allow it to ever air.