Controversy Creates Cash (13 page)

I said,
Screw that and let’s just produce television. Dump all of our
resources into TV, acquiring new talent, and dressing up our product.

Then eventually, whether it was six months from now or a year from now or five years from now, people would start parting with their cash and come out to see us live.

People dropped over dead.

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As much as no one wanted any more political infighting or power struggles, they started surfacing again. Meanwhile, the financial pressure increased. I kept speaking up and speaking up and becoming more adversarial. It gradually became me on one side and just about everyone else—especially Bob Dhue, Don Sandefur, Ole Anderson, and Sharon Sidello (who was rumored to be having a “secret” relationship with Ole at the time)—on the other.

Burned to the Ground

In the meantime, the product burned down to the ground. People didn’t like what we were doing. On the live events side, we went from not being able to draw in big markets to not being able to draw in small ones. When we had to go out and produce our television tapings, we’d end up with an audience of 250 people. Bob Dhue and Don Sandefur would give away free tickets and paper half of the arena—sometimes even more. We’d have a Pay-Per-View in a ten-thousand-seat arena, and seven thousand people would be inside free.

It drove me crazy.

“When is this trend going to stop? As long as you’re going to keep giving it away, why do you think they’re ever going to pay for it?” I’d ask. People would stare at me, and I’d continue trying to explain.

“Bob, say you go to a bar and you sit down next to a pretty girl.

You buy her a drink, and the next thing you know you’re up in a hotel room with her. You come back the next night, and the same thing happens. And the next. And the next.

“Then on the fifth night she says,‘It’ll cost you a hundred bucks to go up to my room.’

“What are you going to do? You’ve already been there for free.

You’re not paying for it.”

I had to paint a picture that they could relate to. We’d been giving tickets away for so long people thought we had no value.

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This wasn’t just a problem for our live events business. We shot our syndicated programming on the road in arenas. We’d go out to produce a television show, and we’d have a miserable looking crowd, half of them winos with a bottle of cheap wine in paper bags on their laps, or no crowd at all. It affected the performance of the wrestlers because they were performing in front of people who were dead. And forget about what a shot of the audience told the viewers at home.

Even the best shows looked tired. They looked regional. They looked dull. That was what the world thought of WCW.

Finally I came up with an idea that pissed everyone off even more.

M-i-c-k-e-y

Wrestling with Disney

In late 1993, I took a trip down to Orlando, Florida, to check out the Disney-MGM Studios. I thought that, if it were possible to shoot our syndicated show on a soundstage at Disney World, we could turn perceptions around.

It was a much smaller venue than those we’d been using, but we had the ability with camera technique to make it look a lot bigger than it really was. It had better production and lighting facilities, so the shows would be colorful and bright. We could shoot three or four shows a day every day for six or seven days, saving a lot of money.
And
we’d have train cars full of fresh audiences who had all their teeth.

The people visiting Disney for the most part weren’t wrestling fans, but we didn’t have many of those anyway. All we had were winos and brown paper bags.

From a purely television point of view, an advertiser’s point of

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view, and a syndication point of view, shooting at Disney would give us a product that looked a whole lot better than what we had been producing. It wasn’t ideal by any stretch of the imagination, but it would be a vast, vast improvement.

More importantly, I knew that if our show could open up with an announcer saying, “Coming to you from the Disney-MGM Studios in Orlando, Florida,” and combine that with a wide cover shot of the Disney towers, the perception of WCW as a tired, regional promotion

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Our “set” at MGM-Disney.

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would immediately change. As incongruous as this may seem today when you think about it in relation to a wrestling company, the fact that we co-branded with a powerhouse like Disney would help us in a big way with advertisers as well as audiences. It would make us look like a national operation. We could finally be seen as competition.

But shooting a wrestling show at Disney-MGM Studios?

Where Mickey Mouse is? And Pluto? And Donald Duck?

Are you crazy?

I went from being a heretic to being the Antichrist.

Just Do It

There were certainly negatives to the idea. A sound stage was a sound stage and didn’t have an arena feel. This sound stage could hold only about eight hundred people. And the audience would be primarily vacationers who came for Disney, not us. For the most part, they wouldn’t be following our storylines or get into our characters. But overall, the pluses far outweighed the negatives.

Bob Dhue, Don Sandefur, Ole Anderson, Sharon Sidello, and Gary Juster (he headed arena relations) all thought I should be hung by the neck until dead. And frankly, it wasn’t just the Bob Dhues of the world who thought I’d lost my mind. Dusty Rhodes, who I get along with just about as well as anyone, was reluctant at first. Most wrestlers couldn’t imagine producing the show in a sound stage. It was a real battle.

There were weeks and weeks of meetings and debate back and forth. Everybody had a point of view, and none of them agreed with mine. Finally, Bill Shaw got involved.

Bill thought it was out of the box, a little progressive—not necessarily in a good way—but he finally said, “Quit your bitchin’ and bellyaching, we’re going to go do this.” 96

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

Wrestlers? In Disney World?

As wacky as the debate got inside the offices of WCW, it was nothing compared to the reaction of the seven or ten Disney executives when I met with them to discuss the idea.

My first meeting was with Bob Allen, the vice president of Disney-MGM Studios, who oversaw all of the production inside the sound stages there. I sat down and explained what we did, telling Bob that I’d like to produce all of our syndicated shows inside one of his sound stages.

Keep in mind, part of Disney-MGM’s business was trying to attract outside television production. They wanted to keep those sound stages full. Tourists would go in and see actual television shows being produced, which made the studios a draw for the park.

And, of course, the companies using the studios were charged a good sum for the facilities.

Bob loved the idea of wrestling at Disney. But he knew that he had to sell it up to his superiors, because it would be—

Controversial?

The word doesn’t quite cover it.
Radical,
maybe.
Insane
was probably closer. “Professional wrestling” and “Mickey Mouse” had never been uttered in the same sentence before.

Two or three weeks later, myself and another WCW executive, David Crockett, went down for a follow-up meeting with some of the more senior Disney people. We were surrounded by a dozen very corporate, very Disneyesque execs. I could tell by looking at them that most of these guys had no desire to see 300-pound guys running around in wrestling tights in Disney World.

After all the introductions, I began the presentation. The more I talked, the more uncomfortable the Disney people got. When the meeting started, they were all looking at me, making eye contact, shoulders squared with me, receptive or at least not openly hostile.

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were turned ninety degrees from me. It was small room, so they couldn’t
quite
turn their backs on me, but they would’ve if they could’ve.

These executives had a very strict view of the Disney brand and what worked and didn’t work. For me to convince them that professional wrestling worked—I felt like I was selling ice cubes to Eskimos.

To be fair, they did have some cause for concern. Wrestling, and WCW in particular, had been positioned as very violent and got a little bloody at times. That wasn’t the Disney way. I had to convince them that things wouldn’t be nearly as violent as they had seen on the TBS cable side of things. The syndicated show had always been more family friendly: we’d make sure it was even more so.

The meeting didn’t go well, but Bob Allen was still pretty enthusiastic. He must have gone to work on his bosses, because after a third meeting we managed to convince them to give it a try.

Don’t Feed the Wrestlers

But the Disney people did give us rules.

First, I had to promise that the wrestlers would be bused in. We were coming down there with sixty or eighty wrestlers at a time.

They didn’t want wrestlers parking in the lot and walking over to the sound stages.

It wasn’t just a logistical issue. Basically, they didn’t want us to be seen.

They asked if it would be possible not just to bus our guys in, but to cover the windows so people couldn’t see them. I wasn’t doing that. But we did agree to bus everybody in, because that part made sense. Everyone coming in their own cars would be too chaotic.

“Also,” they said, “we don’t want the wrestlers walking around the park. When they’re here, they have to stay in the sound stage.

We don’t want the guests to see a bunch of scary-looking wrestlers walking around.”

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Okay.

I didn’t tell the talent. I had enough people fighting the idea without telling everyone that we had to hide when we went there.

The Survey Says

I knew what we were up against with Disney. So I asked Turner’s research department to come up with some “research” to overcome their negativity. We distributed questionnaires to everyone who came to the first shows and asked them questions designed to tell the Disney people that the WCW experience was a good one.

Ninety percent of the questionnaires came back positive. We asked questions we knew would allay the execs’ fears: Did your children enjoy the show? Do you feel comfortable bringing your kids back to another WCW event? Do you have anything negative to say about the show?

People said things like, “It was the most fun we had at the park,”

“Great time,” and so on. I gathered up all this research for my next meeting with the Disney executives. We walked through some of the logistical issues we’d had, catering, simple stuff. Then I said,

“Oh, by the way, here’s what your guests said about the experience.”

When I came back to negotiate the second set of tapings, the Disney executives who had objected to having WCW earlier had changed their tune. Now they were excited about having us. They still wanted me to bus the wrestlers in, but they let us film in other parts of the park. Jesse “the Body” Ventura could interview people in Epcot and at other areas. They let us out of the box.

Well, they didn’t let us into Magic Kingdom, where the rides were. Maybe they were afraid we’d break something expensive.

But otherwise we had the run of the place.

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Telling Stories

Changing the Product

Disney had an immediate positive impact on the product, and on WCW. There was more buzz, better shows, and more interest from the national advertisers. The hard-core wrestling fans hated it, but there weren’t enough of them to support the brand, and I wasn’t going to cater to them.

We’d gone from filthy arenas with a few hundred people who, if they were sober enough to realize where they were, didn’t care, to being in front of families with children who were excited to be in front of a WCW ring and seen on television. All of that translated to the viewer—not the hard-core wrestling fan, mind you, but the passive or peripheral viewer and the advertisers. They were my target.

Taping at the television studio changed the product in more subtle ways. Since we now produced ten to twelve weeks of shows at a time, our writers had to think long-term when they came up with their angles. None of them were used to doing that.

Most of the writers on the creative side of the business were born out of the monthly or in some cases weekly territories, where they only had to think two or three weeks in advance. There was very, very little long-term planning at the time.

That was something I knew had to change. According to people who claimed to have worked somewhat closely with Vince, they planned six months in advance, sometimes as far out as a year. Vince would always have a pretty good idea of where storylines were going. He’d know what he wanted to do at, say next year’s
WrestleMania,
and would work backward from that.