Stephen K. Bannon, who maintains a precarious hold over the nativist wing of the Trump White House, honed his skills in the art of conservative persuasion in the most liberal precinct of the American imagination, Hollywood. He became himself in the byways of the movie business. These days, Bannon is a dishevelled presence in the Oval Office, but he cut a different figure in Beverly Hills, where he looked the part of a Hollywood executive—fast-talking, smartly dressed, aggressively fit, carrying himself with what one former colleague described as an “alpha swagger.” He worked out of an impressive office on Canon Drive. He was passionate and knowledgeable about film, and boasted about his connections, his production credits, and his background in mergers and acquisitions at Goldman Sachs. He was a Republican, but not dogmatic, and he tried not to let his political beliefs get in the way of his work.

Bannon moved from New York to Los Angeles in 1987, to help Goldman expand its presence in the entertainment business. Two years later, Bannon and a senior colleague struck out on their own, opening a small investment company in Beverly Hills. According to Bannon, the firm’s clients over the next half-dozen or so years included Crédit Lyonnais, M-G-M, and PolyGram. In 1998, the company was acquired by an offshoot of the French bank Société Générale, and he remained there for a couple of years. He had brief stints at Jefferies, an investment bank, and at a talent-management company, the Firm, as a strategic adviser. By the early aughts, the former Hollywood colleague recalled, “he was sitting on Canon Drive, in his fabulous office, his bookshelves lined with military and history books, and he would take meetings all day with people, some of whom came to him for money for their movies.”

Tim Watkins, the president of a small advertising company in Maryland, was one of those people. A conservative and a devout Catholic, Watkins had an idea for a film, based on the book “Reagan’s War: The Epic Story of His Forty-Year Struggle and Final Triumph Over Communism,” by the political consultant Peter Schweizer. As Watkins began looking for someone to help make the movie, he was introduced to Bannon. He was impressed by Bannon’s enthusiasm about Ronald Reagan, and by his Hollywood connections. Watkins showed him a trailer he had made, and Bannon “jumped in full-bore,” Watkins told me. He understood that Bannon would raise the money to produce it and would also distribute it. To Watkins, he seemed an ideal partner. “Steve was very good at whipping people up into a passion,” he said.

Before 9/11, Watkins had planned to make a traditional documentary, but by the time he started working with Bannon, he said, “something ticked in us—that life is about good versus evil, and history repeats itself.” The film, called “In the Face of Evil: Reagan’s War in Word and Deed,” opens with archival footage from early-twentieth-century cataclysms—the First and Second World Wars, the Soviet labor camps and famine—and proceeds to Hollywood, where Reagan rose to prominence. Throughout the film, a female narrator invokes “the Beast,” an authoritarian force that threatens “anything that elevated or empowered the individual.”

The triumphal final scene shows the destruction of the Berlin Wall, in 1989, but it is followed by an ominous coda that warns of the dangers of Islamic radicalism, with militants hoisting rifles, and people falling to their deaths from the Twin Towers. “War had not been wished away,” the narrator says. “Reaching out: first to convert, then turning in to destroy. That was the nature of the beast.”

Julia Jones, who worked as Bannon’s screenwriting partner for a decade, helped write the script, but she told me that she was not involved in the coda. She described how Bannon admired the documentary films made by the Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, such as “Triumph of the Will”: “Her playbook was key for him. I think he used her technique of fear, which you can see in that movie.”

Ultimately, Bannon was able to secure only about a third of the film’s financing, and Watkins covered the rest. He told me he would never use his own money again: “Because Steve was a Hollywood guy, I hoped there was going to be a great distribution program behind it, and there really wasn’t.”

The first major profile of Steve Bannon appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, in October, 2015, after he had become the chairman of the conservative Web site Breitbart News and moved to Washington. He was working out of a Capitol Hill town house, which he called the Breitbart Embassy, and the image he had cultivated years earlier in Hollywood was gone. In a photograph for the story, he sits slumped on a couch in the house. Wearing an open-necked striped shirt that bulges around his ample middle, and cargo shorts that ride up his thighs, he looks at the camera with a baleful gaze.

The article, by Joshua Green, was titled “This Man Is the Most Dangerous Political Operative in America,” and it set the tone for subsequent coverage. In it, Bannon said of Breitbart, which was publishing a slew of attacks on the mainstream media and on establishment politicians, “We’re linking to everybody else’s stuff, we’re aggregating, we’ll pull stuff from the Left. It’s a rolling phenomenon. Huge traffic. Everybody’s invested.” Green described Bannon’s two decades in California as “a succession of Gatsbyish reinventions that made him rich,” including a period of “Hollywood moguldom.” When Donald Trump hired Bannon to be the C.E.O. of his campaign, in August, 2016, it seemed a fulfillment of Bannon’s challenge to the liberal élite, in the movie business and in Washington.

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People in Hollywood were bewildered by Bannon’s story of himself as a major dealmaker. “I never heard of him, prior to Trumpism,” the media mogul Barry Diller told me. “And no one I know knew him in his so-called Hollywood period.” Another longtime entertainment executive said, “The barriers in Hollywood are simple. First, you have to have talent. And, second, you have to know how to get along with people. It’s a small club.”

Many who did have dealings with Bannon were unwilling to be interviewed. Others would not speak for attribution, saying that they feared what he might do with the instruments of government—one spoke of a possible I.R.S. audit. He worked hard to join the Hollywood establishment, and several people who knew him said that they were startled by his conversion to what one called “conservative political jihad.” Another said, “All the years I knew him, he just wanted to make a buck.”

Bannon was reared in an Irish Catholic family in Richmond, Virginia. Bannon’s father, Martin, spent his career at A.T. & T., and his mother, Doris, was a homemaker. After attending Benedictine College Preparatory, a private military high school, he went to Virginia Tech, graduating in 1976, and spent seven years in the Navy—four at sea and three as a low-level official at the Pentagon, dealing with budget and planning. He has told reporters that his parents were Kennedy Democrats, and that he wasn’t political until he entered the Navy, and witnessed President Jimmy Carter’s handling of the Iranian hostage crisis. He became a Reagan Republican.