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Required

• Read Huey Long. Every Man a King.
  
• Watch the Sean Penn version of All the King’s Men.
  

Redaction Criticism is the study of how an author molds the source material, and what that says about the author's purpose and theme. Today we have a hall of mirrors of redactions to consider.

1. The original events themselves.
   
2. Huey Long's political autobiography, Every Man a King.
   The Louisiana Press was united against him, so he founded his own newspaper, the Louisiana Progress (later the American Progress). The autobiography, like the newspaper, puts a progressive spin on the news.
   
3. Robert Penn Warren. All the King's Men novel. Penn Warren puts a reactionary spin on the Huey Long story. He was what passed for a liberal in Louisiana in the 1930's, but the temporarizing sort who can never seem to get on board with actual progress. He takes the Huey Long story and runs it through Dante's Inferno, Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, and Machiavelli's Prince.
   
4. Steven Zaillian / Sean Penn. All the King's Men movie. Zaillian and Penn take out some of the subplots, like Willie pushing his son to be the state university quarterbook (Russell Long was the student body president.) And they restore a lot of material from Huey's life.
   
1. We are once again in the great state of Louisiana. The movie opens and closes on the Great Seal of Louisiana that's in the floor of the lobby of the Capitol Building of Louisiana.
   
2. The movie is shot in various locations around the state.
3. In the book and original movie, Willie Stark is illiterate until his school-teacher wife teaches him to read. Sean Penn's Stark was smart in school, maybe even as brilliant as Huey Long himself. That's the point of the wink. He was always in on the joke.
4. Free textbooks, roads, & bridges. Tiny -- people like their roads finished.
5. The very real impeachment faced by Huey Long gets put into the movie.
   
6. The song Every Man a King an hour in.
7. Hi populorum and lo papa hiram. Hi populorum is Latin. It's not a joke Willie Stark could hope to make.