Controversy Creates Cash (20 page)

I couldn’t. I spent a month or two trying to figure things out. I knew I had to do the deal, but there was no way I could do it without taking it to Ted first. To do otherwise, to give content to Rupert Murdock without Ted’s okay, would have been career suicide.

You have to remember, Ted valued content more than he valued dollars. He saw content as long-term dollars, and giving up content for short-term gain was not the way Ted did business.

Finally I called Scott Sassa, with whom I had a little bit of a relationship. Scott oversaw the television networks and had an enormous amount of influence in the company. He was a young guy, kind of a renegade, and a golden boy within Turner. Everybody considered him to be the heir apparent to Ted Turner. He was also a very cool guy. I laid out the situation for him.

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“We have a chance to turn this company around, but I need your help. I need you to help me get this in front of Ted, and I need your support. I need you to go in and tell him, or help me tell him, why this is a good idea. Because if I go in there solo, I’m going to get shredded, and I won’t get the deal done.” Scott saw the merit in it and agreed to accompany me.

What Do We Need to Compete?

The meeting ended up being myself, Scott Sassa, Harvey Schiller, and Ted Turner. I was a salesman before my wrestling career, and I knew exactly what to do. I honed my pitch. I tried to anticipate all of the objections and figured the best way to overcome them. I practiced laying out all the financial reasons for doing the deal, and countering the negatives.

I was nervous. I wanted the deal, and I’d never pitched Ted before; it was my first face-to-face meeting with him that really mattered. I was a little intimidated going in and sitting across from Ted, especially knowing that I was pitching something that was going to piss him off.

Finally, the time for the meeting arrived. We went in, I introduced myself, and began my presentation. I got, oh, maybe two and a half minutes into the pitch before Ted interrupted me.

“Uh, Eric, What do we need to do to become competitive with Vince?”

I had every answer for any possible question about Star TV and how we needed the deal to make a profit and grow the WCW

brand. But I had
not
been thinking about being competitive with Vince. So when Ted Turner stopped me in the middle of my pitch and asked me a question I wasn’t prepared to answer, I did what any good street fighter would do when he was about to get beat about the head: I tucked my chin to my chest, threw my fists up in front of my face to protect myself, and thought as quickly as I could.

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Finally I blurted out, “Well, Ted, I think we need to have prime time.”

That was the only thing Vince had that we didn’t.

Ted looked at Scott Sassa and said, “Scott, I want you to give Eric two hours every Monday night on TNT.” You would have thought somebody cut Scott’s tongue out of his head.

Scott looked at TNT as the coolest, slickest, most hip cable network going. Wrestling did not fit with the profile—remember, until that point we were on TBS, which had a much different image. I think as far as Scott was concerned, wrestling was for rednecks; it wasn’t cool, it wasn’t Hollywood. Scott was very happy to have wrestling on TBS, but he would never in his worst nightmare have dreamt that Ted would put it on TNT
in prime time.

So Scott was in shock. And by the way, so was I.

Ted wanted to know how soon I could get a show on the air. I stuttered out, “I think I can do it by August.”

“Great. Let’s do it by August.”

In order to buy some time, Scott pointed out that TNT network president Brad Siegel wasn’t in the meeting. “Why don’t we have a meeting next week and talk about it with Brad?” Ted looked at Scott and said, “No. Brad’s a smart young man.

He’ll understand what I want to do and why I want to do it. Let’s just do it.”

And that was the end of the discussion.

A Competitive Genius

Nobody asked how much it would cost or what impact it would have on the network. We had our marching orders. As for the Star TV deal, it was off the table. Ted expected us to focus on the new show—eventually called
Monday Night Nitro
—and make it work.

As we walked out of the meeting, I looked at Harvey Schiller, 152

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and he said, “Well, time to get to work.” I looked at Scott Sassa, and he was still in shock. All he said was, “When Brad gets in tomorrow, you better go visit with him and figure this out.” I don’t think Scott was pissed at me, but I’m sure if he had known this was going to happen, he wouldn’t have gone into the meeting with me. Then again, I don’t think anything would have changed: I think Ted would have told us to do it anyway, and Scott would have found out in a memo.

The impression I have of Ted Turner is that he’s a genius in a lot of ways, and he’s extremely competitive. He believed in WCW. And I think we had gained enough momentum that we were beginning to validate his beliefs. So when he started thinking about what it would take to get to the next level, going head-to-head with Vince was an obvious next step. I think he said to himself,
We’ve built this
product; we’re ready to compete. Let’s compete.
I think it was really that simple.

Vince McMahon has his own opinions about what happened, taking it personally and claiming that Ted was out to get him.

Maybe he was right—maybe there was something more malevolent going on. But I don’t believe it. Ted just liked to take risks and compete, and very much believed in WCW. As far as he was concerned, taking WCW prime-time was a natural progression.

Better Than/Less Than/

Different Than

Pressure to Be Better

Going head-to-head with World Wrestling Federation would mean one of two things: we’d either rise to the occasion and be successful, or our failures and weaknesses would be obvious, and we’d never get a chance at it again.

I went back to my office and called a few people in—Craig Leathers, PRIME TIME

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who was a director at the time, David Crockett, and most of my department heads. When I told them what had happened in my meeting with Ted, they were shocked as badly as I was. I’m not actually sure they believed me at first. Prime time had not been in our consciousness. We were already stretched to the limit just doing what we were doing.

But the more I thought about it, the more excited I became. It was a great opportunity for the brand, and for me personally. And I liked the pressure. I’ve always functioned well under pressure.

First thing the next morning, I went over to Brad’s office, not knowing what to expect. I would have been angry and defensive if I’d had such a major shift of strategy happen to a network I was president of when I wasn’t even in the room to voice an opinion. I anticipated a lot of resentment from Brad. To my surprise, Brad took a positive attitude.

“Look, this wasn’t something I would have chosen to do,” he said, “but if we’re going to do it on my network, it’s got to be great.

And whatever it’s going to take to make it great, I’ll do what I can to support that.”

The amount of enthusiasm and support Brad showed in that meeting wiped my doubts off the mat. It gave me a lot of confidence. I felt I had somebody at the network who really wanted to make it work.

It was a real pivot point. Up until that moment, just about everyone at WCW was shunned when they stepped into the North Tower, where all the company’s top executives worked. We got the feeling many didn’t even want us in the building. To have someone like Brad embrace us really gave me a lot of confidence.

In my career, the launch and success of
Nitro
is something I can point to and say, I did that. But I have to add that I wouldn’t have been able to pull it off if it hadn’t been for the vision of Ted Turner.

And almost as importantly, the support of Brad Siegel.

I’m not trying to make an Oscar speech, but over the years Brad ended up taking a lot of heat for his involvement in the wrestling 154

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business, and it was undeserved. He supported WCW in every way he possibly could. A lot of
Nitro
’s success really had to do with Brad, and how he supported it. He gave us the tools to succeed.

Unpredictable

I grabbed all my department heads and said,
We’re going to do this.

We have a blank slate—how do we want to paint this picture?

We spent days bouncing around ideas. I listened more than I talked. I wanted to hear what everyone was thinking.

Brad and I discussed doing some research to get an idea of what some of the audience was thinking. I’d worked with researchers before, and quite frankly, I found it to be pretty unproductive. The old saying that numbers lie and liars use numbers is even more true when it comes to research for television shows. Questions can be asked and research framed in a way that you can get any outcome you want—just as I’d done for the executives at Disney.

But Turner Broadcasting had an unusually talented research guy (I can’t remember his name, unfortunately). He asked me about my goals for the show and what I wanted to find out. Then he came up with an approach to get into the audience’s “head” in a way no researcher previously had. His idea was to create an equal balance of pro-WCW viewers and pro-WWE viewers, and mix in a certain percentage of nonwrestling fans as well as people who used to watch but didn’t any longer. His only agenda was to try and help.

I’ve never believed that research is going to give you a blueprint or formula to make you successful. Too many people in the entertainment business have no real instinct for the business. They aren’t creative people and don’t really relate to the creative process. They are ad sales people, or business affairs people, or marketing people.

They look at research more to provide an excuse or a safety net if a decision goes bad than as a tool to be used in combination with a truly creative process. But I do believe that if you look at that re-PRIME TIME

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search and apply it against what your instincts tell you, it can be very helpful.

And that’s what we did. The research dug below the surface. It was more about the psychology of why people enjoyed wrestling than about any one performer. The questions were things like:

“What do you like about professional wrestling?” The answer: “I like it when it’s unpredictable.”

“Unpredictable” and “spontaneous” popped up over and over.

People like surprises, especially in wrestling. This may seem obvious now, but believe me, it wasn’t then.

Different Than

After about three weeks, our creative discussions became unproductive. We started going in circles. There was no disagreement, but there wasn’t much agreement either. So I went off by myself for a couple of days to think about the new show.

When I came back, I told my staff, “Here’s what we’re going to do. We have three choices: be better than them, less than them, or different than them. We can’t be better than them. They have been around longer, have a lock on the audience, and are good at what they do. We don’t want to be less than them, so we have to be different than them.”

Everybody looked at me like:
Are you high, or what? What does
that mean?

At the time, WWE billed itself as the leader in family entertainment. I didn’t think we could beat them at that. If we tried to be better than them at what they did, we’d need to knock things out of the park or be a miserable failure. On the other hand, if we admitted we weren’t as good as them, we’d be losers from the start. Neither approach seemed very inviting.

“Here’s how we’re going to be different than them. Their show is taped. How can we be different than that? We go live.” I’d known early on that I wanted to do the show live, though I 156

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waited until the time was right to tell everyone. I worried it would crack a lot of people on the production side, who were uneasy enough as it was. I’ve always thought that something on live TV is more interesting than the same thing taped. It’s hard for performers to be spontaneous when they’re being taped. We’d also have trouble achieving the unpredictability and spontaneity that kept jumping out at me from the research on a taped show, since by the time we aired, word about what happened would have gotten out.

“All right, that’s one,” I said. “Here’s another. Who’s their audience? Who are they catering to?”

Their core viewers were kids. If you looked at their demographics at the time, that was their model. I didn’t think we could go after the same audience and be better than them at doing it. So what were our options?

“If their audiences are kids, eleven to seventeen, we go after eighteen-to thirty-nine-year-old males. Let’s make that our target.”

“Hmmmm.” Some heads in the room started to nod.

“How do their stories play out? What are the characters like?” WWE’s characters were over the top, basically live-action cartoons in animated storylines.

“Our storylines will be more reality based,” I said. “We’ll create stories that are more real to that eighteen-to-thirty-nine demo.” I wasn’t suggesting that all of our characters make this radical shift, but I did want to do things that would focus our stories on an older demo.

The list got to be very long, but those were the key elements.

And
Nitro
took shape from that.

Promote till You Drop

Pro wrestling philosophy dictated at the time that you have to cram the product down the audience’s throat. Promote, promote, promote.

Tune in next week to see this . . . Call your local cable company and order
this . . . Go to your local Ticketmaster and get your tickets now . . .

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That always bothered me. As a viewer, I hated listening to it. As a talent, I hated doing it. So I decided I was going to strictly limit the promos on the live show. I wasn’t going to tell you this week what was going to be on next week.