Controversy Creates Cash (45 page)

Vince Russo

Vince Russo came to WCW claiming to be
the
guy. Bill Busch, because he was an idiot in my opinion, went, “Here’s the guy who turned WWE around. Let’s grab him.”

The others didn’t know any better and went along. They were desperate to find somebody to fill the void that I’d left. They didn’t do any real diligence; they took his claims at face value.

The truth is, Vince Russo is not the guy who turned WWE

around. Now that I’m part of WWE and talk to some of the people who were there then, I’ve found out that they all wet their pants laughing when they heard that claim.

Vince Russo was
part
of the turnaround. But Steve Austin, Vince McMahon, and the realistic storylines built around them were the biggest factors in the turnaround, and Russo was not part of much of that. And, from what I’ve been told, the top people had no respect for him.

Russo was smart enough to look at
Nitro
and apply many of our formulas to his storylines. And he was able to convince a lot of people, including himself, that he was the guy. But anyone who worked with him for a few weeks would have known better—he
wasn’t
the guy.

Ready to Rumble

Laugh With Us, Not at Us

The movie,
Ready to Rumble,
came out in 2000. A lot of WCW peo -

ple including Sting, Bill Goldberg, and Diamond Dallas Page had 348

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parts in the movie. I’d played a big role in making the movie happen, though my departure from WCW may have ultimately hurt it.

In the summer of 1998 or thereabouts, I was approached by Jef-frey Silver and Robert Newmyer from Outlaw Productions, which had a deal with Warner Brothers to do a movie. Because of the syn-ergy within Time Warner and the popularity of WCW at the time, Bobby and Jeff suggested we come up with an idea for a wrestling-themed film. We met over a period of a couple of months and discussed some ideas. They had some ideas and I had some ideas, and for a couple of months we just bounced them back and forth.

WCW’s concern was that the movie was fun and funny, but didn’t necessarily make fun of our business.

In Hollywood, poking fun of the audience is a very easy thing to do. While that may be very funny to people
outside
the industry, fans and those inside the industry don’t find it that entertaining. My role was not so much to come up with a great idea for a movie; my role was to help them find ways to have fun with the content without making fun of wrestling fans and wrestling in general.

We collaborated for a few months and came up with a really interesting idea. They cast some really good people. David Arquette, who already was a big star, is the name everyone recognizes of course, but the entire cast was very substantial. There was Oliver Platt, who may not have been an A-lister but had had a lot of interesting movie and TV roles and was a legitimate star. There was James Caan’s kid Scott, who’s gone on to do some pretty good stuff, including
Gone in Sixty Seconds.

The movie had a great cast and a good budget, and we were all excited. The idea was that WCW would work with the producers and get as much of our talent integrated in the movie. We also hoped to do some of the things we had done previously with TBS

and TNT, using our shows as a promotional platform for the movie, putting it over the top.

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349

A “Bischoff Project”

It was all going great until I left WCW in September of 1999. By that time, Outlaw had already started production. All Bill Busch and the rest of the brain trust had to do was follow through on the plans we’d made. But the problem was, the movie was an Eric Bischoff project. So despite the fact that it was a Warner Brothers’

feature film, internally it got very little support, other than what was contractually required. Once it came out, it got very little promotional support.

That’s just bizarre. When you look at the way Vince McMahon puts together a great infrastructure and management team when WWE is involved with a movie, you see how it should be done.

That’s because Vince understands the power of the brand and the media platform, and how it can reach out to the audience and help motivate them to see movies.
See No Evil,
released in 2006, was a perfect example.

WCW didn’t do that for
Ready to Rumble,
and I think that hurt the movie at the box office. It only did about $5.3 million on its opening weekend. I’m sure it did better in rentals and DVD sales and that sort of thing over the years, but in my opinion it could have done much better out of the gate if WCW had pushed it.

Selling Out

Are You Serious About Buying This Company?

WCW deteriorated, and deteriorated, and deteriorated. Russo wasn’t the only problem. The company was still hamstrung by everything that had hamstrung it before I left.

Stepping away a second time, it all crystallized for me. After a short while I called Brad. “It’s not going to work, Brad. You can’t fix 350

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

it. I can’t fix it. If Steven Spielberg came in and took over WCW, he couldn’t fix it. In my opinion, WCW is a square peg that will never fit into the round hole that is AOL Time Warner.” The conglomerate does not want WCW to succeed.

“Rather than beat this thing to death, let me buy it. It’s going to go away, one way or another. So let me buy it.” He laughed. “No thanks, Eric. That’s not going to work. You keep doing what you’re doing. We will never sell this company.” A month later, I got a phone call from him.

“Uh, Eric, are you
serious
about buying this company?” I started pulling the financing together right away.

11

The Art of

the Non-Deal

Dialing for Dollars

False Start

Ididn’t have the resources to buy WCW myself, but I was sure I could find the money. I picked up the phone and called a couple of people who I thought might be interested.

Peter Gruber at Mandalay Entertainment was one. Peter had been the former chairman and CEO at Sony Pictures. He was a pretty impressive dude. Mandalay was producing some high-budget movies that were doing very well. They also owned a bunch of baseball teams. They were well respected in the entertainment business and had a lot of bread.

I had a pretty good working relationship with Peter. My friend Jason Hervey was also working with him at the time, so it was easy to get a meeting. But Peter likes to do deals that are lopsided and aggressive. He also doesn’t like to use his own money to do anything. It became obvious that he wouldn’t mind being involved, but 352

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

he wasn’t going to step up in a substantial way to make it happen.

So I started looking around for other people.

The Package

Jason told me about a guy named Brian Bedol who headed Fusient Media Ventures. Brian and his partner, Steve Greenberg, had spent years acquiring old footage of sports events. They spent a lot of time aggregating old video that no one thought had much value. Then they used it to launch the Classic Sports Network, then subsequently sold the network to ESPN. You know it today as ESPN

Classic.

Jason got me Brian’s number. I called him and told him about the opportunity with WCW.

He immediately got his partner on the phone, and I walked them through a potential deal. “Great,” they told me. “Come on out to New York and let’s talk.”

They decided they wanted to take a run at it. Our arrangement called for me to own part of the company. I would run the wrestling and TV side, leaving Brian to handle the business side. He was far more qualified there than I was.

Brian and Steve were part of Allen & Company, a venture capital company, so we brought them in. We made a presentation to Warburg Pinkus, another venture capital firm. In the end, we had a package worth $67 million.

Start by Closing the Doors

While Brian negotiated the deal with Turner Broadcasting, I worked on developing the go-forward strategy. The first thing we would do, I decided, was shut the company down.

The WCW brand had been dragged through the mud for so long that it had to die and be reborn if it was going to be worth anything.

It had to go away and then come back looking and feeling com-THE ART OF THE NON- DEAL

353

pletely different. Otherwise the audience wouldn’t give it a chance.

Gradual change wouldn’t have worked, because it would never feel different enough for the audience to give it a chance.

We planned to keep it off the air for a period of time, rebuild it creatively, then launch it with a fair amount of fanfare. It would be kind of like a re–grand opening. That was the only way we’d get the audience to sample us.

No More House Shows

One of the other strategies was to shut down the live event business.

Just as in 1994, the live event business was way, way down. I knew that we couldn’t tour successfully until we built the brand back up.

And since it was bleeding money, it wasn’t a very hard decision.

We also agreed that it was critically important that, for a year to eighteen months, we cut down on television production costs. That meant doing the shows at the same location, giving us a base to work at week after week.

I had some relationships at the Hard Rock Café in Vegas. Brian had some relationships there as well. So we started talking to them about building a small arena on top of one of their parking decks.

The arena would be WCW’s new home.

Hard Rock was a hip, pop-culture place to be, and we’d gain from the cobranding. Vegas being Vegas, we knew we could always get an audience. In the short run, it would be a great situation for us.

Take Two

WWE’s Offer

WWE made some inquiries about buying WCW, which gave Turner a second possible buyer. We weren’t worried about the competition, until Brian uncovered some pretty “creative” bookkeeping (a couple 354

CONTROVERSY CREATES CASH

of years later the SEC found AOL’s accounting a little too creative as well, and laid a pretty heavy fine on the conglomerate). That made us revise our initial offer, which gave Brad Siegel an opportunity to pursue WWE’s inquiries. We backed out.

I was disappointed. We had spent a fair amount of time and a lot of money, and for them to shop it without trying to renegotiate the deal felt pretty sleazy. But there was nothing I could do about it.

WWE pursued a deal, and in fact got pretty close to buying WCW in the fall of 2000. Vince McMahon got a call from Viacom, with whom he’d recently entered into a comprehensive, long-term deal. Basically, they told him that there was no way they were going to let him buy WCW and air what would then be his show on a rival network. He had to back out of the deal, though I didn’t know that until I got a phone call from Brad Siegel.

“Hey, Eric, you think you can put that deal back together again?”

“Hey, Brad—fuck you.”

Silence.

“Brad, if I do put this back together, will you guys act in good faith?

Because if you do, then I think I can. But I don’t want to get these guys back to the plate if you’re using us to leverage a better deal.” He gave me his word that wasn’t the case.

I called up Brian, and asked whether we should pick the ball back up and run with it.

Fusient wasn’t thrilled. They weren’t convinced that Brad and the rest of AOL Time Warner were operating in good faith. But Brian gave Brad a call and convinced himself. We began renegotiating the deal.

Clean Sweep

By that time, Vince Russo had left WCW for good. There were some decent human beings left at WCW, though they were struggling under all of the old constraints and dealing with poor morale as well.

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Ed Ferrara had come in with Vince Russo to help write the shows. Ed was an okay guy, and a real writer. He’d done some feature films and understood television. He understood wrestling and was a good guy to work with.

There were others at WCW who weren’t. It seemed to me that the only qualification anyone needed to get a job there was to stand up and say, “I watch wrestling on TV every week and I love it.” In Brad’s mind, that qualified you to play a major role in running the company.

Terry Taylor was there, and a guy named Bill Banks who in my opinion was the most underwhelming person I’d ever met, creatively speaking. There was a guy named Aaron Blitzstein who was, for reasons I couldn’t understand after meeting him, supposed to oversee branding and marketing. For the most part, I had a collection of underqualified misfits. Miraculously, Sharon Sidello and Gary Juster were still there. I wouldn’t make the same mistake twice when it came to them.

Brian suggested we sit down and talk about whom we wanted to keep.

“We can do that on the phone. And you won’t run up much of a phone bill.”

The people there were part of the problem; they were never going to be part of the solution. It was better to just start all over.

Brian was very hesitant to take that position until he went to Atlanta and met some of them. Then he called me and said, “Okay, you’re right. We’re going to wipe the slate clean and start from scratch.” A Done Deal

The deal was announced in January. We had a signed letter of intent. We met with the employees. We held a press conference. We had a call with Wall Street. It was a done deal.

We spent the next month or two working out the mountain of legal and business details involved in the sale. The closing was set 356

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for sometime in April or May. In the meantime, Brad arranged for me to work behind the scenes so that we could position the creative for the eventual takeover.

I told my wife that when the deal finalized, my life would change dramatically. It would be back to the way things were in 1995 and 1996; there wouldn’t be a lot of family time, or even the opportunity to take a vacation for quite a while. We decided to take advantage of the kids’ spring break for one last splurge. We booked flights to Hawaii. I told each of my kids they could bring one friend.